More or Less Enlightened

It’s been the new buzz novel. It’s all over the bookstore window-displays and it’s selling like pancakes. It’s been heralded, awarded the Asian Man Literary Prize before it was published, and flanked with the expected accolades. The publishers even decided to release it in time for the May 2010 elections as a cheap marketing tactic under the guise of helping the voting public become "enlightened."


Not to mention how it’s so cool, you want to be seen reading it, preferably in an overpriced, overrated place like Red Mango or Golden Spoon where a paper-bowl of frozen yogurt is within your easy reach.

Now, the novel possesses that character. It tempts you into finding something flawed with how it was executed or fallacious with how its logic was formed. I tried, and while its imperfections are not so endearing, this local read made a significant leap. It’s the kind of novel that leaves an indelible imprint in your mind. I would have paid more than PHP 298, if not for the poor binding as my copy started to have its pages lose and unglued.

The narrative approach and the ambitiousness reminded me so much of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). Only, Junot Diaz was more subtle in his transition from a third person to a first person narrative somewhere in the middle of the novel. Now that’s an unimposing technique with a lofty goal that’s surgically and stylishly achieved. Miguel Syjuco seemed to have gone firing away with all the styles he learned in Ateneo and Columbia: he had everything from blogs, poetry, excerpts from a novel-within-a-novel, fictitious newspaper clips, aphorisms, first person narration, and third person narration all in one broth less a cohesive balance. It’s a heavily spiced dish that doesn’t seem to want you to get bored. The novel had grandiose dreams, and it thrown a lot of ammunition, weapons of mass destruction if may - to hit the target.

The novel succeeded in keeping me from getting bored – especially with the serialized ice breakers of Erning Isip to Boy Bastos. It’s a good development in a story, humorously stereotyping what happens to our culture once it’s homogenized into American culture.

As I leisure my way into so many of the writing styles, I pause to cherish some of the most tasteful phrase formations: toothlessness of exile, mellifluous rhetoric, the pawn making a final sprint to queenhood, having a child as a grand gesture of optimism in this world. I repeatedly read some portions of this book because it sounded so good and it was so cerebrally delicious:

“In those years, young Salvador witnessed the benefits that his father’s position in the collaborationist government provided their family, and he experienced and swallowed, for the first time in his life, the alluring palatability of necessary hypocrisies." P.149

The most moving piece was on the character Mutya Dimatahimik’s story on p.204. During a Marcos-era protest demonstration, a poet, who was five months pregnant, lies in front of an advancing tank. In the page after he went on about Seamus Heaney’s “No lyric has ever stopped a tank” and ranks that act alongside the efficacy of literature or poetry. Perhaps I was touched that deeply because D. was in her third trimester of pregnancy when I read the book back in May.

Miguel Syjuco writes with an impressive versatility and authenticity. The dialogues sounded real and unpretentious as though he had the inside scoop. The cono kids really sounded like cono kids who went to Pravda, talking like “Dude, you have?” You knew this author was for real right from page 1, when he chose to have the character wear Ermendegildo Zegna trousers and you easily surmise that he’s wearing a pair, himself.

The level of specificity to substantiate both characters and the advocacy was in some parts laid out nicely:

"Together, Madison and I moaned about how CNN had stopped calling it Communist China, except during negative new stories about lost American jobs or consumer safety violations."

Fearlessly and precisely, he went on to satirize the character of Filipino writers as well as the state of Filipino writing.

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, and every short story seems to end with misery or redemptive epiphanies. And variations thereof. An underlying cultural faith in Deus ex machina P. 207

He knew the traps he should avoid. He didn’t give in to, and even exposed the pretentiousness of the Philippine literati. Filipino writers always seem afraid to criticize themselves because they’re all friends, celebrating and congratulating themselves in a debt-of-gratitude, scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours culture.

These are the literati of the Philippines: the merry, mellowed stalwartly middle-class practitioners of the luxury of literature in the language of the privileged. Many of them are former Maoists. p.161

The trap he didn’t avoid, however, was the dream of having the novel become some kind of modern-day Noli Me Tangere. It appeared as though he wanted to write an expose-book that will move the nation to revolutionary progress. But while it’s a good story, he didn’t really tell us anything new to wake us up from our national amnesia.

Characters in a novel often give biased and condescending judgements that are not reflective of the author’s views. But a novel’s conscious/unconscious attempt to lean towards an agenda over the other to make it come out in a more favorable magnitude is clearly a message that an author sends out. For example, Miguel Syjuco made himself out to be a schoolist, as he champions Ateneo as some kind of elite utopia. He bashes other schools from AMA to La Salle to UP. The arrogance was an uncalled-for low-point.

I often imagine if successful writers regret some of what they have written. I play on to imagining that this writer probably regrets adding too many of his fantasy chicks in this novel to the point of sounding homophobic. More importantly, he may have left out a certain character undeveloped as though he didn’t have the ending clear in his mind.

And I’m probably wrong. Because endings are virtually non-existent in so-called postmodern novels such as Illustrado.

You just go on talking about it.