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I looked at the book at the British Library in London, where Rizal had read it, and imagined myself purloining it, just like Raymundo Mata (note to British Library guards: the book is still there, undefiled). One of the most engrossing works by Rizal is his annotation of a book of history from 1609, Sucesos de las islas filipinas, by a Spanish lieutenant general Antonio de Morga, whose work he used to lament what he considered the lost culture of the Philippines. My character was an avid, kleptomaniac reader of Rizal - and to write my book I had to immerse myself in the novels, poems, letters, debates with priests, his clinical notes (Rizal was an eye doctor), and his balarila, his grammar of Tagalog. My made-up fanatic, Raymundo Mata, was a night-blind bookworm consumed by his own private bibliolepsy, wrapped in the textual fatalities that have defined the Filipino - from folk genres like balagtasan (rhymed poetry contests) to bugtong (riddles), from the candid Voltaire, translated in multiple tongues in the Philippines, to Rizal’s figure of fun, Doña Victorina. I view him as a troubled, and troubling, Filipino novelist, and I spent four years working on a novel that tried to capture Rizal the writer in a refractory light, a novel presented as the memoirs of a Beatlemaniac-level fan of Rizal’s, from his own time, circa 1896. My own reading of Rizal is tinged with a writerly desire. The reason Anderson counts (in two meanings of that verb) is that he trusts completely in the significance of Rizal’s words as a way, ultimately, to understand both the hero and the nation he produced.
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The noun tabulations and stirring of ingenious word data build suspense, and lead us to new and still-simmering questions about Rizal the nationalist, polemicist, and artist. But it’s precisely this reduction that produces the book’s provocative effects.
#Bruno mars count on me español series#
This book by Ben Anderson, professor emeritus of international studies, government, and Asian studies at Cornell, might look like a dry exercise in arithmetic, with tables of fictional characters alongside a series of numbers. Rizal is required reading in grade schools and colleges in the Philippines, like Machado de Assis in Brazil. The latest translations of these books, by Harold Augenbraum, are from Penguin, with Augenbraum’s introductions. Most of Why Counting Counts is a catalog of selected words ( filipino, patria, nacional) repeated in Rizal’s two novels, Noli Me Tángere (or Noli) and El Filibusterismo (or Fili), both of which, in the view of Filipinos, helped imagine the nation. The book’s resonant brevity is a testament to the scholar’s agile imagining of Southeast Asian history - in this case Philippine history - but also to his quite inexhaustible potent subject in that history: the 19th-century Filipino novelist José Rizal, whose death in 1896 precipitated his country’s revolution against Spain. The book, at 94 pages, is a morsel in comparison to his other texts, but Anderson is incapable of insignificance.
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READING Benedict Anderson’s book Why Counting Counts (Ateneo de Manila Press) is like coming home to what you think is a quick merienda, a brief snack of pan de sal and mantikilya, only to find yourself replete, satisfied, and renewed, like a guest at some unexpectedly generous feast.