La Tercera

Description

In her first novel since Insurrecto, Gina Apostol assembles a vision of Philippine history from the 19th century to present day in the fragmented story of the Delgados, a family surviving across generations of colonization, catastrophe, and war. Rosario, a Filipina novelist in New York City, has just learned of her mother's death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on a remote investigation into her family's history and her mother's supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogues generations of Delgado family bequests and detritus- maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the family home during visits from Imelda Marcos. Each life Rosario explores opens onto an array of other lives and raises a multitude of new questions. But as the search for La Tercera becomes increasingly labyrinthine, Rosario's mother and the entire Delgado family emerge in all their dizzying complexity- traitors and heroes, reactionaries and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, another narrative takes shape-of the country's erased history of exploitation and slaughter at the hands of American occupying forces. La Tercera is Gina Apostol's most ambitious, personal, and encompassing novel- a story about what seems impossible-capturing the truth of the past-and the terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.

Gina Apostol is the author of the novels Insurrecto, Gun Dealers' Daughter, Bibliolepsy, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She is the winner of two Philippine National Book Awards, the PEN/Open Award, and the Rome Prize. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.

Praise for La Tercera Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2023 "Stylish, meta-fictional, intelligent, kaleidoscopic, melodramatic, multi-generational, spiked with twisted Filipino puns and double entendres, and containing a book within a book within a book (because we never get just one book from an Apostol novel but two, sometimes three), La Tercera is a love letter from a daughter to her mother, and an urgent act of remembering that salvages the truth (or its remains) from the regimes that pursue its erasure." -R. Zamora Linmark, author of Leche "A feat of lavish storytelling, La Tercera reinvents the family epic to surface political exigencies and shadow histories with Apostol's signature linguistic mischief, madcap humor, and earthy intelligence. This novel flashes with prismatic light." -Tracy O'Neill, author of Quotients "To be Filipino, Gina Apostol writes, is to be a person under translation. Her ambitious project, at once relentlessly intellectual and dizzyingly slapstick, brings together two currents that usually never mix: the political project of anti-imperialism and the formal play of Borges, French theory, and postmodern fiction. What makes La Tercera so special is how it compresses these obsessions into a moving story of a novelist trying to understand her recently passed mother. It's her most personal and accessible novel yet." -Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia Praise for Gina Apostol "A bravura performance in which war becomes farce, history becomes burlesque . . . 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 New York Times "Gina Apostol uses an array of literary and cinematic techniques: memoirs, jump cuts, close-ups, and reveries to set a story in Duterte's Philippines that shows us that though victors often write histories, survivors and artists can revise them." -NPR's Weekend Edition "Wickedly funny . . . Ferocious in its political indignation . . . Pick one of the many figures offered by the novel itself: a palimpsest, a translation, a stereoscope, an abaca weave. Insurrecto is all of these things-a polyphonic work that challenges the reader to keep up with its plotting and to think with or against or through its complex moral reckonings." -The Boston Globe "Dazzling . . . A tender character study erupting with blazing insights on the ethics of storytelling." -Entertainment Weekly