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Title details for Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco - Available

Ilustrado

A Novel

by Miguel Syjuco
William Dufris
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 30, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400197200
      • File size: 364916 KB
      • Duration: 12:40:14

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      William Dufris performs a feat of wonder in a novel that skips swiftly from topic to topic, intertwining the life stories of Filipinos Miguel Syjuco and his mentor, famed author Crispin Salvador. Syjuco investigates Salvador's suspicious death and the disappearance of his long-awaited, unfinished, and possibly abandoned manuscript. When speaking lines from Salvador's books, journals, and letters, Dufris knows just when to lay on an overdramatic tone that is reminiscent of old-time radio announcers. For Syjuco's bitter and cynical views, he adopts a jaded tone. The listener is never confused about the source of each utterance--whether it's the biographer's notes, published novels, eavesdropped gossip, blogs, or Syjuco's personal history. Pieces of these puzzles form the author's life through literary fragments and, in addition, trace 150 years of Philippine history, contrasting the islands' ravished present with their illustrious past. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 1, 2010
      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.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 26, 2010
      Syjuco's novel investigating the mysterious death of a beloved writer is crammed full of quotations, letters, found documents, and all sorts of devices and flotsam that translates better on the page, where it can be read or skimmed, than in audio, where everything must be given equal attention. William Dufris does his best with this material, but he cannot prevent the addenda from bogging down the flow of the narrative. Dufris gamely tries to navigate his way through the thickets of Syjuco's prose, but the constant interruptions and stylistic embroidery does not lend itself to fruitful listening. A Farrar, Straus, and Giroux hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 1).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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