[QUOTE=Bookpossum;2996506]
For me it didn't do well in the literary stakes. I found it very disjointed, lurching from one situation to another, and then with no more information (for example about Basilio and his brother) for a few hundred pages. Maybe Rizal needed a good editor.[QUOTE]
same for me - it did take me forever to finish it, but for reasons others than a "plodding through" feeling - various domestic distractions meant I've been having ridiculously little time to read, and my brain is paying for it
Or to be more precise, I found the first three or four chapters slow going, but then I got in the rhythm.
So though I found it invaluable as a witness of the time, place and culture - and similarly to Mishima and his tetralogy, knowing Rizal's endt made reading it all the more poignant. As a literary text, however, I did not enjoy it very much.
It is a project book, aimed at firing people up, so some black and white was in order. Still, the almost saintly purity of various of the characters (not just the two main protagonists, but several others, like Tasio, Elias, and so on) did irk me quite often.
Nevertheless I have enjoyed reading it, and is one of those books that I keep thinking back to long after I've finished it.