A Tapestry of Tricks: Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

Story Time Asia is an ex-journo, freelance writer, and lifelong bookworm. You can find more book reviews and musings at www.storytimeasia.com.

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Ilustrado begins in New York with the apparent suicide of a gilded yet divisive figure of Philippine literature, Crispin Salvador. At the time of his death, he was writing an incendiary novel that could ruffle the feathers of powerful personalities in the Philippines. This book follows Salvador’s student, the author’s namesake, as he journeys back to his homeland to piece together the life of his mentor and finds himself in the process.

This is a book for ilustrados written by an ilustrado. In that sense, I am not part of the intended audience for this book. However, I stuck with it, if only to widen my perspective. Books are mind-broadening instruments, after all.

Ilustrado is a very accomplished book. It’s a comprehensive book that seeks to encompass the Filipino experience—political, social, historical—using various literary devices. Ambitious is the word that gets thrown around for a book of this calibre. Rightly so. Did the author manage to hit the mark of his lofty ideals? Of that, I’m not so sure.

This is a highly self-aware and self-referential book, but it is not autofiction. It is metafiction. It is clever. Too clever. And creative, postmodern books can either be immensely satisfying or a total chore. This fits squarely in the latter category for me.

I have no problem with reading unlikeable characters, but the story has to be relatable. The author knows his story does not have universal appeal, but he tries anyway—a sad childhood, a doomed relationship, an idealistic bent. All this stuffing merely bloats the story, while the collection of his mentor’s writings, interviews, polemics from his contemporaries, and a mysterious disembodied narrator interspersed throughout the novel slowly start to take shape.

The characters being denigrated or extolled are key to the conceit of this novel. Still, even upon discovering this subversion, it all feels calculated and serves to distance the author from the more contentious aspects of the book.

The conceit of this novel hinges on the reimagining of the unreliable narrator. It recontextualizes the entire story, but to me, it is just another clever distancing device—a neat little trick in a book full of tricks from an author flexing his talent. But we already have a lot of ingenious Filipinos running the country aground.

Perhaps when the kaleidoscope of tricks starts to merge and Syjuco finally finds his roots, he can stop relying on tricks and write with more sincerity.

Where ilustrado shines is in the discussions between Miguel and Crispin about the state of Philippine literature. In one of these teacher-student conversations, the author’s thesis emerges:

What is Filipino writing? Living on the margins, a bygone era, loss, exile, poor-me angst, postcolonial identity theft. Tagalog words intermittently scattered around for local color, exotically italicized. Run-on sentences and facsimiles of Magical Realism, hiding behind the disclaimer that we Pinoys were doing it years before the South Americans… León María Guerrero once told me, ‘We Filipinos owe our faults to others, but our virtues are our own.’ At first, I wasn’t sure whether he was being sincere or sarcastic. It can only be the latter. Our heartache for home is so profound we can’t get over it, even when we’re home and never left.

The decision to present the story in fragmentary pieces is akin to the thousand-island Philippines—a kaleidoscope of perspectives and lived experiences. These fragments of stories only cohere in the back half of the novel and then throws you back on a loop.

I will say this: 75% of the way through; I was ready to abandon this book. But this is one of those books that doesn’t reveal its true nature until the end, so if you’re one of those readers who tend to decide whether to finish a book based on the first 100 pages, you’d probably abandon this early on. But that would be a shame.