Ilustrado: A Novel

by Miguel Syjuco Narrated by William Dufris

Overview

Ilustrado opens with Crispin Salvador, lion of Philippine letters, dead in the Hudson River. His young acolyte, Miguel, sets out to investigate the author's suspicious death and the strange disappearance of an unfinished manuscript-a work that had been planned not just to return the once-great author to fame but to expose the corruption behind the rich families who have ruled the Philippines for generations.



To understand the death, Miguel scours the life, charting Salvador's trajectory via his poetry, interviews, novels, polemics, and memoirs. The literary fragments become patterns become stories become epic: a family saga of four generations tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, the Americans, and the Filipinos themselves. Finally, we are surprised to learn that this story belongs to young Miguel as much as to his lost mentor, and we are treated to an unhindered view of a society caught between reckless decay and hopeful progress.



In the shifting terrain of this remarkably ambitious and daring first novel, Miguel Syjuco explores fatherhood, regret, revolution, and the mysteries of lives lived and abandoned.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 2008 Man Asian Prize before it was even published, this dizzying and ambitious novel marks an auspicious start to Syjuco's career. The apparent suicide of famous, down-on-his-luck Filipino author Crispin Salvador sends narrator Miguel Syjuco home to the Philippines to come to terms with the death of his literary mentor, research a biography he plans to write about him, and find the author's lost manuscript. With flair and grace, Syjuco makes this premise bear much weight: the multigenerational saga of Salvador's life, a history of the postwar Philippines, questions of literary ambitions and achievement, and the narrator's own coming-of-age story. The expansive scope is tightly structured as a series of fragments: excerpts of Salvador's works, found documents, Miguel's narration of his return to the Philippines, blogs about contemporary terrorist incidents in Manila, and even a series of jokes that tell the story of a Filipino immigrant to America. Though murky at times, this imaginative first novel shows considerable ingenuity in binding its divergent threads into a satisfying, meaningful story. (May)

Library Journal

The title of this first novel, winner of the 2008 MAN Asian Literary Prize and the Palanca Grand Prize, refers to the Philippine middle class and is a central motif in Syjuco's narrative. The story begins with the suicide of the great Filipino writer Crispin Salvador, found floating in the Hudson River. His protégé and biographer, Miguel, ends up reconstructing Crispin's life as he seeks to uncover the details of his mysterious death and the whereabouts of a last, unfinished novel about the corruption in the Philippines. Written in the voice of both main characters, the plot unfolds through sections of Crispin's published work, imagined magazine interviews, and snippets of Miguel's incomplete biography. Crispin offers a historical portrait of the Philippines and its deteriorating creative class, while Miguel simultaneously travels through the modern-day Philippines, pursuing the truth about Crispin. VERDICT Through his vivid use of language, Syjuco has crafted a beautiful work of historical fiction that's part mystery and part sociopolitical commentary. Readers who enjoyed Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao will enjoy this literary gem. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/10.]—Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Kirkus Reviews

An ambitious debut novel, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, introduces an author of limitless promise. This isn't the only recent debut that finds the author using his own name and drawing from his own life for his protagonist, but it dazzles as brightly as Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The framing is simple, though nothing is clear, and everything encompassed remains open to question. It begins with the death of Crispin Salvador, a writer once revered in his native Philipines, but whose literary legacy has become far more controversial since he exiled himself to Manhattan. After the discovery of his dead body floating in the Hudson River, not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the initial report lists suicide as the cause of death, though his protege, the student writer Miguel Syjuco, suspects murder. For more than two decades, Salvador had been working on a manuscript that was to be his life's crowning achievement, one that would explore and illuminate the corruption and scandal at the heart of his native country for more than a century. The young narrator returns to the Manila that both writers had left, hoping to discover both the location of the manuscript and the truth about his mentor. He tells his story in both the first and third persons, mixing fictional reality with dreams and excerpts from both Salvador's work and his own work-in-progress biography of Salvador. The novel ultimately blurs the distinctions between life and art, and between protege and mentor, within what it calls "the ‘arbitrary scrim' between fiction and nonfiction." As it details generations of Filipino history through the lives of the two writers, it additionally employstechniques as contemporary as blogs and e-mail exchanges. Ultimately, the global interconnections know no boundaries: "When a butterfly flapped its wings in Chile, a child soldier killed for the first time in Chad, a sale was made on Amazon.com, and a book arrived in two days to divulge the urgencies outside our lives."First novels rarely show such reach and depth.

From the Publisher

Winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript form, Ilustrado is a hip and secure first novel about the urgency of art and regret. Confident and quirky, with passages that recall early Phillip Roth and a structure not unlike the best M. Night Shyamalan films, the book actively seeks to provoke its audience with bathroom humor and sexist stabs at superficial melodrama. Such scenes are bookended by passages of profundity that somehow manage to always say something about life as well as literature.” —Roberto Ontiveros, The Dallas Morning News

“Ambitious . . . In a daring literary performance, Syjuco weaves the invented with the factual . . . Ilustrado is being presented as a tracing of 150 years of Philippine history, but it's considerably more than that . . . Spiced with surprises and leavened with uproariously funny moments, it is punctuated with serious philosophical musings.” —Raymond Bonner, The New York Times Book Review

“A dazzling and virtuosic adventure in reading . . . The narrative is organised with immense confidence and skill . . . The author's post-modernist bag of tricks also contains a whip-crack narrative skill that's as reminiscent of Dickens as it is of Roberto Bolaño . . . There's a capaciousness that makes the book richly attractive to wander into . . . [This] novel . . . fizzes with the effervescence a large book can have when its author is in total control of the material. This isn't a story; it's the unfolding of an entire world, a mirror-land that seems familiar but is always ineffably strange . . . Syjuco is a writer already touched by greatness . . . This is a remarkably impressive and utterly persuasive novel. Its author . . . may one day succeed with the Nobel committee.” —Joseph O'Connor, The Guardian

“An exuberant, complex, and fascinating ride through 150 years of Philippine history . . . Syjuco's writing is playful, smart, and confident . . . An inventive and exciting debut.” —Grace Talusan, Rumpus

“An extraordinary debut, at once flashy and substantial, brightly charming and quietly resistant to its own wattage . . . Syjuco's gifts for pastiche, his protean narrative energy, are in particular evidence in these pitch-perfect fictions of the fictions of his fictional author . . . An exuberant, funny novel that neither takes its grand ambitions too seriously, nor pretends to be measuring itself by any less a scale of intent. How Syjuco . . . has done this is foremost a testament to his prodigious gifts . . . With his dazzling first foray, Syjuco suggest how his new Asia, his new identity, must ‘look' on the page and between the covers. That look is unexpected and fresh, quite unlike anything that has been seen before.” —Charles Foran, The Globe and Mail

“Wildly entertaining . . . Engaging . . . Absolutely assured in its tone, literary sophistication and satirical humor . . . Syjuco is only on his mid-30s, and he already possesses the wand of the enchanter.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Ilustrado will provoke audible oohs and ahhs from readers . . . The writing is gorgeous. Plus, there's an O. Henry twist in the epilogue. This is a great book. Read it.” —Luis Clemens, Senior Editor, Tell Me More

“Syjuco's exceptional novel exceeds its heightened expectations, serving notice that a brilliant new talent has arrived, somehow fully formed.” —Jared Bland, The Walrus

“Dazzling . . . It is a virtuoso display of imagination and wisdom, particularly remarkable from a 31-year-old author; a literary landmark for the Philippines and beyond.” —Michele Leber, Booklist (starred review)

“This imaginative first novel shows considerable ingenuity in binding its divergent threads into a satisfying, meaningful story.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Through his vivid use of language, Syjuco has crafted a beautiful work of historical fiction that's part mystery and part sociopolitical commentary. Readers who enjoyed Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao will enjoy this literary gem.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“An ambitious debut novel, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, introduces an author of limitless promise . . . It dazzles as brightly as Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated . . . First novels rarely show such reach and depth.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Miguel Syjuco's dizzyingly energetic and inventive novel views his native Philippines with a merciless yet loving eye, its many voices a chorus illuminating the various facets of this chaotic, complicated country. An ambitious and admirable debut.” —Janice Y. K. Lee, author of The Piano Teacher

“Vulnerable and mischievous, sophisticated and naïve, Ilustrado explores the paradoxes that come with the search for identity and throws readers into the fragile space between self-pursuit and self-destruction. A novel about country and self, youth and experience, it is elegiac, thoughtful, and original.” —Colin McAdam, author of Fall and Some Great Thing

“From the ruckus of rumors, blogs, ambitions, overweening grandparents, indifferent history, and personal crimes, Miguel Syjuco has innovatively reimagined that most wonderfully old-fashioned consolation: literature. Ilustrado is a great novel.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

“Brilliantly conceived, and stylishly executed, [Ilustrado] covers a large and tumultuous historical period with seemingly effortless skill. It is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and effervescent with humour.” —2008 Man Asian Literary Prize Panel of Judges

“A daring literary performance.” —Raymond Bonner, The New York Times Book Review

“Short, sharp and funny. . .” —Joyce Hor-Chung Lau, The New York Times

“Winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript form, Ilustrado is a hip and secure first novel about the urgency of art and regret. Confident and quirky, with passages that recall early Phillip Roth and a structure not unlike the best M. Night Shyamalan films, the book actively seeks to provoke its audience with bathroom humor and sexist stabs at superficial melodrama. Such scenes are bookended by passages of profundity that somehow manage to always say something about life as well as literature.” —Roberto Ontiveros, The Dallas Morning News

“The book Ilustrado most recalls is Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Though stylistically the two writers couldn't be further apart, the way Syjuco places his characters in the political pressure cooker of the Philippines's political history achieves the same disorienting mix of breadth and claustrophobia. The book picked up the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008 and will likely be nominated on our shores, as well.” —Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

“The thing about wildly inventive novels that play with form and voice and style is that they're often easier to praise than to read. Even the ones that feel like a rewarding accomplishment to finish can be tough sledding to get through. That's one reason why Miguel Syjuco's debut novel, "Ilustrado," is so rare, rich and rewarding . . . Syjuco has talent and style to burn—he's a dynamic and funny writer who uses every tool at his disposal to create a narrative. The result is literary fiction that will keep you up all night thrilled, laughing, enthralled and amazed. Don't miss it.” —David Daley, The Courier-Journal

“This is a big, bold, cunning, impassioned, plangent and very funny book. . . Although there are riotously satirical parts to this book, there is an emotional core as well: the comedy would lose its tang without the characters' blasted hopes and self-aware inadequacies. Like Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, another epic comedy from the southern hemisphere, it deftly negotiates between the absurd and the all-too-real, the cosmopolitan and the local, the nature of failure and celebrity.” —Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

“Beyond Ilustrado's furious skewering of Filipino elites is writing that bristles with surprising imagery. Life with a girlfriend, Miguel says, ‘was like walking naked around a cactus with your eyes closed.' Miguel notices how an old woman's skin ‘sags on her as if she were a child wearing her father's sweater.' An unruly and energizing novel, filled with symmetries and echoes that only become apparent in its closing pages, Ilustrado pushes readers into considering matters of authenticity, identity and belonging. Despite its various comic turns, it is ultimately a tragedy—a raw reminder of the fact that we can never, really, find our way back home.” —Financial Times

“Ilustrado is built like a carousel, revolving between first- and third-person commentary, news reports, interviews, extracts from Salvador's work and a Crispin Salvador biography the narrator is writing. Nonetheless it is all held tightly together, focused on the returning son's difficulties with his family and his efforts to acclimatize. Manila is conjured as a dystopian black hole. Civil unrest crackles at the edge of the narrator's vision as he explores the metropolis, reaching critical mass when a typhoon hits the city near the novel's climax.” —Times Literary Supplement

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170521395
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	04/30/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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