Insurrecto
Soho Press 2018
Publishers' Weekly's 2018 Ten Best Books
praxino.org: a website in and on a novel
Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto, connecting the Philippine-American War to 1970s and present-day Philippines, are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction to recover the atrocity in the 1901 Balangiga incident and in so doing shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.
From the New York Times
The Philippines of “Insurrecto” is wild and lush, beset by cruelty, boisterous in its embrace of the tacky relics of late-20th-century globalism — a place where Elvis ballads seem to “spring from the bamboo groves”; where the news is full of bodies “piling up at the garbage dumps, in the slums, near schoolyards”; where karaoke singers, possessed by a “maniacal insomnia,” wail drunkenly into the night.
Apostol is a magician with language (think Borges, think Nabokov) who can swing from slang and mockery to the stodgy argot of critical theory. She puns with gusto, potently and unabashedly, until one begins reading double meanings, allusions and ulterior motives into everything…
The novel’s structure reflects how history comes at us in scattered shards, the way voices are amplified or silenced, story lines invented or forgotten.
From Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer:
Meta-fictional, meta-cinematic, even meta-meta, plunging us into the vortex of memory, history, and war where we can feel what it means to be forgotten, and what it takes to be remembered.