Gun Dealers' Daughter: A Novel Hardcover – July 9, 2012

Gun Dealers’ Daughter is a mesmerizing read. It is so beautifully, poignantly written, the narrator’s remorseful account of her youthful rebellion intertwined with vivid portrayal of the ruling class (with subtle humor), as well as brilliant, and sometimes heartrending, reflection on history and revolution.Apparently a few readers had been put off by the somewhat overwritten passages in the beginning chapters, but once you get through the high-sounding superlatives you would quickly realize it is a stylistic device to let readers see through the narrator’s eyes and glimpse into the nation's psyche. The point they fail to see is, I think, the wordplay here was also meant to illustrate the dual, dialectic power of language – the way our words reveal and disguise the secrets in our hearts. The way our words allow us to heal, and indulge in, our pain. Just as the doctor says in the end, “but you can see where the tragedy lies. It is a paradox at the heart of our human mystery perhaps. Words are all we have to save us, but at the same time, they are not enough to make us whole."Couldn’t have said it better than Brian Collins on the LA Review of Books: “If all this seems rather distant from the here and now, one only has to reflect on how our own political institutions have kept us from reckoning with the root causes of the current crisis (…) or on the way a kind of neocolonialist rule of law appears to have come home to roost with the War on Terror. Apostol has given us a tour de force tale about late-20th-century Manila, but Gun Dealers’ Daughter is also a book for our times.”

Enjoyed reading this. Insight into revolutionary movement in the Phillipines, gun trade, rich & poor. Took awhile to get into the book, but overall very satisfying.

It has been a very long time since I've read a book that is this complex and interesting. The first chapter was a little confusing, but everything made sense as I read further into the book. I especially enjoyed the unexpected ending.

“You will read Gun Dealers’ Daughter wondering where Gina Apostal novels have been all these years (in the Philippines, it turns out). Apostol’s language is audaciously lush and acrobatic, gossipy and protean, a perfect match for her worldly but vulnerable protagonist, Sol, a half-hearted dissident. Through this novel of Marcus-era politics and history, we see how fiction can scrape out a future, demand a re-look at the past. Not only does Gun Dealers’ Daughter make an argument for social revolution, it makes an argument for the role of literature in revolution—the argument being that literature can be revolution.”

A finely wrought novel about modern-day Philippines seen through the eyes of the society's upper class. It is narrated by Sol, a young, bookish, over-protected daughter of a wealthy family who is sucked into a group of ragtag urban guerrillas when she falls in love with one of its operatives - Jed, himself scion of another elite family. Despite his boorishness toward her, she can't resist him and his eponymous girlfriend, named Soli. The latter is supposed to be her doppelganger, who has her heart in the right place as rebels go, but Soli only drives Sol to self-abasement - she (Sol) wonders if she's part of the problem not the solution. Although Sol acts and ends up true to character, I could not like, or relate to, her. She is basically passive, a 'useful fool,' as Soli tells her, attended to by a slew of servants, pampered and protected by her rich parents, driven everywhere in a limo by a devoted chauffeur (she doesn't know how to cross the street.) Her only passion is for books - she is studying to be a historical scholar; she attends the best schools in the Philippines and the US, courtesy of her parents' wealth. As her name suggests, she's a solitary soul, totally self-absorbed. Her parents have enriched themselves as weapons dealers, but Sol, a bright, observant girl, is clueless. When we meet her she is the throes of a suicidal impulse (for reasons we learn much later;) along the way we also learn she suffers from vertigo, menarcheal hysteria, anterego amnesia, gysgraphia, reflux. The writing is deft, lyrical and high brow. Feel free to gloss over her use of latinate words: 'oleaginous,' 'glutinous,' 'lapidary,' 'pendulous,' 'recidivating,' 'feculant,' 'carious,' there's just too many of them and can be distracting. An editor less in awe of Apostol's lapidary prose could have trimmed the superabundance of modifiers. The plot is thin, propped up by background lectures on the country's colonial past delivered by academics - foreigners at that - in the form of dialogue, descriptions of people, even minor characters, and Sol's ruminations on her illnesses. The story plays out against the background of martial law (must every novel by Filipino writers published in the US feature the Marcoses?) Readers of Gun Dealers' Daughter can easily figure out the ending from the volatile mix of a weak neurasthenic main character, weapons dealers, a rabid, opportunistic leftist, and life abroad for a quick exit. The book is overrated.

This book is so many things. On the one hand the story itself is something of a puzzle. Part of the tension is in figuring out what exactly is going on. But it's also an historical story of US-Philippine relations, and thus a political one that has relevance when looking at the US's current foreign policy. At heart though, it's a young woman's coming of age but a devastating one in the end. Though a challenging, thought provoking story the prose itself is so fluid that I found myself quickly into the first quarter of the book. Highly recommended, particularly for fans of Curtis Sittenfeld, Nabokov, and Banville.

This slow-searing thriller is lyrical, inspired, and absorbing. Gun Dealers' Daughter is fairly representative of Gina Apostol's poetic, extremely well-crafted style. Her other works - particularly  Bibliolepsy: A novel (Philippine writers series) (a book that is a lot harder to find but a great read) - have similar qualities, but read this one first for a sense of her top-notch writing. I started reading this book one morning and I could barely put it down.