Hot off the press: Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

READ OF THE WEEKEND

:: Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco is published in paperback by Picador priced, £14.99. Available 4 June 2010.

The first and last chapters of Miguel Syjuco’s debut novel, Ilustrado—winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize—both end on a plane en route to Manila, back to the country the protagonist calls home.

In this book, Syjuco explores themes of exile, literary ambition and—rarely featured in fiction, at least in internationally published books—the history of post-war Philippines.

Ilustrado, Spanish for “enlightened one” is the term used to refer to the progressive Filipino educated class during the Spanish colonial rule in the 19th century.  Syjuco takes the title—an archaic word hardly used in contemporary Philippines (and only ever in reference to history)—and lends it a modern twist.

In a nod to postmodernism, he names the protagonist Miguel Syjuco. A man much like the author prior to his life as a novelist based in Montreal, Miguel is a Creative Writing student living in New York.

He is introspective, sensitive, sometimes funny and often earnest to a fault. His otherwise uneventful life is turned on its head when he hears of the supposed suicide of his literary mentor and professor, Crispin Salvador, a mildly famous but hapless Filipino author.

Intent on getting to the bottom of Salvador’s mysterious death, Miguel flies home to find Salvador’s missing manuscript and do research for the biography he plans to write to redeem Salvador’s memory.

At this stage Ilustrado sounds vaguely like detective fiction. But this is hardly the case. Part mystery, part coming-of-age story, the novel also looks at the broad sweep of Philippine history with admirable flair.

The novel begins with a sense of foreboding. Salvador’s body is found floating in the Hudson River with his “ratty-banded briefs and Ermenegildo Zegna trousers…pulled around his ankles.” To offer readers some semblance of Salvador as a character, Syjuco cites reports of his life and death in the local and international papers.

Upon Miguel’s arrival in Manila, he takes us on a whirlwind tour of Salvador’s epic past, the country’s socio-political history, and chronicles of his own coming of age.

Beneath the dizzying surface of this novel, order and cohesion are always present in the background. Syjuco achieves this by inventively cobbling together fragments from various sources—blog entries, message board posts, newspaper articles, magazine interviews, text messages, excerpts from fictional books—and weaves them seamlessly together.

On the whole, we get a good sense of the characters. Miguel is fully developed. We follow him from his childhood in Vancouver where his “Grapes and Grandma were intent on Canadia[s]ing us, to prepare us for the melting pot into which we’ve been thrown, and they prohibited us from speaking Tagalog lest we never master English” through to his privileged adulthood in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Salvador, the down-on-his-luck author serves as Miguel’s cautionary figure—one to be admired, but not emulated.

The emphasis is not just on personal lives but also on history and politics. Syjuco turns his eye on the current political turmoil, complex colonial past, and insecurities of a nation, which after much struggle is still trying to formulate its identity.

Structurally, the novel is sound and is a wonderful feat of the imagination. Stylistically, the effects are sometimes laboured and in some cases, strained. For instance a passage on Salvador’s notoriety: “Yet it was the internecine intensities of the local literati that gossiped Salvador’s life into chimerical proportions.”

But when he is in full flow, Syjuco exhibits gifts for vivid description (the house’s “Wasabi-green shutters were wide open and latched against the façade. Grey smoke streamed northward from an aluminum chimney. A Sarimanok weathervane pointed south.”), dialogue and ingenuity.

This inspired debut novel displays remarkable originality and marks Syjuco as—what both Miguel and Salvador hoped to be—a global writer.

*Interview with Miguel Syjuco on the life of a writer here.