Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

EVEN before it was considered as a highly-anticipated debut novel, Ilustrado’s manuscript has already wowed the literati in the Philippines. In 2008, it won the Palanca Award, touted as the top literary prize in the country. Shortly after, it was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and eventually won the top plum, with $10,000 to boot. All these, two years before the actual book was published.

The life of Miguel Syjuco, the man behind Ilustrado, was never the same after that.

"This is a dream come true," Syjuco tells the Asian Journal as he imbibes the atmosphere. We are huddled inside the Idlewild Bookstore, an independent bookshop in midtown Manhattan. In a few minutes, more than a hundred people would crowd the small space to listen to what he had to say. This was his moment.

Critics and fellow authors have been very generous in giving their praise to the newly minted author’s debut novel. Among the superlatives that have been heaped upon the book? "Dizzyingly energetic and inventive", "brilliantly conceived and stylishly executed," "ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy and effervescent with humour" and "astonishingly inventive and bold."

The accolades don’t stop there: Canada’s Globe and Mail calls him "The shooting star of Filipino fiction" and his book a "dazzling debut", Publisher’s Weekly says "this imaginative first novel shows considerable ingenuity in binding its divergent threads into a satisfying, meaningful story," and Library Journal finds "Syjuco has crafted a beautiful work of historical fiction that’s part mystery and part sociopolitical commentary."

"Ilustrado is a book about the Filipinos, about our experience from my perspective, from my own limited slice of the Philippine experience. It feels wonderful to be able to tell our story to the rest of the world," he says.

The book examines the diaspora, the experience of living abroad and coming back and forth, coming home to the Philippines feeling guilty for living abroad—all the different things that he thinks most expatriate Filipinos feel.

The manuscript that won and the book that we have here now took about 18 months. He worked with an Eric Chinski, an editor from his publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux and writer John Evans, a good friend and a colleague of his from Columbia, who helped him revise the book into the form that it is now.

Syjuco finished the final revisions in January. For him, it is still not finished. "But you know you have to publish it sometime," he says with a laugh.

The book is completely fictional, and it’s not a memoir. The protagonist’s name just happens to be Miguel Syjuco as well. The similarities end there, or so it seems.

"I wanted to play with that idea of ‘Is Miguel Syjuco, the character, real?’ or ‘Is Crispin Salvador real?’ or ‘Are these things really happening in the Philippines’?’ I hope that the readers, when they get to the end, they realize, well, it doesn’t matter. It may not be real or factual but it is true in the greater sense of the word," he says.

As Albert Camus once famously said, "Fiction is the lie we tell to get to the truth."

"The people and events are all imaginary, but the truths they represent—the flawed humanity, the mistakes we make, the potential for good and bad, the celebration of who we are and can be —are all real," Syjuco, the author, tells the fictional critic Marcel Avellaneda in an interview.

The book follows Miguel Syjuco, who sets out to investigate the suspicious death of his mentor, Crispin Salvador, once a revered and famous literary figure in the Philippines who made New York his home after a series of not-so-fortunate events. The novel opens with Salvador’s body being fished dead out of the Hudson River.

The protagonist returns to the Philippines to know more about Salvador’s life and in the process of doing so, he meets the author’s family and friends as he fulfills his quest to write his mentor’s biography and find his missing manuscript.

The book shuffles furiously between the points of view of the protagonist and his mentor that some readers may find mildly confusing. The inspiration to do this came one day, through a documentary he was watching.

"I was watching a documentary called Dreamweavers about T’boli women who wove textiles, and I saw how they were developing each thread independently before weaving them into a fabric, into a pattern," he tells of that day.

Prior to that, he was writing the book in a very conventional, linear structure.

"When I saw them weaving, I realized that ‘Boom! That’s the way I have to do it.’ I took the book apart and developed the narrative threads on their own and I wove them together to create the bigger story," Syjuco shares.

The book is spiced with enough Filipino humor that hopefully will not get lost in translation.

"I like playing with absurd things because there are just too many absurd things in life, especially in the Philippines. We Filipinos love to laugh at ourselves," he shares. He thought it was important to put jokes into the book because humor is really a part of our culture.

He admits though that he set out to be funny.