Arts and Books, Headlines

Miguel Syjuco’s long literary love affair

BY Ruel S. De Vera

March 27, 2022
7:18 pm

In 2008, Miguel “Chuck” Syjuco won the Grand Prize for the Novel in the Carlos Palanca Memoral Awards for Literature with “Ilustrado,” a literal literary murder mystery where the body of an iconic Filipino writer is found floating in the Hudson River with his manuscript, allegedly set to reveal the dirty secrets of many powerful Filipino families, missing. That writer’s follower, also named Miguel, must solve the mystery by journeying through the dead man’s papers, an investigation that spans colonial Philippine history.

In 2010, “Ilustrado” was published by prestigious New York house Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (FSG) to much acclaim, winning the 2008 Man Asian Literary Award, among many other honors, and even cited as a New York Times Notable Book of 2010, aside from being translated into 16 languages. Readers understandably eagerly awaited his next novel. They would have to wait a bit.

Did he feel any pressure following up such a successful debut? “Writing ‘Ilustrado’ had answered some of my questions of craft, but it led me to questions of purpose—because I don’t care about praise or prizes, likes or followers; I just want to grow as a more purposeful human being. And writing, and reading, are purposeful acts, both hopeful,” he told Lifestyle.

“Yet the question nags: What can a novel mean to our troubled world? Only in attempting to answer that comes the pressure.”

Finally, after 12 years, the 45-year-old Syjuco’s second novel, “I Was the President’s Mistress!!” (“IWTPM!!” for short), also from FSG, is coming out. It is as crazy and as irresistible as the title suggests.

The book is Syjuco’s new novel, yes, but it purports to be a celebrity tell-all by Vita Nova, the titular mistress, “with Miguel Syjuco,” and yet it is presented as a set of transcripts of leaked recordings—inaudible words and loud noises intact—after a bombing.

The (fictional) publisher’s note reads: “It is our responsibility to publish these materials unabridged. It is yours to make sense of them.”

The novel has 13 distinct characters, each with a distinct voice. Syjuco doesn’t break character/s, not once. It is an infectious satire of Philippine politics and society, with sex scandals, assassination attempts, romance and decay, that is also frightening because, despite how ludicrous it might sound, it also feels so close to reality. After all, Syjuco has been an open-throated if erudite critic of the current administration: “As a private citizen criticizing our public officials, I’ve endured onslaughts of trolls, death threats, mocking memes and even attacks on people I just happen to be related to. You can imagine the blowback this novel will receive—even though the worst thing the trolls can do is ignore it, since every attack will only sell me more books.”

But this is profanely funny (it opens with Nova describing President Fernando V. Estregan’s penis), extremely busy and, in many ways, more reflective of Syjuco’s style than “Ilustrado.” It takes narrative guts, real outrage and sense of design to pull this off. If his first novel felt like Syjuco was still tiptoeing around the conventions of the form, “IWTPM!!” feels like him just gloriously, fiercely letting loose. For all that, “IWTPM!!” is more polarizing, more powerful and better than “Ilustrado.”

One can thus only hope readers will not have to wait as long for a third novel. After all, he is also assistant professor of Practice, Literature, and Creative Writing at New York University Abu Dhabi. “That’s just a detail more minor than my being a writer,” he says. “If I don’t consider myself first and foremost a writer, I tend to forget it myself, get distracted, and next thing I know 12 years have passed between books. Obviously.”

Lifestyle interviewed Syjuco by email. Here are excerpts:

You waited 12 years to follow your award-winning debut. Why so long?

Because I had to learn how to write “IWTPM!!” A book may be a product, but its writing is a process—of time, mistakes, growth, evolving skills, shifting ideas, and its narrative as a theory of both the novel form and the world this one portrays.

That’s what a novel represents: the clutchable proof of an intangible process, which readers can now scrutinize and make their own—returning to the real world hopefully changed. That’s the writer’s moonshot.

For apprentice novelists, the proverbial advice is “write what you know”—because learning to write is hard enough. Thus, many first novels are semiautobiographical, because we humans know nothing better than our own hopes and traumas. But after that, we must develop our craft by writing what we want to know. Plus, writing isn’t just expression, it’s problem-solving—as anyone who’s ever revised their work can tell you.

So, there was much about life that I wanted to learn, many technical problems of craft that I sought to solve. My schooling: multitudinous revisions, solitude, company, conversations, heartbreak, heart breaking, regret, distance, presence, violence and, most of all, anger over our leaders’ plunderous impunity (of even the words in their speeches and the facts of our history).

I needed to study what a person with a pen could do—from an iconic novel that helped inspire a revolution to the journalists at Rappler now holding the line. For me, such lessons haven’t ended with the publication of this new book; I’m simply turning the page. Twelve years is just one chapter in a life.

‘Ilustrado’ was undeniably a roman a clef. But you have insisted this book is no such thing, that it is satirical fiction. Are you sticking to that story, all evidence to the contrary?

Because “IWTPM!!” is entirely, totally, absolutely a work of fiction. It’s a novel: undisguised artifice, asserting no facts. But if readers glean truths among it, that only speaks to their agency, shared experience and potential of their imaginations—and confirms the potency of literature in reflecting life’s larger verities.

This is vital, for we are now in a crisis, the most important issue of our era—because from it we choose our leaders and humanity’s response to urgencies like war, deadly viruses and climate change. Facts and truth—and our freedom to guard, seek and speak out for them—are being manipulated to skew the meaning of history, to control us, all for the benefit of those hungry for power.

We regular, private citizens must wrest those weapons back, to learn and use them against our officials in charge of our public fate.

Fact, from the Latin factum, means an act done; truth, from the Old English treowth, means faithfulness or constancy. Truth is based on facts; facts form truths. Journalists seek to gather facts as empirical evidence of what happened; columnists, novelists and artists seek to connect those facts to what they mean writ large.

For example, it’s indisputable fact that Ferdinand Marcos and his family plundered the country of billions of dollars, destroyed our economy, suspended democracy, quashed free speech, killed thousands and imprisoned tens of thousands more before fleeing in ignominy. Those are facts—acts done—reflected empirically in GDP (gross domestic product) figures, public records, verifiable historical evidence, court findings and graves or direct testimonies of victims.

All of which lead us to the larger truth that the dictator was no hero, that the Marcoses were not good for the Philippines, and that we were not on our way to being the next Singapore when they were ousted.

Despite their paid minions and hoodwinked supporters now multiplying their Big Lie, the facts still lead us to the truth.

In a world where power grabbers thrive on making and manipulating falsities, the truths found in a book of fiction can play a vital role in challenging us to see, and decide, what’s important in our lives, and how we’ll stand to defend it.

My book possesses not the ballast of factuality, but as fiction it’s rooted in the truths of actuality. It’s to those, I believe, that readers will respond.

‘Ilustrado’ was a fairly conventional novel in its construction. This book is not. Why choose this structure?

Because the novel as a literary form has always sought newness—what is, literally, novel. That’s simply art’s raison d’etre—to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound implored, and Jose Garcia Villa did. New ways of seeing, feeling, reading, thinking, discoursing.

But what is newness today? Can anything be new? The answer, I think, can be found by going back to the things themselves: the roots of the novel form, when it was as novel as “Don Quixote,” or “Clarissa,” or “Hay ibn Yaqzan,” or “The Tale of Genji,” or “Noli Me Tangere”—particularly in Jose Rizal’s theory that narrative storytelling is an essential Filipino tool for representation, education, public discourse and action.

As a reader, my abiding frustration with the contemporary literary novel is that it’s too often become a product, wallowing in safe variations that rely on emotional resonance, rendered in the celebrated but poetically glib language of literary fiction—the stuff of too many creative writing workshops (which I wrote a lot of, as well)—as if the revolutions of the “nouveau roman” movement have nothing to teach us today.

So, as a novelist, searching for newness, I’m inspired by arts like haute cuisine or music, which have experimented with certain methods so long now they seem clichéd.

“IWTPM!!” attempts a similar deconstruction: the component parts of a ghost-written celebrity tell-all memoir, so that the reader experiences the familiar in an unfamiliar way, requiring you to assemble the book yourself, to be complicit. For only when literature becomes yours, as the reader, can it be made new.

I feel this novel is more conventional than “Ilustrado’s” fragmentary structure, which was intended as a deliberately unfamiliar way of reading, to involve the reader in piecing together the puzzle, even though its ideas—as a bildungsroman, a picaresque, a meditation on the self and the potential of literature—were more straightforward.

But “IWTPM!!” is “Ilustrado’s” inverse, playing with familiar narrative conventions of celeb interviews, tell-all memoirs, romance novels, epistolaries, talking-head punditry, and rambling TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) socmed oversharing; but its ideas—its philosophical questions about truth, its political polemicism, its challenge to us to consider our potential role in society—are less straightforward.

Each of my novels sought, in different ways, that same balance that’s necessary to both challenge and engage a reader. At least that’s my theory; it’s now up to the reader now to test it.

The title refers to Vita Nova, who goes through so much, but is also a bit much herself. Why choose to write the book with her at its heart?

I believe it’s not just the novelist’s role but our responsibility to inhabit all manner of characters—to widen both our understanding of craft and of humanity.

In “Ilustrado”—a book about a young man’s search for meaning (with all his limitations and blind spots)—Vita was the most misunderstood and maligned character, relegated to the background, rendered only through the gossip and condemnation of others. I wanted to make up for that.

But as I tried to create a female protagonist as responsibly as I could, I found myself ever limited and blinded by my gaze as a male writer. And because writing is problem-solving, I posited two solutions.

First, I’d let Vita teach me all I had to still learn, from which I’m learning still. Second, I’d explore, expose and critique the inequities of power in our very machismo society that had so privileged my perception.

And that’s why “IWTPM!!” is a book about perception, in which Vita is both bida and contrabida, heroine and villain, depending on who is looking, who is speaking, and which mask she must use in our world that forces masks upon someone like her.

As our protagonist, she is as informed by my gaze as she is everyone else’s—including yours. Yet there is clearly so much more to her that neither you nor I can ever know. To me, that space is exactly where her character comes to life.

Alright, I have to ask, what is up with the two exclamation points in the title?

Ask Vita; it’s her title. As she said: One is too few; three would be too many. Besides, haven’t you ever come to use two exclamation points? Of course, you have!!

It is admittedly a bit challenging to dive into this world at the beginning of the book because of the format, but the world you’re building is eerily familiar (yes, we’re going there again). But then, midway through the book, all the way to the last entry, ‘IWTPM!!’ plummets to its ending. Was that always the plan or did it emerge organically?

Yes. And yes. Because a lot can happen over 14 years. Plans, like people, change. The person I was when I began writing this book was entirely different from the person I am now. My original plan was to write something easier for readers than “Ilustrado,” because I always felt bad for those who felt left behind—even though some blamed me for it, as if I’m here to pander or entertain.

But I’m not some blogger slash “influencer” oversimplifying the world and appealing to emotions; I can’t help but love big, challenging, lasting works of literature that confront you on almost every level—because that’s what art’s supposed to do. So, I challenged myself to try to write such a book, but coating it in sex and sugar, and making it fun and funny, with the promise at the end of the satisfying click in place of the last puzzle piece.

I do like how you use the word “plummets” to describe the downward slope readers expect from a narrative arc—because this book is a leap of faith, which I hope they’ll take. I’ve often thought, often hoped, that falling feels like flying.

Tellingly, the book has a very extensive Content Warning page that, to me, is crucial to the plot. Please just tell me if I’m reading too much into this.

I believe that every word, blank space and punctuation mark in this book is crucial—I’ve meant it that way. But the Content Warning is, indeed, significant. Because don’t we all appreciate a warning shout before the rope snaps on the piano dangling over our heads? And as in most things in life (dating, Scrabble, first day of school, leaping over a crevasse), it’s always ideal to get off on the right foot.

Trigger warnings are how we accommodate the more vulnerable among us, to help care about their traumas and sense of safety and self. But in a book that confronts the friction between our constitutional freedom of speech and our outdated criminalized libel laws (so oft weaponized by the powerful seeking control of what we can say, and therefore think), the Content Warning serves as either disclaimer or promise—a warning or a vow. And the reader, as I’ve said before, must have the agency to decide which.

What is next for you? Are you working on anything right now?

Yes. On my sanity. And also on my next books: initially, a little break, via a more straightforward historical fiction about the first clash between us Filipinos, the Chinese and the West (as relevant today as it was to the 1500s); and, eventually, the final novel in my Manila Trilogy, in which “Ilustrado” is about the past, “IWTPM!!” the present, and that third book the future most dire.