Ilustrado

It begins with a body -- that of seminal Philippine writer Crispin Salvador floating in the Hudson. Ilustrado follows Salvador's protege (seemingly sharing a name with our author) in his investigation into Salvador's death (surely, his mentor couldn't have killed himself, our protagonist thinks). Syjuco interweaves that plotline with our protagonist's reminisces from childhood, interviews and essays by Salvador, Salvador's various fictions, daydreams of our narrator, and running Filipino jokes on an everyman from a particular background.

It's tough for me to square how I feel about this one -- it's an enjoyable, engaging novel, but at any point did I feel "I'm glad I read this" or "I can't wait to recommend this to someone", and I'm not quite sure that I did. Why did I feel that way? Was it that the mystery didn't quite grab me, but I didn't feel pulled into madness or confusion the way I often am with similar works? Was it that all the Filipino cultural references went over my head? Was it that the protagonist progressed to someone I had difficulty relating to? There's only so many characters with a bit of a drug habit I can stomach before I get bored.

So, yes, this is something I consider worth reading, but I don't know if it's something I'll ever come back to, or say "Hey, you should really check out Ilustrado!" I will give Syjuco points for a few gratuitous Borges references, particularly a book one character finds towards the denouement.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was apparently partially inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which contains a series of first chapters of novels, all truncated at a cliffhanger. Mitchell takes this device but modifies it, so while there are six separate tales in Cloud Atlas, each has an ending, but also links to the other stories (novellas?). The linked palindromic structure is unique, but it works, particularly because each segment has a different style, which Mitchell segues between effortlessly. His skill here prevents each tale from reading as a pastiche, although the styles are identifiable.

The six tales are, in order: the journal of an American functionary on a voyage in the South Pacific (ca. 1850), the letters of a debauched and disinherited English composer (1931), the travails of a plucky female reporter working to uncover a corporate scandal, written in the form of an airport thriller (ca. 1975), the memoirs of an aging and broke English publisher (ca. today), the interrogation of a clone in a dystopic future Korea (ca. who knows), and a tale around a campfire of a tribesman's life in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

While the tales (often frustratingly) fail to gel entirely into a cohesive whole, this is one of the techniques that makes the novel work, as it prevents Mitchell from getting bogged down in explaining why or how this happened to Korea, to Hawaii, or exactly what Ewing was doing in the South Pacific, or how reliable of a narrator Frobisher is. This allows him to focus on the characters and the tale at hand, rather than spending too much time setting the scene, which is a hallmark of subpar science fiction.

For such an oddly structured novel, Cloud Atlas is a surprisingly easy read -- the only section that gave me difficult was the central section ("Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After"), as dialect with liberal usage of apostrophes and colloquialisms tends to make my eyes glaze over and my brain skip past sentences, much like the titular clouds. (Thankfully, the characters don't spend a significant fraction of their time watching the sky and engaging in pareidolia. Symbolism used is more subtle.) An absolutely worthwhile book.