Ilustrado - Softcover

Praise for "Ilustrado ""Winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript form, Ilustrado is a hip and secure first novel about the urgency of art and regret. Confident and quirky, with passages that recall early Phillip Roth and a structure not unlike the best M. Night Shyamalan films, the book actively seeks to provoke its audience with bathroom humor and sexist stabs at superficial melodrama. Such scenes are bookended by passages of profundity that somehow manage to always say something about life as well as literature." --Roberto Ontiveros, "The Dallas Morning News ""Ambitious . . . In a daring literary performance, Syjuco weaves the invented with the factual . . . "Ilustrado" is being presented as a tracing of 150 years of Philippine history, but it's considerably more than that . . . Spiced with surprises and leavened with uproariously funny moments, it is punctuated with serious philosophical musings." --Raymond Bonner, "The New York Times Book Review ""A dazzling and virtuosic adventure in reading . . . The narrative is organised with immense confidence and skill . . . The author's post-modernist bag of tricks also contains a whip-crack narrative skill that's as reminiscent of Dickens as it is of Roberto Bolano . . . There's a capaciousness that makes the book richly attractive to wander into . . . [This] novel . . . fizzes with the effervescence a large book can have when its author is in total control of the material. This isn't a story; it's the unfolding of an entire world, a mirror-land that seems familiar but is always ineffably strange . . . Syjuco is a writer already touched by greatness . . . This is a remarkably impressive and utterly persuasive novel. Its author . . . may one day succeed with the Nobel committee."--Joseph O'Connor, "The Guardian ""An exuberant, complex, and fascinating ride through 150 years of Philippine history . . . Syjuco's writing is playful, smart, and confident . . . Ans

`A dazzling and virtuosic adventure' Joseph O'Connor, author of Star of the Sea Internationally Bestselling Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008 `With Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco obliges us to remake the canons of our great classics of contemporary literature. Ilustrado is, literally, a masterpiece' Alberto Manguel It begins with a body. One anonymous winter day, the corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from the Hudson River. Gone is the controversial giant of Asian literature. And missing is the only manuscript of his final book, an expose of the corrupt roots of the ruling Filipino families, meant to restore his once dazzling reputation. His student, Miguel, is suspicious of the suicide verdict. He investigates: first sifting through the dead man's work for clues, then journeying from New York to Manila, seeking out family, colleagues, and anyone who might hold pieces of the puzzle. But when Miguel assembles the fragments of his mentor's past, this ambitious and rewarding novel expands into far wider contexts - political, social, historical, literary. As patterns emerge, the mystery of a death deepens into the greater mysteries of life - and the reader makes increasingly significant discoveries of their own, until the startling revelation of the final page. `A big, bold, cunning, impassioned, plangent and very funny book' Scotsman `Bristling with comic verve, metafictional playfulness, and an undertone of expatriate nostalgia . . . an impressive, vibrant mix of Borgesian literary labyrinth and acerbic emigre comedy' Sunday Times `A seethingly ambitious debut . . . US critics have cited Bolano as an obvious comparison; others may think of Midnight's Children-era Rushdie' Independent