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Few novels, expect perhaps the now much disparaged Uncle tom’s Cabin, have made a more shattering impact on the society in wich they were conceived and read than the Noli Me Tangere and El Felebusterismo of The Filipino national hero, Jose Rizal.And surely no write paid a higher penalty for self-expression; Rizal was executed by a firing squad mainly because of these two books, now revered by his country as the gospel of its nationalism and lately mad e by law required reading and its colleges. It is usually not much fun to read gospels, but the Noli was meant to be enjoyed; at its best it is a delightful comedy of manners, and irreverent satire of the last years of the Spanish colonial regime in the Philippines. It has a melodramatic excitement of the elder Duma’s The Count of Monte Cristo, by which Rizal is influenced in his early years. The characters come to life with surprising ease and linger in the memory: the absurd Doña Victorina, the elegant Dominican hair-splitter, the pheasants worriedly classifying Spanish insults into various degrees of danger, the bell-ringer Crispin, even the ham-fisted, oddly sympathetic father Damaso. Rizal was perhaps less fortunate with his plot and protagonist, who tend to be the plaster-cast in sorrowful Wertherian attitude when they are not earnestly debating the desirability of reforms ‘from above’ and revolution ‘from below’, and issue, however, which has not yet entirely lost its topicality.