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Insurrecto
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
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Insurrecto
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Summary
Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte's Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War.
Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation, American soldiers created "a howling wilderness" of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara's film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator - one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher.
Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, and Nabokov's Pale Fire. But at its heart this is a novel of emotional power that grapples with our endless ability to erase the past. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she reveals the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.
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What listeners say about Insurrecto
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- JM Bradley
- 22-01-20
A Nearly Great B Movie
I enjoyed this book very much. It gave me pleasure, for which I give thanks to the writer and narrator.
If this book were a movie, which in a sense it is, then it would be a gem of a B movie, rather than a Hollywood blockbuster. Something stumbled upon by accident, but which grips the viewer.
This is not intended to be damnation by faint praise. I believe there is some greatness in this book and if the author is crazy enough to keep going, I would not be at all surprised if she produces something else that is truly extraordinary.
The narration is first class. However, there is one thing that made me want, like the oft mentioned Elvis, to do the equivalent of pull out my gun and shoot the TV ... or at least shout a string of expletives (I don't actually have a gun).
This one thing refers to the crime of saying the word AMOK as amuk. I don't know if the word is written incorrectly by the author, or spoken wrong by the narrator. The word amok is an Indonesian word received into English.
Anyway, if you have any interest or love for the Philippines and want to listen to a well told story, then I recommend Insurrecto 100%.
Thank you again Gina Apostol.
Kind regards John Martin Bradley
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