Scan barcode
A review by mandirigma
Insurrecto by Gina Apostol
3.0
I'm so torn on this.
There is a great story in here about the Balangiga Massacre, a moment in Philippine history that I had no idea occurred until reading this book. Each time a chapter focused on this part of the story, I couldn't put the book down.
But that story is buried under two(-ish?) other separate stories. One about a Filipino woman who is returning to her homeland for the first time after a long period of grief, and another about a white woman coming to the Philippines to shoot a film but also try to better understand the death of her famous father and the relationship he had with her mother. Insurrecto is really a combination of three different novels, but unfortunately, none of them feel finished.
There are a million references here to pop culture and Filipino history throughout the entire 20th century. If you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge about that stuff, there's a lot you will want to look up. Also the language feels like you're drifting into and out of each character's stream of consciousness, and it's often hard to follow where one character shifts to another. I tried to listen to the audiobook as well, but that was even more difficult to follow.
A lot of people have used the word "kaleidoscopic" to describe the book, but for me it felt like trying to navigate through a tangle of threads to find the one that led to something bigger. The best parts of the book were the ones dedicated to a single character -- for example, the ones that took a deep dive into Virginie's past, but even Virginie's story felt a little unfinished to me. The story about the Balangiga Massacre was supposed to be Chiara's film and Magsalin's rewrites -- a detail I'd forgotten about by the end of the book because it was impossible to tell which parts of the story were Chiara's and which parts were Magsalin's.
I wish I hadn't chosen this as the first book of the year to read, because I needed to spend more time on it than I was willing. For the first half of the book, I really tried to just go with the flow and ignored my own confusion, but by the second half I felt like I was just trying to make it to the finish. I might come back to this later in the year to give it another shot, but as of now it wasn't the book I was looking for, I guess.
There is a great story in here about the Balangiga Massacre, a moment in Philippine history that I had no idea occurred until reading this book. Each time a chapter focused on this part of the story, I couldn't put the book down.
But that story is buried under two(-ish?) other separate stories. One about a Filipino woman who is returning to her homeland for the first time after a long period of grief, and another about a white woman coming to the Philippines to shoot a film but also try to better understand the death of her famous father and the relationship he had with her mother. Insurrecto is really a combination of three different novels, but unfortunately, none of them feel finished.
There are a million references here to pop culture and Filipino history throughout the entire 20th century. If you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge about that stuff, there's a lot you will want to look up. Also the language feels like you're drifting into and out of each character's stream of consciousness, and it's often hard to follow where one character shifts to another. I tried to listen to the audiobook as well, but that was even more difficult to follow.
A lot of people have used the word "kaleidoscopic" to describe the book, but for me it felt like trying to navigate through a tangle of threads to find the one that led to something bigger. The best parts of the book were the ones dedicated to a single character -- for example, the ones that took a deep dive into Virginie's past, but even Virginie's story felt a little unfinished to me. The story about the Balangiga Massacre was supposed to be Chiara's film and Magsalin's rewrites -- a detail I'd forgotten about by the end of the book because it was impossible to tell which parts of the story were Chiara's and which parts were Magsalin's.
I wish I hadn't chosen this as the first book of the year to read, because I needed to spend more time on it than I was willing. For the first half of the book, I really tried to just go with the flow and ignored my own confusion, but by the second half I felt like I was just trying to make it to the finish. I might come back to this later in the year to give it another shot, but as of now it wasn't the book I was looking for, I guess.