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Noli Me Tangere

by José Rizal

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First published: 1887
Pages: 369

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About this book

A dinner at Capitan Tiago's Manila house gathers priests, soldiers, fashionable guests, and people eager to claim friendship with their host. The narrator surveys the river outside, the crowded rooms, religious paintings, and expensive furnishings with pointed humor. Even the chairs and decorations become clues to a society preoccupied with appearances. Among the guests, the reserved Dominican Fray Sibyla contrasts with the outspoken Franciscan Fray Dámaso.

Elsewhere, Don Tiburcio's hopes of comfort shrink as poverty presses him toward marriage with Doña Victorina. Their bargain brings together his need for bread and her taste for status, fine clothes, and carriages. This novel uses social scenes and sharply drawn portraits to examine vanity, authority, and the compromises people make to survive. Readers interested in social satire will find a narrator alert to the distance between public dignity and private motives.

About the author

José Rizal

José Rizal was a physician, poet, writer, educator and linguist whose scholarship and literature challenged Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. He wrote Noli Me Tangere and its sequel El Filibusterismo in Spanish, exposing colonial oppression through fiction. Charles E.