Upclose Miguel Syjuco
Filipino writer and current Montreal, Canada, resident Miguel Syjuco won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for the then-unpublished manuscript of his novel, “Ilustrado.” He talks to Doretta Lau about hoaxes, life stories, silences and his writing process.
HK Magazine: You use nonfiction techniques in “Ilustrado.” It’s so successfully done that on Wikipedia, your character Crispin Salvador is labeled as a literary hoax—he seems so real. How did you go about constructing this character?
Miguel Syjuco: I got the idea to write it this way when I was doing some fact-checking in New York at The Paris Review for their “Writers at Work” series. And how we get to know a subject, say someone like Jack Kerouac for example, through all the different sources of biographical information: interviews, profiles, introductions to his work, his own work itself, etc. When I was cobbling all this together to check facts on the interviews that had been done, I thought, this is a really interesting way to construct a portrait of the artist. I mean, what could be better than getting to know the author through his own work. So I made up this Crispin Salvador who, I guess in a sense to me represents everything good and everything bad about Philippine literature, a Filipino writer. And I created his work for him. And maybe that’s why it seems real because it’s not just a book where I’m telling the reader about this character. You’re learning about the character through his work. So it’s a question of layers, I think. What is writing? Writing is how a writer reveals his own thoughts and his own struggles and his own ideas. I think that is a far more profound way to get to know somebody, than just straight biography.
HK: What was your process for assembling the book? There’s a narrative, but you had to create all the elements, all the text, all the interviews, even Salvador’s poetry. How did you go about doing that? Because, in a sense, you created two bodies of work. You created your own novel, but you had to create this archive for a whole other writer. Did you write everything that was related to him first?
MS: Yes, I did. I basically wrote his life’s work to a certain extent, sketched it out…I didn’t write entire books, but I mapped them out. And a lot of what comes out in “Ilustrado” is really only a fraction of what I’d actually written…I opened up ten Microsoft Word documents, and developed each and every single narrative on its own, knowing full well that, in the end, a lot of it would get trashed. But at least it would feel solid when I wove them together. I had the many threads I used to create the textile, to weave the pattern. So how did I do it? I just sat down and wrote.
HK: It does feel like there is so much more that we don’t get to read.
MS: Especially in a book like this, that’s told in fragments. The space between the different fragments, the silences, so to speak, are really quite important in the telling of the book. I wanted the reader to get the sense that there’s much more than what’s on the page. There’s a lot more than what’s between the covers. It’s a 320-something page novel, and I’d like the reader to feel that whole Hemingway tip of the iceberg thing…. When you cut and you lose things, the ghost of them, or the sound of what has been taken out, and inclination of what was once there, is what makes it through in the work.
“Ilustrado” is out now from Macmillan, and is available for purchase in bookstores and online.