Insurrecto

Review by New York Times Review

LATE-LIFE LOVE: A Memoir, by Susan Gubar. (Norton, $25.95.) The influential literary critic blends tales of her marriage, her cancer treatments and her husband's age-related infirmities with discussions of works whose meaning has changed for her over time; her rereadings confirm her talents as a teacher. MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts. (Basic, $32.) By the second century B.C., the proud Roman Republic had been brought low by inequity, corruption and populist politicians. Since America's founders modeled it on the Roman example, Watts, a historian, warns that it behooves us to understand what went wrong over 2,000 years ago. MUHAMMAD: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole. (Nation, $28.) Cole offers an ambitiously revisionist picture of the father of Islam, replacing the idea of a militant leader with one of a peacemaker who wanted only to preach his monotheism freely and even sought "multicultural" harmony. INSURRECTO, by Gina Apostol. (Soho, $26.) Set in the Philippines, this novel raises provocative questions about history and hypocrisy as it follows two women with dueling modern-day film scripts about a colonial-era massacre. MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND: Volume 2, by Gengoroh Tagamé. Translated by Anne Ishii. (Pantheon, $25.95.) A sweet satire of Japan's taboo against gay marriage, this manga-style graphic novel is a sophisticated investigation into the nature of love, marriage, divorce, bereavement and nontraditional child-rearing. IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY, by Guy Gunaratne. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) Gunaratne's striking, Bookerlonglisted debut unfolds over a few restless days in a workingclass Northwest London suburb. Despite the rush of drama indicated by its title, the book should be read for its quieter details - Gunaratne, with a gift for characterization, presents the kinds of Londoners not often seen in contemporary fiction. THE DAY THE SUN DIED, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Grove, $26.) This brutal satirical novel takes place on a single night, when a plague of somnambulism unleashes a host of suppressed emotions among the inhabitants of a Chinese village. The ensuing chaos is promptly struck from the official record. TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandel. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) In this intoxicating novel, set in 1506, Michelangelo sets up shop in Constantinople to design a bridge connecting Europe and Asia. SLEEP OF MEMORY, by Patrick Modiano. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. (Yale, $24.) The Nobel laureate's dreamlike novels summon elusive, half-forgotten episodes. Here, that means Paris in the '60s, love affairs, a flirtation with the occult and a shocking crime. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Adjectives like humorous, playful, and ingenious seem almost disrespectful when describing a book anchored by the worst massacre of U.S. Army soldiers in the decades after Custer's defeat. The little-known 1901 Balangiga massacre in Samar, Philippines, during the Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths of 48 Americans. In retaliation, the occupying U.S. military razed the surrounding area, killing 2,500 to 50,000, depending on who is doing the counting, blamer or blamed. With shrewd insight, inventive plotting, and stinging history lessons, Apostol, who received the PEN Open Book Award for Gun Dealers' Daughter (2012), puts the unremembered Philippine-American War on display, deftly exposing a complicated colonial legacy through the unlikely relationship between a U.S.-educated Filipino translator and a visiting American filmmaker. Chiara, whose father directed a cult Vietnam film in the Philippines decades earlier, arrives to make a movie of her own. She hires Magsalin to translate her script, but the result produces two disparate versions. As the two women journey toward the massacre site, their screenplays unfold, overlapping, intertwining, even scattering, which demands the reader's careful participation in paring and parsing dueling stories within stories. The multilayered challenge, enhanced by the presences of Elvis, Muhammad Ali, various Coppolas, and a sprawling cast of characters both historical and imagined, proves exceptionally rewarding.--Terry Hong Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Apostol (Gun Dealer's Daughter) fearlessly probes the long shadow of forgotten American imperialism in the Philippines in her ingenious novel of competing filmmakers. Chiara Brasi, daughter of the director of The Unintended, a Vietnam War movie shot in the Philippines, comes to Manila to make her own film. She hires Magsalin, a translator, to take her to the Philippine island of Samar (near where Magsalin was born) and the town of Balangiga, site of a brutal American massacre of revolutionaries in 1901 during the Philippine-American War. Chiara and Magsalin craft two very different scripts for the film. One script focuses on Cassandra Chase, a well-connected photographer who travels to the Philippines to produce stereographs of the American military's actions. She faces extreme hostility from the soldiers, including the inexperienced and devoutly Catholic Capt. Thomas Connell. The second script more elusively follows Caz, a Filipino school teacher, who mourns the death of an eccentric film director she had an affair with in the 1970s. This is a complex and aptly vertiginous novel that deconstructs how humans tell stories and decide which versions of events are remembered; names repeat between scripts, and directors suddenly interrupt what feels like historical narration. Apostol's layers of narrative, pop culture references, and blurring of history and fiction make for a profound and unforgettable journey into the past and present of the Philippines. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

With its dizzying shifts of perspective, Apostol's (Gun Dealers' Daughter) latest novel has the feel of an experimental film or video art installation. Films and filmmaking are also at the center of the labyrinthine plot, which features Magsalin, a Filipino translator and mystery author, and Chiara, an American filmmaker. The story begins as Chiara enlists Magsalin's help on her script about the 1901 Balangiga Massacre. In 1898, the United States was met with resistance from the Philippines after it was acquired, along with Puerto Rico and Guam, from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War. In retaliation for a Filipino revolutionary attack that killed 48 American soldiers, Gen. Jacob H. Smith, who was eventually court-martialed, ordered soldiers to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the countryside into a "howling wilderness." Like American and Filipino historians who have provided conflicting accounts of the massacre, Chiara and Magsalin's personal histories influence the way they think the movie script should represent and interpret the historical event. With its dense, carefully crafted prose and complicated narrative structure (the chapters are not numbered sequentially), this requires careful attention. VERDICT Veteran narrator Justine Eyre gamely and enjoyably relates the vignettes, but only the most diligent listeners and serious experimental fiction fans will have the patience to piece together the hopscotching, though ultimately rewarding, narrative. ["Worthy of a place in collections strong in postcolonial and experimental fiction": LJ 10/15/18 review of the Soho hc.]-Beth ­Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Demanding, baffling, and ultimately exhilarating examination of a forgotten moment in U.S.-Philippine history.Cinematic in its approach, Apostol's (Gun Dealer's Daughter, 2012, etc.) fourth book alternates between aerial shots, jump-cuts, and close-ups, moving backward and forward in time to get at a story of U.S.-Philippine relations by way of history, literature, language, and scholarship. It even opens with a six-page Cast of Characters, some historical, many from pop culture, a few fictional. While at first the book seems gonzo in its approach, the result is a portrait (though incomplete) of Casiana Nacionales, the insurrecto for whom the book is named, a woman whom "history barely knows." Nacionales was the only woman who actively participated in a rebellion against U.S. servicemen in 1901 after a period of occupation marked by cruelty on one end and breathtaking abandonment on the other. To be clear: The book is not explicitly about Nacionales. Her appearance, like an image emerging on film, serves as a metaphor for how the truth of history is repressed until something or someone brings it into the light. To anchor the novel, Apostol uses two characters: Magsalin, a Filipino writer/translator, and Chiara, a U.S. filmmaker. Their contrasting approaches and accounts of the rebellion ultimately get to what Magsalin and Chiara believe they failed at, of telling "a story of war and loss so repressed and so untold." Magsalin and Chiara may have failed, but Apostol did not. The U.S. may have "manufactured how to see the world," but it's the writers, artists, and other visionaries who speak outside the frame who can reveal the truth. The cast of characters and the out-of-order system of numbering chapters are best revisited after finishing the book.Dazzling, interlocking narratives on history, truth, and storytelling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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For the mystery writer, it is not enough to mourn the dead. One must also study the exit wounds, invite the coroner to tea, cloud the mind with ulterior motives.      The translator and mystery writer Magsalin has undertaken (yes, no, pun) some of the above at previous incidents. But the insoluble puzzle at the heart of the labyrinth, the secret within the secret, is not hers to bemoan. That is up to the dead man's kin, who are, fortunately or not, also dead. It is said, for instance, that the writer Stéphane Réal's mother died in Auschwitz, his father of shrapnel wounds before the war started. The writer Stéphane Réal had a wife. She is a widow. Her heart must be broken. (Magsalin cannot do that for her.)       For the mystery writer, there are clues. Sheaves of paper with marginal notes, clippings of newsprint events of general interest, such as the Tunis-Marseille ship schedule, lottery numbers, and election results for the mayor of the commune Ivry-sur-Seine, 1979 (the winner is a communist). Everything could be a sign, and a word has at least two meanings, all of them correct. And it is not right to jump to conclusions, especially when it becomes apparent that one's sorrow is misplaced in this instance.       First, the writer Stéphane Réal has been dead for some time. Second, Magsalin has read only two of his books. Third, it turns out he does not figure at all except as premonitory prompt, place holder in this story of disappearance Magsalin is about to tell as she slips a hoard of facts into her duffel bag (leather, made in Venice, aubergine with olive handles, always admired by salesladies): to wit, the writer's income tax returns, an unmailed box covered in pale blue whorls, doubled postcard-size photographs, books with slips of paper falling out, index cards slipping from loose envelopes, a stash of library books the writer thought he would have time to return.       Her protagonist, what do you know, is female. The dead male writer that prompts the story waves goodbye. It turns out the woman is a filmmaker of moody artistry whose scandalous father precedes her fame. The woman's name has an arbitrary Italian flavor--Chiara or Lucia, with the first C glottal and the last c a florid ch : she is Kiiiara, or Luchiiiia. Magsalin has yet to decide the name, an act that must occur without the reader's noticing. Both names mean clear , or lucidity , or something that has to do with light , something vaguely linked to eyesight , hence to knowing , thence to blindness, or paradox.      Choosing names is the first act of creating.         Magsalin gets the dossier from the filmmaker herself, who emails Magsalin. Microsoft Outlook warns: Mail thinks this message is Junk . Magsalin likes that her Mail thinks, but she doubts it. The subject line is intriguing.        Translator needed, meet me at Muhammad Ali Mall.       The message must be from a foreigner. No one in Manila calls the mall by that name. Some Filipinos do not even know that that seedy building in the traffic hellhole that is Cubao is named for the greatest--Muhammad Ali.       Magsalin ignores the message.       She is jet-lagged. She has just arrived from New York, on vacation in her birthplace, and she has no time for paid work. She is trying to unwind in Manila, hoping to continue a task that she believes has great spiritual payback, though the rewards are yet to surface.       She has begun her mystery novel.       She arrives with her baggage. A balikbayan box for her uncles, whose home she is visiting on this trip. The box is packed with vinyl records from bargain bins in a shop on Bleecker Street--Neil Sedaka, Ray Conniff and His Singers, the elegies of Karen Carpenter, and for good measure a new press of their favorite, Elvis, Aloha from Hawaii , still in cello-wrap , plus bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label that she thought might appease them. She has been gone for so long. All wrapped up in bath towels from Marshalls and stuffed with bags of Hershey's kisses in the extra spaces. Another suitcase, filled with books. In her duffel, aubergine with olive handles, a square box, covered in pale blue whorls.       When Magsalin finally opens the email message, it only repeats its subject line, run-on included.        Translator needed, meet me at Muhammad Ali Mall. Signed.       The curtness of it, Magsalin thinks, is rude. She thinks the message is a joke, a hoax drummed up by her writer friends, a bunch of alcoholics hiding out in pork-induced stupor in Flushing, Queens.       Not even her mother's phone call had moved her to return home.       "I cannot go home," Magsalin had told her mother a long time ago.       "Do not come home," her mother had said on the phone. "If you feel you cannot do it, inday--do not return."       So she had not.      The reasons for return need not be sentimental: they could be an intellectual project, a way to deal with writer's block, or a respite during a cheap-airfare month. For a mystery writer, it is correct to return to soak in the atmosphere, to check out a setting, to round out a missing character, to find the ending.       Later, of course, she searches the Web for the filmmaker's name.       The search results include an item only eighteen hours ago mentioning Chiara Brasi's arrival in Manila. The report is an innocuous piece with a photo of the filmmaker at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, wearing huge shades and what looks like a safari outfit. Chiara is scouting locations for a movie, but no quote emerges from the director herself.       Magsalin checks praxino.org, her website of choice for cultural curiosities. A Philippine tour operator reports in a news update that Tom Cruise was sighted in August at a resort in the Ilocos, sporting an ugly ingrown toenail revealed by beach flipflops. Sandra Bullock did not buy her black baby in the area near the old US Air Force base in Pampanga. Madonna's orphanage in Malawi is losing money, its website hacked by teenagers. Eric Clapton's late son's former nanny, a Chabacano, is said to be in seclusion in Zamboanga, an island in the far South, near the pirates--she still mourns her single lapse. Once again, Donatella Versace did not slap her maid. A video of Chiara Brasi shows a wan and wavering figure, in one of those canned interviews to promote a project. This detail appears in FabSugar, the Emory Wheel , the Irish Times , romania-insider.com, the Kansas City Star , the Prague Post, gmanetwork, inq7.net, and Moviefone: at age five Chiara rode a helicopter over Manila with her father when he was filming his war movie about Vietnam. A fond memory, in 1976. Someone had unhinged the helicopter's doors, and she looked out as if the sky were her vestibule.      Magsalin goes back to the email message.      She hits send. Excerpted from Insurrecto by Gina Apostol All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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