Apostol's 'Gun Dealers' Daughter' gets rave review from US literary mag

Filipino novelist Gina Apostol’s American debut “Gun Dealers’ Daughter” has been earning rave reviews abroad, the latest of which is from the literary and cultural arts magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books. The review written by Brian Collins was all praises for Apostol’s novel, which he called brilliant. “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,” the review also said.

Collins noted that Apostol’s protagonist Soledad Soliman is “one of the most compelling characters in recent fiction.” Upon reading a passage in the book where Soliman describes her uncle, Collins was appreciative of Apostol’s technique in fleshing-out  Soliman. “Soledad's verbal intensity we grasp as that of a bookish only child with a cosmopolitan upbringing. Apostol even allows her to overwrite here and there, to slip into a precious or self-indulgent style, sharpening our image of Soledad as a stunted character,” Collins said. Collins also saw “Dealer Daughter” as part of the impressive context of the Filipino novelist’s body of work. “For a sense of Apostol's own impressive stylistic range see also her first novel, Bibliolepsy, already a kind of contemporary classic back home in the Philippines, though now out of print. Soon, I would think, some alert publisher will bring this book out in the US,” he said. Collins is not the only critic who gave the book positive reviews. Manila-born American writer Jessica Hagedorn, famous for her 1990 novel “Dogeaters” which was set in Manila as well, called Apostol’s book “long overdue.” “In ‘Gun Dealers’ Daughter,’ Gina Apostol probes the hard truths of love, nationhood, and exile with crisp intelligence and subtle humor. Apostol is a fearless, stylish writer of substance and her American debut is long overdue,” Hagedorn said.          Literary trade magazine Publishers Weekly, meanwhile, said Apostol’s novel was “poetically told,” noting the narrative style of the story’s central character in relation to the book’s subject matter. “Apostol offers an intriguing and significant view of Marcos-era Philippines in this complex and feverish novel,” it said.  “Gun Dealers’ Daughter” is Apostol’s third novel. Her previous two, “Bibliolepsy” and “The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata,” both won the Philippine National Book Award for Fiction in 1997 and 2010, respectively. A synopsis of Gun Dealers’ Daughter available in Apostol’s website explained that the book is the story of a young woman, Soledad Soliman, as she “pieces together her troubled past in this story of rebellion and romance set in the Marcos-era Philippines.”          Soliman “transforms herself from bookish rich girl to communist rebel”. A conflict arises when she questions her principles; is she really committed to the communist movement or just to the man she falls in love with? Apostol said in her website that she lives in New York City, western Massachusetts, and Manila. She wrote the first draft of “Gun Dealers’ Daughter” back in 1998. — DVM, GMA News