Insurrecto

By: Gina Apostol

Narrated by: Justine Eyre

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.

©2018 Gina Apostol (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Insurrecto

A masterpiece. Brilliantly written novel, nostalgic and funny. I can't stop listening until it's done.

Might help to read on the page instead

Justine Eyre’s reading is great and differentiates the characters (to the degree that’s possible in a novel explicitly written as “a weave of voices”—it’s complicated, but interesting!) . . . but the chapters have an idiosyncratic numbering scheme that might have been easier to figure out with the ability to flip back to earlier sections.

Great story, cringe performance

I really enjoyed listening to this book. As many others have noted, the print version is easier to follow since the timeline isn't linear. The plot is still understandable on the audio version though. What killed the vibe for me was Eyre's pronunciation of Filipino words. As a Filipino myself, it was really difficult to hear her repeatedly butcher my language. Perhaps Audible should better vet their readers.

Fascinating story, grating performance

The writing is, for the most part, excellent. I enjoyed the unusual subject matter a great deal. The big disappointment was the performance. Eyre pronounces the Filipino language well; however, she ends nearly every single phrase of dialogue with a nasal vocal fry that comes off as extremely contrived. One has to intentionally work to insert that much vocal fry into dialogue; it’s quite annoying and distracting.

Not my favorite

Maybe I've been spoiled by how good Elaine Castillo's America Is Not the Heart (and narrator Donnabella Mortel) was, and it might be unfair of me to compare these two - but I couldn't finish this. The story is ambitious, the history is intriguing and Magsalin and Chiara are intriguing characters, but it's all much too complex for audio. But it was the performance that finally sank this for me. The narrator was puzzlingly soft, almost at a whisper, and the last word of her sentences ended with a rising tone. The Filipino pronunciation was uneven - some words (Magsalin, Balangiga) were perfect, others (most notably, Tagalog) were inexcusable. The characters' voices made them feel flat. It was not an enjoyable listen for me overall.