The illusions of Ilustrado AN OUTSIDERS VIEW Ken Fuller 07/13/2010

The illusions of Ilustrado

AN OUTSIDERS VIEW Ken Fuller 07/13/2010 Warning: If you intend reading Miguel Syjuco’s much-praised Ilustrado, winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript form, as a mystery novel (which it is not), proceed no further. A major character, a young writer, berates himself for “those damn confusing experiments with style. The thing is to write a straight narrative… Emulate A Passage to India.” This advice was, reportedly, given to Syjuco by an agent. That it was rejected may be gleaned from the fact that the character in question is called “Miguel Syjuco.” Moreover, the italicized passage is one of several which, dotted throughout the novel and often giving a slightly different version of events from that in the first-person account by “Syjuco,” seem to be written either as a commentary by Syjuco, or by an alter ego of “Syjuco.”  Although both these interpretations could be said to be true, we later learn that their author is the book’s other main character, the elderly writer Crispin Salvador, who (we think) dies before the novel opens. Ilustrado employs a variety of media (e-mails, extracts from Salvador’s published work and interviews, text messages, snatches of radio commentary), but it reminds this outsider of the films of both Hitchcock (rich in illusion) and the French New Wave (bristling with symbols and allusions). After Crispin Salvador’s body is found floating in New York’s Hudson River, his young friend and research assistant “Miguel Syjuco” finds it hard to accept that he has committed suicide. He was, after all, nearing completion of his magnum opus The Bridges Ablaze, an outpouring of bile which, he has recently told a hostile audience at the Philippine Cultural Center, will expose “our shared guilt.”.... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100713com6.html

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