I read Ilustrado because of Jesse Eisenberg. Right around the time I was putting together my list of countries and books, there was an interview with him in the Times Book Review where he mentioned having left it on a plane the day before. I wasn't familiar with the book, so I looked it up and when I learned the author was Filipino, I added it to my list. A few months later I found a copy and last week I decided to pick it up. As has been the case with several of the countries I've read books from for this "project," Ilustrado brought to my attention how little I know about the history of the Philippines.*
There are a lot of pieces to this book -- and sometimes I wasn't at all clear how they fit in with the larger story -- but at the center is the narrator, a Filipino writer living in New York, who is writing a biography of an older Filipino writer who had also settled in New York and whose death seems unresolved. I love a literary detective story, but the thing I really liked about this book was how the narrator turns out to be a mystery himself. As you learn more and more about him over the course of the book, you're forced to go back and reassess who he is and why he's telling this story. It never quite resolves, but the story has a lovely way of unfolding.
*Also embarrassing: It took me 3 tries to spell Philippines correctly.
