Climbing the Literary Ladder Backward

An author had to win a major award to stanch the flow of rejection slips

After being rejected by dozens of agents and publishers, Miguel Syjuco, 33, is emerging as one of this year’s most surprising literary Cinderella stories.

Miguel Syjuco, pictured in Montreal, strayed from his family’s path.

His novel, “Ilustrado,” a postmodern mystery set in New York and the Philippines, won the prestigious Man Asian literary prize two years ago, when it was still a manuscript with no publisher attached. Farrar, Straus & Giroux snapped it up shortly after. Now “Ilustrado,” which came out in the U.S. last week, is being translated into 13 languages and published in 18 countries.

“Ilustrado” begins with the body of Crispin Salvador, a famous Filipino novelist, floating in the Hudson River. His protégé, an aspiring writer named Miguel Syjuco, believes he was murdered, and sets out to solve the crime and find Mr. Salvador’s unfinished manuscript. The narrative weaves together fragments from Mr. Salvador’s novels and Miguel’s biography-in-progress about the author. The first-person chapters cover Miguel’s failed romance, his struggles to get published and his complicated relationship with his relatives and homeland.

Like his protagonist, Mr. Syjuco comes from a prominent Filipino family and faced pressure to go into politics. He has also struggled to appeal to both Western and Filipino audiences, a dilemma addressed in his novel.

“Ilustrado” takes its title from a Spanish phrase used to describe Filipino intellectuals who pushed for political reform during the 19th-century Spanish colonial era. Mr. Syjuco says he lobbied to get the novel published in the Philippines first, ahead of the May general elections, because he hopes its discussion of political corruption will spur debate. The Philippines edition, which was written and published in English, came out in April.

Few Filipino novelists have developed an international following (Jessica Hagedorn, author of “Dogeaters,” a gritty portrait of a handful of characters under Ferdinand Marcos’s rule, ranks among the most well known in the U.S.), and the literary scene there is anemic compared with the country’s vibrant film industry. But in the last few years, Filipino authors have started to gain international recognition. Many Filipino novelists write in English—a legacy of the long American presence there. Several have been boosted by the Man Asian prize, which was first awarded in 2007. Filipino authors accounted for five of the 24 finalists on the 2009 long list, following India as the most represented country, and Manila native Eric Gamalinda was short-listed last year for his novel “The Descartes of the Highlands.”

One of six children, Mr. Syjuco was born in Manila in 1976. His family fled to Vancouver, British Columbia, a year later to escape Mr. Marcos’s martial law. When he was 11, his family returned to the southern city of Cebu, where they owned a bottling plant.

Mr. Syjuco says he was expected to go into business or politics (his father, Augusto Syjuco, served as a cabinet member under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and his mother, Judy Syjuco, is a member of Congress). Much to his parents’ disappointment, he flunked out of his economics classes and majored in English.

He took odd jobs to make ends meet after receiving his master’s degree in creative writing at Columbia University in 2005. He bought designer purses for $10 at sample sales and sold them on eBay for $100, rented himself out as a medical guinea pig in psychological experiments, tended bar, painted apartments and worked as an assistant bookie at horse tracks in Adelaide, Australia. He wrote fiction in his free time, and gathered a stack of rejection slips from agents and literary magazines. “Ilustrado” was rejected by every one—one agent advised Mr. Syjuco to read E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” and try again.

All the while, he kept in touch with his mother and siblings but was estranged from his father for a time. “We didn’t talk for several years,” Mr. Syjuco says.

After winning the Man Asian prize, Mr. Syjuco signed with U.K. agent Peter Straus and U.S. literary agent Melanie Jackson, who represents Thomas Pynchon and Rick Moody. He sold his novel to FSG for an undisclosed sum as part of a two-book deal. Mr. Syjuco went through extensive rewrites with his editor, Eric Chinski, streamlining the plot and making it more chronological. He has patched things up with his family, he says.

His next novel, which touches on politics, is written as a celebrity memoir. Celebrity worship in the Philippines is “even more extreme” than in the West, Mr. Syjuco says. “One of the truisms there is if you want to get into politics, first get into entertainment.”

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703866704575224083541325948.html

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See also:

‘Ilustrado’

Prologue

The Panther lurks no longer in foreign shadows—he’s come home to rest. Crispin Salvador’s fitting epitaph, by his request, is merely his name.

—from an unattributed obituary, The Philippine Sun, February 12, 2002

When the author’s life of literature and exile reached its unscheduled terminus that anonymous February morning, he was close to completing the controversial book we’d all been waiting for.

His body, floating in the Hudson, had been hooked by a Chinese fisherman. His arms, battered, open to a virginal dawn: Christlike, one blog back home reported, sarcastically. Ratty-banded briefs and Ermenegildo Zegna trousers were pulled around his ankles. Both shoes lost. A crown of blood embellished the high forehead smashed by crowbar or dock pile or chunk of frozen river.

That afternoon, as if in a dream, I stood in the brittle cold, outside the yellow police tape surrounding the entrance of my dead mentor’s West Village apartment. The rumors were already milling: the NYPD had found the home in disarray; plainclothes detectives filled many evidence bags with strange items; neighbors reported having heard shouts into the night; the old lady next door said her cat had refused to come out from under the bed. The cat, she emphasized, was a black one.

Investigators quickly declared there was no evidence of foul play. You may recall seeing the case in the news, though the coverage was short-lived in the months following September 11, 2001. Only much later, during lulls in the news cycle, was Salvador mentioned at any length in the Western media—a short feature in the arts section of The New York Times , a piece in Le Monde on anticolonial expatriates who lived in Paris, and a negligible reference at the end of a Village Voice article about famous New York suicides. After that, nothing.

At home in the Philippines, however, Salvador’s sudden silencing was immediately autopsied by both sides of the political divide. Both The Philippine Gazette and the Sun traded blows with Salvador’s own Manila Times, debating the author’s literary, and indeed social, significance to our weary country. The Times, of course, declared their dead columnist the waylaid hope of a culture’s literary renaissance. The Gazette argued that Salvador was not “an authentic Filipino writer,” because he wrote mostly in English and was not “browned by the same sun as the masses.” The Sun said Salvador was too middling to merit murder. Suicide, each of the three papers concluded, was a fitting resolution.

When news emerged of the missing manuscript, every side discarded any remaining equipoise. The legend of the unfinished book had persisted for over two decades, and its loss reverberated more than its author’s death. Online, the blogosphere grew gleeful with conjecture as to its whereabouts. The literati, the career journalists foremost among them, abandoned all objectivity. Many doubted the manuscript’s existence in the first place. The few who believed it was real dismissed it as both a social and personal poison. Almost everyone agreed that it was tied to Crispin’s fate. And so, each trivial tidbit dredged up during the death investigation took on significance.

Gossip cycloned among the writing community that Salvador’s pipe was found by the police, its contents still smoking. A rumor circulated that he long ago fathered and abandoned a child, and he’d been maddened by a lifetime of guilt. One reputable blog, in an entry titled “Anus Horribilis,” claimed extra-virgin olive oil was found leaking out of the corpse’s rectum. Another blog surmised that Salvador was not dead at all: “Dead or alive,” wrote Plaridel3000, “who would know the difference?” None among Salvador’s colleagues and acquaintances— he had real no friends—questioned the suicide verdict.

After two weeks of conjecture, everyone was happy to forget the whole thing.

I was unconvinced. No one knew what I knew. His great comeback was scuppered; the masterpiece that would return him to the pantheon was bafflingly misplaced and the dead weight of controversy buried in his casket. The only remaining certainty was the ritual clutter inherited by those left behind—files to be boxed, boxes to be filled, a life’s worth of stuff not intended as rubbish to be thrown out for Monday morning pickup. I just about ransacked his apartment searching for the manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze. I knew it was real. I had witnessed him typing away at it at his desk.

He had spoken of it, puckishly, on many occasions. “The reason for my long exile is so that I could be free to write TBA,” Salvador had said, that first time, spitting out the bones of chicken feet we were eating in a subterranean Mott Street restaurant. “Don’t you think there are things that need to be finally said? I want to lift the veil that conceals the evil. Expose them on the steps of the temple. Truly, all those responsible. The pork-barrel trad-pols. The air-conditioned Forbes Park aristocracy. The aspirational kleptocrats who forget their origins. The bishopricks and their canting church. Even you and me. Let’s all eat that cake.” But what remained of the manuscript was only crumbs: the title page and a couple of loose leaves scrawled with bullet points, found sandwiched and forgotten in his disintegrating Roget’s Thesaurus. Missing was twenty years of work—a glacial accretion of 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. “All of humanity’s crimes,” Salvador said, spitting a bone atop the pyramidal pile in his bowl, “are only degrees of theft.”

I, of course, believe the conspicuous lack of clues is stranger than the disarray of the domestic scene from which he was mysteriously absented. Ockham’s razor is chipped. Every bone in my body recoils at the notion Salvador killed himself. Walking through his apartment afterward, I saw his viridian Underwood typewriter loaded, cocked, and ready with a fresh blank page; the objects on his desk arranged in anticipation of writing. How could he have brought himself to the river without passing his conscience reflected in that Venetian mirror in the hall? He would have seen there was still so much to do.

To end his own life, Salvador was neither courageous nor cowardly enough. The only explanation is that the Panther of Philippine Letters was murdered in midpounce. But no bloody candelabrum has been found. Only ambiguous hints in what remains of his manuscript. Among the two pages of notes, these names: the industrialist Dingdong Changco, Jr.; the literary critic Marcel Avellaneda; the first Muslim leader of the opposition, Nuredin Bansamoro; the charismatic preacher Reverend Martin; and a certain Dulcinea.

Excerpted from Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704370704575228810015078170.html

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