Posts tagged miguel syjuco

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. 

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When the author’s life of literature and exile reached its unscheduled terminus that anonymous February morning, he was close to completing the controversial book we’d all been waiting for.

Miguel Syjuco, from the prologue of Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

So it goes. The book I suppose you’d all been waiting for. I copied all the notes from the Ilustrado giveaway post, pasted them on the entries box over at the lists section of Random.org, removed the ones from those who are living abroad (save for the one from someone who wants to give the prize to one of her siblings here in the country) and the one from someone who said, “Not joining the draw, but I had to ‘like’ it since the covers are so pretty,” but retained the ones from those who I know already have their own copies on account of my trusting they’ll have the charity to give the prize to one of their friends if ever one of them wins, and clicked on the Randomize button.

And the winner of my extra copy of Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is whoever’s at No. 1 in the image below.

Congratulations to the winner and thanks to all who joined. :]

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is all the rage lately. So are giveaways! After buying The Dark Knight Returns, I thought I’d stay in the store for a little while longer last night and browse the non-graphic novel shelves. As a habitué of the store, I had practically memorized what books are in a particular aisle and can quickly spot the new arrivals therein—save for the shelves in the large-format section, which is home to books whose size and price more often than not keep me at bay. But for some reason I found myself taking a look at the books in said section last night and was surprised to see a copy of the Picador edition of Ilustrado (pictured right). The brilliant cover by Jon Gray, who also designed the cover of the smaller, cheaper, and more common Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition (left), a copy of which I had purchased several weeks back, caught me off guard. As much a collector of book covers as a collector of books, I bought it right there and then. Now, I have two copies of the novel, and I’m giving one of them (the smaller and cheaper one) away. Similar to the tiny set of rules I specified for my first book giveaway half a year ago, all you have to do to win is to like, reblog, or reply to this post. Also, lest I risk ponying up a ridiculous amount of money for international shipping, you need to be a resident of the Republic of the Philippines to qualify. The winner will be determined via random draw on May 30, 2010. So what are you waiting for? Hit that heart button or buzz in with your thoughts and be one step closer to being enlightened. But wait! There’s more! If you want to earn an additionally entry for the draw, just photo reply to this post with your favorite book cover design. I expect to see more works by Jon Gray and maybe a little bit of Milan Bozic, Peter Mendelsuhn, David Pearson, and Chip Kidd, but I bet I’ll be delighted at your choices all the same. Ilustrado, by the way, is Syjuco’s debut novel. He won the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Palanca Award in 2008 for the manuscript of Ilustrado. Syjuco was born in the Philippines and currently lives in Montreal. He is therefore ineligible to join this giveaway.

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is all the rage lately. So are giveaways!

After buying The Dark Knight Returns, I thought I’d stay in the store for a little while longer last night and browse the non-graphic novel shelves. As a habitué of the store, I had practically memorized what books are in a particular aisle and can quickly spot the new arrivals therein—save for the shelves in the large-format section, which is home to books whose size and price more often than not keep me at bay. But for some reason I found myself taking a look at the books in said section last night and was surprised to see a copy of the Picador edition of Ilustrado (pictured right). The brilliant cover by Jon Gray, who also designed the cover of the smaller, cheaper, and more common Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition (left), a copy of which I had purchased several weeks back, caught me off guard. As much a collector of book covers as a collector of books, I bought it right there and then.

Now, I have two copies of the novel, and I’m giving one of them (the smaller and cheaper one) away. Similar to the tiny set of rules I specified for my first book giveaway half a year ago, all you have to do to win is to like, reblog, or reply to this post. Also, lest I risk ponying up a ridiculous amount of money for international shipping, you need to be a resident of the Republic of the Philippines to qualify. The winner will be determined via random draw on May 30, 2010.

So what are you waiting for? Hit that heart button or buzz in with your thoughts and be one step closer to being enlightened.

But wait! There’s more! If you want to earn an additionally entry for the draw, just photo reply to this post with your favorite book cover design. I expect to see more works by Jon Gray and maybe a little bit of Milan Bozic, Peter Mendelsuhn, David Pearson, and Chip Kidd, but I bet I’ll be delighted at your choices all the same.

Ilustrado, by the way, is Syjuco’s debut novel. He won the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Palanca Award in 2008 for the manuscript of Ilustrado. Syjuco was born in the Philippines and currently lives in Montreal. He is therefore ineligible to join this giveaway.

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river’s murky waves. This book therefore shoulders the weighty onus of relocating a man’s lost life and explores the possible temptations that death will always present. The facts, shattered, are gathered, for your deliberation, like a broken mirror whose final piece has been forced into place.

Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

Ilustrado is the first book by a Filipino author whose name does not rhyme with Rob Long that I’ll be reading, and it’s a far, far cry from my previous, decidedly homogeneous, choices in homegrown reads. Its depth and style make for a sweeping novel that is a breath of fresh air in the often vacuous sphere of contemporary Filipino literature. I’m only past the prologue, which ends with the above-quoted paragraph, but I already dare to say so much about Syjuco’s work. While critical and popular reception is somewhat polarized, at this point I choose to maintain my faith in Syjuco, his proclivity to grandiloquence notwithstanding.

I and several online buddies (Pat, Cheska, Nash, and PJ) have agreed to read Ilustrado synchronously in hope of forming our very own Twitter book club. I have never been a member of a book club, let alone a Twitter book club, so this should be quite interesting, not to mention exciting as we are still figuring out how to properly hold reading discussions on a microblogging platform. I guess we’ll just have to work the kinks out as we go along, 140 characters or less at a time.

Meanwhile, en route to Pangasinan, I have on my lap another Filipino-authored novel. A much shorter one but no less intriguing, it’s just what I need for an interprovincial bus ride. It’s called Roles, and it’s written by a guy who goes by the very Filipino name of Siege Malvar.