67. ILUSTRADO

Miguel Syjuco 2010

It begins with the death in New York of a famous Filipino author Crispin Salvador. His student Miguel Syjuco goes home to the Philippines in search of a missing manuscript he believes will solve the mysterious death. What follows is a modern novel full of snippets of other short stories, jokes, blogs, text messages, interviews and subplots inside two main themes: a search of the author's own identity and the frustrating political history of his country. At once lyrical and edgy, philosophical and crude, a complex literary book until the end.

'When the author's life of literature and exile reaches its unscheduled terminus that anonymous February morning, he was close to completing the controversial book we'd all been waiting for.'(first line)

'Missing was the twenty years of work-- a glacial accretion on research and writing--unknotting and unraveling the generations-long ties of the Filipino elite to cronyism, illegal logging, gambling, kidnapping, corruption, along with their related component sins.'(5)

'I eavesdrop on my countrymen, on their tentative English spoken to the cabin crew, never quite perfected despite years in the West: f's still often traded for p's, vowels rounded, tenses mixed, syllables clipped...Like those phrases, we're a collection of cliches, handy types worn as uniforms over our naked individuality...Our industriousness, our inexpensiveness, two sides of our great national image. That image the tangible form of our communal desire for a better life.'(25)

'I can hear Madison now: "Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves."'(32)

'Modern Manila. She who once was the Pearl of the Orient is now a worn dowager, complete with the hump, the bunions, the memories of the Charleston stepped to the imported and flawlessly initiated melodies of King Oliver, the caked on makeup and the lipstick smeared in thick stripes beyond the thin, pursed lips...Manila has changed much since. It's changed so little. If you know where to look, this is the most exciting city in the world.(44)

'But he was one of those teachers who, by a kind of osmosis, helped you discover the quantity of areas in your life in which you are still so ignorant as not to have even considered forming a wrong opinion.'(48)

'Maybe because I was younger and post-postcolonial, I knew that even if it rotated askew, it was still one world. When a butterfly flapped its wings in Chile, a child soldier killed for the first time in Chad, a sale was made on Amazon.com, and a book arrived in two days to divulge the urgencies outside our lives.'(53)

'We the young are necessarily impatient with our elders' patience. How are they so serene when they have so much less time than we do?'(55)

'You can see in his face he is searching, hoping to dispel those things that nettle and diminish him, finding purpose in the conceit of himself as a modern-day member of the ilustrados-a potentiality owned by every expatriate today, a precedent granted by those Enlightened Ones of the late nineteenth century. Those young Filipino bodhisattvas had returned home from abroad to dedicate their perfumed bodies, mellifluous rhetoric, Latinate ideas, and tailored educations to the ultimate cause. Revolution. '(56)

'"Changing the world," he said, "is good work if you can get it. But isn't having a child a gesture of optimism in that world?'(121)

'problem with our country is we can't stand to see people succeed. there's perpetually some fault to find in others. it's quite sad. it's not just jealousy either. it's more like a way of explaining to ourselves why we're having such difficulty whilst others are attaining success. how petty is that rubbish?(125)

'Maybe maturity- he thinks- is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options in life.'(127)

'You can't trust a whiner. You can hear in their voices their hidden motives.'(147)

'I only buy books because they're a justifiable expense-- you know, acceptable retail therapy, like classical music CDs. Other girls buy shoes, I buy books. ... I don't even get to read all of them. They're more like the best interior decoration. And I love knowing they're there. Like infinite possibilities, you know?'(170)

'Good writing makes anything interesting.'(178)

'Both Madison and I were brought up as Roman Catholics. Our atheism was something we explored together. We led each other through the stubborn questions. How could there be possibly be no creator? How could our lives just stop when we die? ... We spent many evenings developing our system of belief, and the only times I ever doubted it was when I was wracked with happiness; I simply couldn't accept that there was no higher power to thank for it.'(181)

'We have to change our country by changing its representation. What is Filipino writing? Living on the margins, a bygone era, loss, exile, poor-me angst, postcolonial identity theft... Our heartache for home is so profound we can't get over it, even when we're home and never left. Our imaginations grow moss. So every Filipino novel has a scene about the glory of cooking rice, or the sensuality of tropical fruit.'(208)

'When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They're gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things among all worst things. But from that I gained a small fragment of wisdom. Purpose. Because the past will weigh a lot more once your future becomes shorter. '(209)

'Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelesness is the task of music and painting... What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience...'(227)

'And don't we spend our lives trying to please our parents, even when we're trying to stick it to them?'(241)

'The plane began its descent. He felt it in his stomach. he thought, too of how we almost always overlook these waypoints, the everyday transformations that occur between milestones, crises, epiphanies, and deaths. It went by so quickly, is what we say our youth, of our loves, of our wedding days, of the childhoods of our children, of our very lives.'(294)

'Our last moment is the string of final moments, the last look you take backward before going forward to the light: that pinprick of dawn, the horizon turning vertical, the sun and the moon in the same sky. The rhythm of a breath we've known always and the terminal sequence of heartbeats. The concave heavens and the convex earth, and in the curve between, the dangling end of a rope, the long cord of life, its loose ends frayed, its individual sinews, moments insignificant on their own, woven together, for strength.'(299)

First edition, 2010
304 pages
Book borrowed from the library