you say you want a.
here’s a line: “He’s not a bad man, just an unconscious one.”
In Insurrecto, a polymath’s lyricism is woven with post-colonial tristesse. A deft and labyrinthine depiction of our helpless condition of ever-revolving insurrection, Gina Apostol has created an elegant mise en abyme wherein the colonizer and the colonized reflect themselves over and over and yet over again.
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i found these pages quite helpful :
https://www.praxino.org/chapters-in-numerical-order
and
https://www.praxino.org/album-of-stereo-cards
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post scriptum & nota bene : found this following passage in apostol’s also excellent GUN DEALERS’ DAUGHTER (which i read after INSURRECTO and which i think serves as good intro/sequel/commentary to the later novel) :
I discovered that our books of history were invariably in the voice of the colonist, the one who misrecognized us. We were inscrutable apes engaging in implausible insurrections against gun-wielding epic heroes who disdained our culture but wanted our land. The simplicity and rapacity of their reductions were consistent, and as counterpoint to Soli’s version of the past, these books provided, as I admitted to Soli, the ballast for my tardy revolt. Soli reproved me. Why do history books persuade you but not the world around you? You live in a puppet totalitarian regime, propped up by guns from America, so that we are no sovereign country but a mere outpost of foreign interests in the Far East. She said this with such conviction, I could barely reply. But, I countered, the military-industrial complex, as you call it, does it not suggest not only an economic order but also a psychiatric disorder? It occurred to me that it was a system of oppression that spurred both of our delusions—hers (to save the nation) and mine (to save myself). Soli nodded, disarmed at the thought, but in the end she disagreed. Obscurantism, she said, does not serve change. The therapeutic couch may be necessary—at least for some, she said pointedly. But it is not the place for action. Next time you drive home to Makati, she said, look around: all you need is to look out your limousine’s window to know that it is a problem to be living the good life in such bad times.
sometimes apostol is e.m. forster or edith wharton — i.e. a proto-modern who can linger over a scene’s details with almost victorian pacing. simultaneously she’s a wit and an experimentalist à la calvino or cortázar and her novels become a penrose staircase of amnesiac memoirists or an erasing documentarian, mazes of duplicitous memory.
in GUN DEALER’S DAUGHTER there are passages that are downright society farce — until they open into truly darker territory, exposing class relations and imperial power-clutching so that the farce turns into a horrorshow version of upstairs downstairs — a cold and hot class war. the bringing-it-back-around structure was brilliantly executed… a fantastic book!