Ilustrado — Miguel Syjuco • The Automaton

Ilustrado — Miguel Syjuco

Miguel Syjuco’s “official” Web site is a joke. Entering www.miguelsyjuco.com (a perfectly innocuous URL) on your browser’s address bar for the first time, you may be surprised seconds later to find neither the dynamic cleverness of an author Web site like Jennifer Egan’s nor the static simplicity of something like David Mitchell’s. Instead you’ll be treated to an embarrassment of riches, chock-full as it is with blocks of text and images forming a tapestry of memes, and an assault on the senses, particularly on your sense of sight but not, to be sure, on your sense of humor.

MiguelSyjuco.com, as the site’s welcome greeting says, is an online fan shrine built by a woman named Vita Nova in honor of Syjuco and his debut novel, Ilustrado. You’ll be forgiven for tagging Vita Nova as nothing short of a creep—not least for sending Syjuco a ton of emails, asking him to write her biography, and posting his courteous but evidently worried reply—not because she may very well be just that (a creep), but because she isn’t real to begin with. Vita Nova is but one of the characters in the very same book for which she has supposedly put up a loving if LOL-tastic tribute rendered in topsy-turvy HTML. The amusingly amateurish author Web site is, apparently, engineered by none other than Vita Nova’s creator, the Montreal-based Filipino writer Miguel Syjuco.

Miguel Syjuco’s novel, Ilustrado, is also a joke, even as it streams from a rather unfunny prologue involving the death of a renowned Filipino expatriate writer named Crispin Salvador.

One February morning in 2002, Salvador’s body is found floating in the Hudson river, prompting speculators in his native Philippines to form their conjectures around either murder or suicide. More importantly, though, the incident impels his erstwhile protégé and hamburger buddy, a Filipino expatriate tyro author named Miguel Syjuco (who joins the company of metafictive characters that includes Jonathan Safran Foer in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Paul Auster in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, and who shall hereafter be referred to as Miguel, so as not to be confused with Syjuco the author, although of course you’ll end up getting confused anyway), to search for the supposedly missing manuscript of Salvador’s The Bridges Ablaze (winkingly abbreviated as TBA), a potential holder of the title, the Great Filipino Novel.

“The reason for my long exile is so that I can be free to write TBA,” Salvador, who left Manila on the eve of Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of martial law in 1972, told Miguel during one of their numerous intimate conversations. “Don’t you think there are things that need to be finally said? I want to lift the veil that conceals the evil. Expose them on the steps of the temple. Truly, all those responsible. The pork barrel trad-pols. The air-conditioned Forbes Park aristocracy. The aspirational kleptocrats who forget their origins. The bishopricks and their canting church. Even you and me.” Such goals are so ambitious as to be remarkably facetious, and already you might be snickering. But that’s just the beginning.

To read the rest of Ilustrado is to consume a literary salmagundi no doubt palatable to anyone with an appetite for postmodern irony and trickery. Beyond the book’s enthralling preliminary pages, which reproduce Miguel’s introduction to his biography in progress, Crispin Salvador: Eight Lives Lived, (the subtitle alludes to the deceased writer’s epithet, “the panther of Philippine letters”) is a medley of paragraphs and sections written in varying styles and perspectives. Excerpts from the aforementioned biography; from newspaper articles; from Salvador’s interview with the Paris Review; from political blogs and spam comments; from iterations of corny jokes (yes, there are jokes within this joke) injected with Pinoy puns and malapropisms; and from Salvador’s multigenre oeuvre, including his tell-all memoir, irreverent essays with titles like “Why Would a Loving God Make Us Fart?” and “Borges Disappointed by the Internet,” pulpy crime novels, a trilogy of supernatural stories for young adults, a quartet of love stories set in Europe, and several books of Philippine historical fiction, take turns alongside Miguel’s musings and the italic and oneiric accounts of another narrator, who refers to Miguel as “our protagonist,” in making the book, if not what little plot the book has, thicker.

Amid such confluence of miscellaneous blocks of words and typesetting schemes, it’s easy to forget that Ilustrado starts with the promise of a plot and that it has a plot. Determined to search for TBA, Miguel returns to the Philippines—less a balikbayan than a revenant—whereupon he embarks on an investigation of Salvador’s life, not indifferent to the realization that it parallels his own more visibly the more things he finds out. Concurrent to this is the emergence of an all-too-familiar image of a country populated by politicians, prostitutes, and political prostitutes. The plot, then, with its fragmented conveyance, is a stand-in for the Filipino’s continuing identity crisis and the plight of the Philippine nation. And this roman à clef is a joke, an elaborate prank. Its delivery may falter, but the punchline is certainly a doozie, which leads to another certainty: that of the egg on our face. Yours and mine.

Italo Calvino, one of Syjuco’s literary antecedents, along with Roberto Bolaño, David Mitchell, and perhaps Vladimir Sorokin, if only for that one fellatio scene told via a queue of excited moans and grunts, held the belief that literature is “an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.” In the book’s prologue, Miguel/Syjuco writes, “this book shoulders the weighty onus of relocating a man’s lost life.” Self-reflexivity and self-consciousness once again blur the line between fact and fake. As such, Ilustrado is nicely summarized by the antimetabolic relationship between the words fiction and possibilities: The book is an example of a “fiction of possibilities, entwined with the possibilities of fiction.”

Miguel Syjuco has said that he is already hard at work on his next book, which will be a biography of a starlet. The starlet’s name? Vita Nova. Her request was granted after all. Fiction and possibilities be damned.

—
Paperback, 320 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 27 April 2010. Cover art by gray318. ISBN 9780374941031. Available at Fully Booked.

See this review on Goodreads.