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. Even mispronunciations are weighted with significance, as when a wayward soldier named Frick becomes, aptly, Prick (a flourish that elicited a smile of recognition in this reader, a “Jennifer” whose Filipino relatives have been known to call her “Jenniper”).

The novel’s structure reflects how history comes at us in scattered shards, the way voices are amplified or silenced, story lines invented or forgotten. “We enter others’ lives through two mediums, words and time, both faulty,” one character observes. But a third medium — image — is a powerful recurring motif. Apostol is obsessed with the lens, the gaze, the way victim and victor, good and evil are identified based on who holds the camera and who consumes its product. “Photographs of a captured country shot through the lens of the captor possess layers of ambiguity too confusing to grasp,” she writes. Her characters marvel at photography’s mechanisms and denounce its propagandistic effects — especially its commodification of suffering and faux valor, from the stereoscopes of early-20th-century soldiers (“sold, in New York souvenir shops, for 2 cents”) to the latter-20th-century “art spectacles” produced by the American “cinematic machine.” A New York doctor, expounding on the miracle of the stereoscope, calls it “a very American invention.” “We have,” he says, full of pride, “manufactured how to see the world.”

The novel’s title may be read as describing the Filipinos who rose up against their colonizers; the translator bent on destabilizing the narratives imposed on her country; or Apostol herself, whose explosion of formal novelistic conventions is its own kind of uprising. Though ambiguity and the unknowable drive and derange this novel’s characters, I don’t believe Apostol is arguing against the existence of demonstrable fact. “Insurrecto” underscores how excruciatingly difficult it can be to interpret, to verify. But it never underrates the obligation to try. It heaps disdain and punishment on characters who would go at the task lightly, oblivious of their own biases, assumptions and mistranslations — like a syphilitic American sergeant who “witnesses all and sees none,” and fatally underestimates the intelligence and resourcefulness of the Filipinos.

Apostol does draw one straight line: from the Philippine-American War to the “latter-day outbreaks of imperial hysteria in Southeast Asian wars, which are a blip in the infinite human spiral of human aggression,” appearing now in the kind of environmental destruction wrought by super-typhoons like the one that pulverized Eastern Samar in 2013. Embedded in all this violence, “Insurrecto” suggests, is absurdity. Balangiga, no matter how you count the bodies, was “a crime of history that no single vision can redeem.” In confronting that crime, Apostol has written a novel of multitudinous vision, one that dares to ask: In the face of so much tragedy, what can one do after the crying … but laugh?