{"product_id":"la-tercera-isbn-9781641295727","title":"La Tercera","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn her first novel since \u003ci\u003eInsurrecto, \u003c\/i\u003eGina  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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRosario, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLa Tercera\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cu\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eLa Tercera\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the Housatonic Book Award for Fiction\u003cbr\u003eLonglisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Editors' Choice\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eEsquire Philippines\u003c\/i\u003e’s Best Filipino Books of 2023\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eMs. Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e Most Anticipated Feminist Books of the Year\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRefinery29 Most Anticipated Books of the Year\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A whirlwind of narrative . . .\u003ci\u003e La Tercera\u003c\/i\u003e expects a lot of non-Filipino readers, but the effort is profoundly rewarding, opening up a glorious new understanding of a country and a culture that ought to mean more to Americans than a twinge of guilty conscience. For a Filipino, I suspect reading it might just feel like coming home.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Hari Kunzru, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Packed with pop culture and literary references from \u003ci\u003eSaturday Night Fever\u003c\/i\u003e to Alfred Lord Tennyson, and untranslated words and phrases in Tagalog, Spanish and Waray, a regional Philippine language, the weighty prose forces the reader to confront the country's legacy of Spanish colonialism, American imperialism and the suppression of indigenous culture . . . A must-read for lovers of literature, history and language.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—NPR.org\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “To say that Gina Apostol’s prose is pyrotechnical is to state the obvious: juggling an immense cast of characters, decades of political entanglements, and Apostol’s trademark brand of humor, \u003ci\u003eLa Tercera \u003c\/i\u003edazzles. I was floored by how the novel somersaulted between multiple languages, the personal and the national, overacted tragedy to heartbreaking history, the US and the Philippines.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Electric Literature\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eLa Tercera\u003c\/i\u003e is not only a triumph of historical fiction, but of the Filipino literary language. Readers are taken through an assemblage of the Delgado families' memories, encompassing colonial and wartime tragedies. It's a novel that grows increasingly dizzying—revealing truths about the past through families, traitors, heroes, reactionaries, revolutionaries, and so much more.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eEsquire Philippines\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Stylish, meta-fictional, intelligent, kaleidoscopic, melodramatic,  multigenerational, 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), \u003ci\u003eLa Tercera \u003c\/i\u003eis 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—R. Zamora Linmark,  author of \u003ci\u003eLeche \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “A feat of lavish  storytelling, \u003ci\u003eLa Tercera\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Tracy O'Neill, author of \u003ci\u003eQuotients\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e “Some friends and I have a long-running saying: WWGD, as in, What Would Gina Do? Another way of saying this is that both Gina Apostol and her work are nothing short of indispensable: hilarious, overflowing with style, unapologetically erudite, and always burning with the cool, mutinous flame that can only be Apostol’s. Every book she publishes is an event; one that restores my faith in literature, and revives us to the world we thought we knew.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Elaine Castillo, author of \u003ci\u003eAmerica Is Not the Heart\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eHow To Read Now\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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 \u003ci\u003eLa Tercera\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Ken Chen, author of \u003ci\u003eJuvenilia\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A powerful multigenerational epic of the Philippines . . . This is worthy of the modern classics of postcolonial literature.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, Starred Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eLa Tercera\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—The Bookreporter\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cu\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for Gina Apostol\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “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.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “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.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—NPR’s \u003ci\u003eWeekend Edition\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “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.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—The Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Dazzling . . . A tender character study erupting with blazing insights on the ethics of storytelling.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—Entertainment Weekly\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eGina Apostol \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of the novels \u003ci\u003eInsurrecto\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGun Dealers’ Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBibliolepsy\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Revolution According to Raymundo Mata\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.\u003cb\u003eEffects\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Of the visible works left behind by Francisco “Paco” Delgado y Blumfeld and Jorge “Jote” Delgado y Blumfeld, what persists does not console. The long-dead brothers possessed the following effects:\u003cbr\u003e      1. a weird-looking guitar;\u003cbr\u003e      2. the rusted remains of chicken coops along the river Himanglos in Salogó;\u003cbr\u003e      3. a seawall, a.k.a. AWOL;\u003cbr\u003e      4. a digest of operatic libretti (in which a parasite has erased an etching of Lucia di Lammermoor and the ghost shape of a moth enshrouds the buried bride);\u003cbr\u003e      5. the name of a dog, Moret;\u003cbr\u003e      6. three volumes bound in leather, with a title in gold lettering, \u003ci\u003eWilliam McKinley’s World\u003c\/i\u003e, resting in a domed sepulcher;\u003cbr\u003e      7. a wooden box, 9 x 18 x 3, inlaid with capiz, and on its lid the initials F.B.;\u003cbr\u003e      8. the journals of a boy already at war but not yet in his teens, 1899-1901;\u003cbr\u003e      9. maps of the area called San Jose in Tacloban and of a gleam of land, now called Greenhills, in metropolitan Manila.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e They were hidden in plain view around the Delgado family home, a forsaken place in the wilds of Leyte, and the question of which brother owned what was moot. We called them both \u003ci\u003eLolo\u003c\/i\u003e—their identities interchangeable because it seemed they had none: their world was incomprehensible.\u003cbr\u003e      For a long time, I mixed the brothers up.\u003cbr\u003e      No one in the house touched their effects except the worms.\u003cbr\u003e      The Delgados are a fretful clan, prone to delusions of pathos rather than grandeur. We linger on the abstract, such as despair and pride. I speak of the Delgados I know—my mother’s family—madmen and collaborators, so I’m told. By the time I had come across my mother’s inheritance, the banality of objects in the material world inhabited by her grandfathers had lost, for my mother, even the sense of the ridiculous—she had ceased to see them.\u003cbr\u003e      Instead, the memory of La Tercera, a place she had never known, drove her mad.\u003cbr\u003e      I grew up under the shadow of La Tercera. It was a legacy not quite tangible but not improbable. And this ambiguity has led members of my family, through generations, to acts that have ended in a sense of loss that burdens too many in the place I am from.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eTop of the World\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The voicemail was from my uncle, Tio Nemorino, the honorable mayor as they called him years after his regime.\u003cbr\u003e      I’d been calling my mother the entire month. She had no use for Messenger. Skype was dead to her. She owned no computers. She was the last woman in that selfie-happy archipelago to have only a rotary phone.\u003cbr\u003e      All I had was her voice.\u003cbr\u003e      During the years I’ve lived in New York, I admit I never called her much. I hate the phone. I mislay it, I pretend I’m not home, I hate the need to call people. The rest of the family knows. They know they will expect no birthday greetings, they will hear nothing from me when my books come out, they will learn about my readings on Facebook, where all the Filipinos are. I’m on Facebook for my books. I have a phone for my mom.\u003cbr\u003e      Her voice was girlish, high-pitched, the voice of one, I thought, who believed too easily in illusion. My mom lived in the future, and the present was a dislocation. She had the trick of making you think it was your existence that gave her joy—partly because of her childish voice, her intakes of breath as she spoke to you, as if her diaphragm and lungs were not formed enough for her thrill.\u003cbr\u003e      “Inday!” she said when it was first detected, “I’m so healthy. I just had my tests!”\u003cbr\u003e      She always called me inday, sounding like she had so many children she had forgotten my name, though I’m her only daughter.\u003cbr\u003e      “But Mom, Tio Nemor said—”\u003cbr\u003e      “My heart is good, my cholesterol is great, my lungs are perrrrfect! All I have is cancer! Without cancer I’m on top of the world!”\u003cbr\u003e      And she began to hum that song from my childhood.\u003cbr\u003e      I could see her doing the cha-cha with the cord of the rotary phone, shaking her hips, dressed in satin and silk, lithe and unconquerable in her feline way, like the stray cats that perched on the unfinished cement wall in Mana Marga’s dirty-kitchen, purring in the security of having so many lives.\u003cbr\u003e      When she was first told she should have surgery to take out her cancerous breast, she refused.\u003cbr\u003e      “How can you dance the tango if you have only one breast!”\u003cbr\u003e      I imagined her, Adina an guapa, pearled and perfumed, dancing the cha-cha to Karen Carpenter, in her high heels. I keep seeing her in her seventies bouffant—though in her last pictures, uploaded on Facebook by Putt-putt who never tags me but still I follow him, her hair has thinned. Her reflexive mode of existence was to go ballroom dancing. She wore high heels to water her orchids in the garden, and when I was a kid watching her use a brown eyebrow pencil to line her lips, she laughed as I stared—“Inday!” she said, humming as she did the weirdest things to her face, her deft fingers etching herself into shape—“does it look good, inday?” she asked.\u003cbr\u003e      “Yes,” I’d say, and it was true.\u003cbr\u003e      I grew up with the daring invention of my mom’s daily routines.\u003cbr\u003e      My mom wore her beauty in a way that was not a drag to others: we were just proud witnesses. Nothing marred her grace. People in Tacloban called her Adina an guapa, that was her nickname. Adina the beautiful. She emerged from her rituals looking somehow like Gina Lollobrigida, who was famous in Tacloban because she once posed by our fantastical bridge.\u003cbr\u003e      Adina an guapa was a silk-and-organza spectacle from the time of that first dictator, the locus of my memory of my mom.\u003cbr\u003e      “Top of the World” was her brother Nemorino’s campaign song, the one the band struck when Tio Nemorino ran for mayor in the seventies.\u003cbr\u003e      “You know that’s not a good allusion, Mom,” I said. “Karen Carpenter did not come to a good end.”\u003cbr\u003e      She told me not to return home.\u003cbr\u003e      She told me what mattered was that I was an artist—how could I leave New York, she said, when I had my career, I was a hysterical novelist, as she called with pride my vocation, my work on events so forgotten neither victors nor losers give a damn.\u003cbr\u003e      “It’s your dream, inday. You stay where you are. In Green Witch. To do your art.”\u003cbr\u003e      “Greenwich Village, Mom.”\u003cbr\u003e      “It says here on the postcard. Green Witch. Stay in Green Witch.”\u003cbr\u003e      So I did.\u003cbr\u003e      My mother’s gift to me was that she believed in all of my dreams, including the stupid ones.\u003cbr\u003e      She kept up a perfect face no matter how ordinary or significant the moment, so that neither her illness nor her love sent me home.\u003cbr\u003e      It was Tio Nemorino’s voice in my mailbox that told me she was gone.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eThe Court Case\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e It’s no surprise that in a country that exists on the argument of conquest, laws about the possession of land are murky. On All Souls’ Day, how many families, bourgeois or not, but mostly bourgeois, burn candles on the plots of the dead only to rant on and on about some long-lost, stolen piece of land?\u003cbr\u003e      The evidence of the existence of La Tercera is tenuous but not mythical.\u003cbr\u003e      Of my mom’s lawsuit over her intestate Lolo Paco’s lands, I remember the outlines like vague crisscross shades produced by the nighttime gauze of mosquito nets, that shadow-roof of my childhood—though all my life my mother kept italicizing the facts.\u003cbr\u003e      \u003ci\u003eLolo Paco had no will, he had no child, when he died who should inherit his properties but us—the children of his blood, of his only brother, Jorge Delgado y Blumfeld, my Papá’s papá: your Lolo Jote!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      I grew up with the incoherent details of Lolo Paco’s life and times while I scraped out burnt rice at the bottom of the kaldero or slapped at bugs that got through the moskitero’s gauze no matter how firmly my mom tucked me into bed. Minor acts or objects would set her off. Such as food. Once, the particular luster that day of her favorite—fresh hipon—the smelliest stuff on the table, I thought, though I was too polite and in awe of my mom’s appetite to mention it—reminded her how much her Lolo Paco had loved the hipon of Leyte, which he called bagoong, and among the bundles that her father, Mister Honorable Mayor Francisco Delgado III, would take on his annual pilgrimage to her Lolo Paco at Greenhills were those jars of purple sheen, Salogó’s hipon, wrapped in multiple layers of banig, so that if they spilled, the gusts of hipon would not ruin her father’s clothes. Lolo Paco also loved danggit, dried squid, and all the most awful kinds of budo-bulad—basically, he had a taste for smelly things—and I see my grandfather, the Honorable Mayor, also the town’s old music teacher, lugging the weight of his bounty from Salogó’s dust to Tacloban’s gangplanks to Manila’s piers. I kept imagining, with a sense of my own humiliation, this proud man, my mom’s Papá, arriving at his rich uncle the senator’s doorstep—stooped, sweating, and reeking of pusit—to deliver his homage of fermented shrimp fry and salted fish, the province’s bounty offered to Manila’s gods.\u003cbr\u003e      Every year, when she had to pay the school bills to the Divine Word Missionary School for my dumb education, my mom mentioned how \u003ci\u003eshe\u003c\/i\u003e could have gone to high school in Manila, you know—and not just college at Far Eastern University in Sampaloc! Anyway, she never graduated from FEU because she refused to wear sneakers during PE, but that’s another story. If only her Papá had allowed her to live with childless Lolo Paco and his mean wife, Lola Chedeng, when he asked to take her—he wanted to adopt her when she was just a baby! Ah, instead, who got to be the child growing up at the senator’s dinner table?\u003cbr\u003e      Oh, that cripple, that orphan—that Madam Charity Breton!\u003cbr\u003e      That poliomyelitic!\u003cbr\u003e      “Oh my goodness, inday, how could she call herself a Delgado—she could not even walk! Agi nga poliomyelitic! An American with no name, left behind by a GI, a ward of the orphanage, a no-name saved by the Gotas de Leche! Ay leche, that Gotas de Leche!”\u003cbr\u003e      And at that last word, that unholy \u003ci\u003eleche!\u003c\/i\u003e, my mom started laughing.\u003cbr\u003e      I can see my mom, lifting her head up from her usual occupations, pasting weeds on cloth canvasses or gluing baubles on homemade lampshades, her veined finger sticky with her pastes, raised to her lips.\u003cbr\u003e      “Oh, inday, do not say that word \u003ci\u003eleche\u003c\/i\u003e, it is bad!”\u003cbr\u003e      And then she crossed herself because she had said the word again.\u003cbr\u003e      Listening to the way her holiness mixed with her prejudice, a troubling jumble of ethics that as a child I could not pinpoint as a portion of my malady, only that I felt it, I felt my mind skip over my unease the way I always moved the fish’s eye, prominent in my mom’s beloved tinola, to make it look away from me.\u003cbr\u003e      “Ah, inday, what would my life have been, if not for that orphan who took all of Lolo Paco’s lands, that greedy woman, your Auntie Charity Breton!”\u003cbr\u003e      “Well, Ma,” I said, “if you had grown up at Lolo Paco’s table, I think you would still be eating too much hipon and budo-bulad!”","brand":"Soho Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305102627045,"sku":"NP9781641295727","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781641295727.jpg?v=1767731047","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/la-tercera-isbn-9781641295727","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}