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ILUSTRADO

Name: ILUSTRADO
Author: Miguel Syjuco
ISBN: 978-0-374-17478-1

by Miguel Syjuco ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2010

First novels rarely show such reach and depth.

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An ambitious debut novel, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, introduces an author of limitless promise.

This isn’t the only recent debut that finds the author using his own name and drawing from his own life for his protagonist, but it dazzles as brightly as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The framing is simple, though nothing is clear, and everything encompassed remains open to question. It begins with the death of Crispin Salvador, a writer once revered in his native Philipines, but whose literary legacy has become far more controversial since he exiled himself to Manhattan. After the discovery of his dead body floating in the Hudson River, not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the initial report lists suicide as the cause of death, though his protégé, the student writer Miguel Syjuco, suspects murder. For more than two decades, Salvador had been working on a manuscript that was to be his life’s crowning achievement, one that would explore and illuminate the corruption and scandal at the heart of his native country for more than a century. The young narrator returns to the Manila that both writers had left, hoping to discover both the location of the manuscript and the truth about his mentor. He tells his story in both the first and third persons, mixing fictional reality with dreams and excerpts from both Salvador’s work and his own work-in-progress biography of Salvador. The novel ultimately blurs the distinctions between life and art, and between protégé and mentor, within what it calls “the ‘arbitrary scrim’ between fiction and nonfiction.” As it details generations of Filipino history through the lives of the two writers, it additionally employs techniques as contemporary as blogs and e-mail exchanges. Ultimately, the global interconnections know no boundaries: “When a butterfly flapped its wings in Chile, a child soldier killed for the first time in Chad, a sale was made on Amazon.com, and a book arrived in two days to divulge the urgencies outside our lives.”

First novels rarely show such reach and depth.

Pub Date: May 4, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-374-17478-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.