Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal

"The government is terrified of raising its hand against the people and the people of the forces of the government. And out of that comes a simple game that seems like what happens to frightened souls when they visit lugubrious places. They take their own shadows for ghosts, and their echoes for strange voices. While the government has no real understanding of this country, it will not get out of such a relationship. It will live like those idiotic young men who tremble at their tutor's voice, though they seek his approval. The government has no dreams of a strong future. It is only an arm, the parish house is the head, and their inertia allows them to be dragged from one abyss to another. They end up as a shadow, they disappear as an entity, they are weak and impotent, and they entrust everything to mercenaries."

Don Crisostomo Ibarra has returned to his native Philippines after a lengthy education in Europe, and to his betrothed, the beautiful Maria Clara. The country is not as he left it; his father is dead, and the parish priest he once counted as a family friend has turned against him, spreading foul rumors about his father. Don Crisostomo has brought home a notion that his people might be elevated by the kinds of education and erudition he himself received in Europe, and begins to raise funds to build a schoolhouse. But the Spanish Catholic priests who actually run the country--using the weak colonial government as a limb to enact their own bidding--are suspicious of his efforts. They hatch a scheme to foment a popular rebellion, which they will blame on Don Crisostomo, and have him hanged. But in the meantime, the real rebels have also identified Don Crisostomo as a man who might champion their cause; the malevolent priests may find that they really have created a rebel after all.

Apparently, Noli Me Tangere is required reading for all high school students in the Philippines. Literally, by law. It captures an emerging spirit of Philippine nationhood, which develops as a reaction to the excesses of Spanish clerical rule. The cruelty and malicious of the priests is drawn with extremity--both the fiery Father Damaso, who hates Don Crisostomo because he is secretly Maria Clara's father, and the mild-mannered Father Salvi, who is secretly in love with Maria Clara, and who is the true animating force behind the scheme to kill Crisostomo. The Filipino people, by contrast, are presented as simple and earnest, the possessors of a culture that inherits both Spanish and Indigenous customs, which often sit in an uneasy tension with one another. The most comic and pathetic characters are those Filipinos who affect a kind of Spanish noblesse to which they are not born; one character is presented as having learned her Spanish poorly but also having had to abandon her Tagalog so that she is nearly unable to communicate in any language. Among this setting, Don Crisostomo emerges as a kind of avatar of the Filipino spirit, which claims an allegiance to European revolutionary principles at the same time it rejects European rule.

Noli Me Tangere is an interesting historical and cultural document. But I wish I'd read something else for my Philippines book. It has a familiar kind of late 19th century-ness: stagey, talky, over-reliant on the revelation of Dickensian secrets, like the true identity of Maria Clara's father, and women whose traumas make them go mad. (You never see women going mad anymore.) As for the Filipino schoolteachers, I can't imagine how they get their kids to read a 450-pp. book from 1887, no matter how patriotic its spirit.

That said, with the addition of the Philippines, my "Countries Read" list is up to 89!