Ilustrado
A Novel
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Ilustrado
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Narrated by:
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William Dufris
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By:
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Miguel Syjuco
About this listen
Ilustrado opens with Crispin Salvador, lion of Philippine letters, dead in the Hudson River. His young acolyte, Miguel, sets out to investigate the author's suspicious death and the strange disappearance of an unfinished manuscript - a work that had been planned not just to return the once-great author to fame but to expose the corruption behind the rich families who have ruled the Philippines for generations.
To understand the death, Miguel scours the life, charting Salvador's trajectory via his poetry, interviews, novels, polemics, and memoirs. The literary fragments become patterns become stories become epic: a family saga of four generations tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, the Americans, and the Filipinos themselves.
Finally, we are surprised to learn that this story belongs to young Miguel as much as to his lost mentor, and we are treated to an unhindered view of a society caught between reckless decay and hopeful progress.
In the shifting terrain of this remarkably ambitious and daring first novel, Miguel Syjuco explores fatherhood, regret, revolution, and the mysteries of lives lived and abandoned.
©2010 Miguel Syjuco (P)2010 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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3 out of 5 stars
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In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox - possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Engaging story beautifully read
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The History of Love
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- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,721
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,894
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,910
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5 out of 5 stars
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Like Garcia-Marquez on Anti-Pschyotics
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Editorial reviews
After 15 Golden Earphones Awards and over 200 audiobook narrations, it's perfectly clear that William Dufris knows how to tell a tale. His primary virtue lies in an uncanny ability to transition between tones and characters within a single breath. This is no easy feat for either a voice or an attention span, and it is this unusual strength in voice work that Dufris places in the service of Miguel Syjuco's debut novel about all things Filipino.
On the surface, this is a work of fiction about a man who is writing the biography of his mentor. But the man is Syjuco himself, and therefore not all is fiction. The mentor is not a real person, but the fictions of his singular literary life are intertwined with the real history of his native land. Like all biographies, as the writing progresses, it tells at least as much about the biographer as it tells about his subject. Drifting back and forth between Manila and New York, Dufris hop-scotches from the mentor's journals to the biographer's interviews, from the mentor's book excerpts to the biographer's book notes, and from the history of a struggling nation to the contemporary troubles of a struggling biographer. Rich in family gossip and political side-stepping, the novel keeps a rare balance between education and entertainment.
As the life stories of Miguel Syjuco, Crispin Salvador, and the Philippines are revealed fragment by hard-won fragment, Dufris turns on a dime from bitterness to hilarity, from stereotype to serious humanity, from revolution to subjugation, elucidating social peculiarities and moral complexities that touch our ambivalent postcolonial nerve. The mystery plot of Crispin Salvador's death is nothing compared to the structural magic of Syjuco's novel, deftly rendered by William Dufris with all the bounce and tumble it takes to chart the feel of four generations worth of real and imagined Filipino history. Megan Volpert
Critic reviews
What listeners say about Ilustrado
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
- Robert
- 03-13-11
Challenging but interesting listen
My in-laws are Filipino, so I was looking forward to some insights on the history and culture of the Phillipines. The shifting narrative mode of the book makes the translation to audio difficult at times: a joke, a passage from a pulp novel, excerpts from a message board complete with email addresses. I ultimately enjoyed it, but it may not be for everyone.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- William A Meeks
- 11-16-10
Not what I expected but a great listen
I thought I was getting another mystery story, instead I was rewarded with a history of the Philippines and a look at a culture most Americans never study. As for the reader I listened to his reading of Cryptonomicon and find his accents interesting.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
- W.Denis
- 06-21-10
Could not continue
This book assumes an interest in all-things Filipino. I had thought it was more of a mystery story but found it hadn't started over half way through the first reel. The author feels the need to explain in great detail why the Philippeans is not Latin America.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
- vf
- 03-06-11
don't...
oh my god...long, painful, uninteresting, lifeless, soporific. really; don't do it. save your credit. save yourself.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
- Nicole
- 08-20-10
Painful
My mind kept wandering off as I listened to the boring storyline that took forever to get off the ground. And the narrator - horrible! He over-enunciates words and speaks with a nasally voice that is very irritating and distracting. Don't waste your time (or your credits) on this flop.
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