In Miguel Syjuco’s first novel, Ilustrado, a Filipino writer named Crispin Salvador describes in a fictional interview with The Paris Review how hard it is to capture Manila on the page:
It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that? If one writes about its tropical logic, its familial loyalties, its bitter aftertaste of Spanish colonialism, readers wonder: Is this a Magical Realist? So one writes of the gilded oligarchs and the reporters with open hands and the underpaid officers in military fatigues, the authority of money and press badges and rifles distinguishing them as neither good nor bad, only unsatiated and dangerous. And readers wonder: Is this Africa? How do we fly from someone else’s pigeonhole?
Salvador’s solution was to write across genres: literary fiction, memoir, noir. Ilustrado wove invented excerpts from his work into the quest of the narrator, a Filipino writer also named Miguel Syjuco, to find Salvador’s final, missing manuscript after his mysterious death. The book announced Syjuco as a writer intrigued by the political potential of the novel, who was exploring how the many facets of Philippine life could be re-created in myriad literary forms.
Syjuco’s latest novel, I Was the President’s Mistress!!, offers readers a new variation on similar themes. It’s a more ambitious book than Ilustrado, looking outward rather than inward, and thrumming with outrage at the chaos that passes for politics in the Philippines. What stops the novel from veering into polemic is its tone. Syjuco is funny, even as his writing is underpinned by pathos.
The novel’s plot revolves around Vita Nova, a singer, actress, seductress, and the mistress of the title. The book purports to be her memoir, ghostwritten by Syjuco himself. As it opens, President Fernando V. Estregan, who shares a backstory with one real Philippine president (Joseph Estrada, the actor turned politician who was forced to step down in 2001) and the foul mouth and obsessions of another (Rodrigo Duterte, whose bloody six-year presidency ended this year), is being impeached after Vita leaks damning audio recordings of him and his inner circle. The impeachment turns into a snap election, and Vita decides to run. Her qualifications? “I got more social media followers than [Fernando] got votes last election,” she declares. Scandal, assassination, and murder ensue. The turmoil ratchets up the jockeying and betrayals among the country’s elite. Vita’s advantage is having slept with all of them. She turns being a mistress into a position of power: Watching from the shadows, she’s seen these men for who they really are.
