Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco
Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco
List: $20.99 | Sale: $14.70
Club: $10.49

Ilustrado
A Novel

Author: Miguel Syjuco

Narrator: William Dufris

Unabridged: 12 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/30/2010


Synopsis

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.

About Miguel Syjuco

Miguel Syjuco received the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the Philippines' highest literary honor, the Palanca Award, for the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado. Born and raised in Manila, he currently lives in Montreal.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Aldrin on August 05, 2017

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......more

Goodreads review by kwesi 章英狮 on May 08, 2011

I don't know why I have to suffer from reading this book, it has a slow beginning, unpredictable ending and added with hifalutin words that can bleed your nose until the last word Syjuco wrote. It was a nice book, unfortunately, for me it was like another Filipino book that serves to criticize what......more

Goodreads review by David on April 14, 2016

A competent piece of work but not really more than this. The book had a few problems ~ Stylistically flat. In literary fiction there is an expectation of eloquence...this book approaches this but does not quite make it. ~ Characters are not compelling and/or believable. ~ The variety of source materia......more

Goodreads review by Paul on August 16, 2023

His autobiography read so much like a who’s who of artistic and political icons that readers wondered whether it was fiction. Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco was the 2008 winner of the shortlived Man Asian Literary Prize, which from 2007 to 2012 was given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either writ......more