Ilustrado

Ilustrado is a novel by the Filipino writer Miguel Syjuco, published in 2010. It opens with the discovery of a body and then works backwards through the career of the man who has drowned.

Crispin Salvador was, by the time of his death, the best-known and most disputed novelist his country had produced, and he had left behind the only manuscript of a book meant to expose the crimes of the Filipino ruling families. His student Miguel, who was also his only remaining friend, goes to Manila to look for the missing pages and to work out what became of the author.

What Miguel assembles is a portrait built out of the evidence Salvador left: his poetry, his interviews, his novels, his polemics and his memoirs. From those fragments the novel reconstructs four generations of a family and 150 years of Philippine history under Spanish, American and Filipino rule, and by the end it is clear that the story being told belongs to the younger man as much as to the mentor he has lost.