La Tercera
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher 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 catalogs 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Apostol (Insurrecto) returns with a powerful multigenerational epic of the Philippines. In present-day New York City, Filipina American novelist Rosario Delgado reflects on the life of her late mother, Adina, an aspiring multimedia artist who resembled former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos. In the 1970s, Adina left her abusive husband in Los Angeles and returned with their children, Rosario and her younger brother, Adino, to her childhood village on the island of Leyte. There, as a seven-year-old who'd been raised in the U.S., Rosario has difficulty adjusting. She plays in her grandparents' rambling old house and discovers journals written by her great-great-uncle Paco during the Philippine-American War of 1899–1902, revealing how he and Rosario's great-grandfather Jote fought for independence from the U.S. In later years, Rosario returns from New York and learns that her mother, who is dying, may have been cheated out of a significant inheritance. In addition to the colonial history, Apostol adds scenes of Filipinos marching for democracy during the People Power Revolution in 1986 and making desperate calls to friends and relatives following Supertyphoon Yolanda in 2013. Snippets of Waray, Cebano, and Tagalog enrich a narrative that is by turns gossipy, harrowing, and serene. This is worthy of the modern classics of postcolonial literature.
