I Was the President's Mistress!!
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Brilliant . . . Miguel Syjuco is his country’s most original and unflinching literary voice.” —Salman Rushdie
"It’s a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author’s reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you . . . [A] raging protest of a book.” —James Lasdun, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
From Miguel Syjuco, the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize for Ilustrado, I Was the President's Mistress!! is an unflinching satire about power, corruption, sex, and all the other topics you were told never to discuss in polite company.
First came the Sexy-Sexygate scandal. Then an impeachment trial. Finally, a battle royale for the presidency. At the center of this political typhoon is Vita Nova, the most famous movie star in the Philippines and a former paramour of the country’s most powerful man. Now, for the first time ever, she bares herself completely in a tell-all memoir that puts the sensational in sensationalistic.
The setting: a sweating, heaving country. The time: right now. The plot: a drug war rages, an assassin brandishes a pistol, a damsel rises from ashes to power, and a government teeters on the brink. Among the players: a dreamer who boxed and acted his way to the presidency, his Koran-toting nemesis in the senate, a horny bishop, a cowboy turned warlord, a poor little rich boy dying with his dynasty, a washed-up reporter redeemed by one last scoop, a high-school sweetheart driven mad by decades of disappointment, and an American naval officer tempting our heroine with a way out. As Vita warns, viewer discretion is advised.
In this masterful and audacious novel, Miguel Syjuco’s signature style—hilarious, insightful, playful, provocative—animates thirteen indelible voices whose stories present a cross-section of a complicated society. I Was the President’s Mistress!! hurtles headlong into love, politics, faith, history, memory, and the ongoing war over who will tell the stories the world shall know as truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Syjuco (Ilustrado) structures his rambunctious, uninhibited satire as a series of recorded interviews by a journalist attempting to write the life story of a Filipino movie star who gets tied up in politics and scandals. Vita Nova was a mistress of the country's conservative president, who is now under threat of impeachment. The novel alternates between long, chatty interviews with Vita, recorded over the course of several months during which her position in the complicated network of political power in Manila evolves to being tapped by a liberal candidate to run with him as vice president. She talks a lot about her many past lovers, some of whom are also heard from in interviews. There's a senator, a warlord, a drug dealer, and an American Navy radar operator, among many others, all of whom have their own self-serving agendas that contrast comically with Vita's. Their graphic descriptions of sexual encounters end up feeling a little indulgent on the part of the author, and the plot remains thin, but the characterizations are vivid and often captivating nonetheless. Those willing to go along for a wild ride ought to be entertained by this tale of dirty tricks and dirty deeds.
