Lolo Jose: An Intimate Portrait of Rizal

Different is this Rizal book, because it's written from "inside" the family. Mrs. Bantug has long been an invaluable source for Rizal researchers and biographers. Reared as she was on family stories about her greatest relative, "Lolo Jose," she could not but amass a rich fund of Rizal lore not available in archives.

Even the now all too familiar events of the Rizal story take on new color and suspense because the reader feels that all this is not research but reportage: the words of witnesses, the testimony of primary sources, the gospel of disciples.

Even more exciting is the unfamiliar material, the private details known only to and lovingly cherished by the family. For instance, Rizal looms so gigantic in Philippine history that it comes as a shock to learn that he was physically a small man and, as a child, had a head too big for his little puny body. When he first tried to walk, he kept falling down because he was top-heavy. As a boy, he was rather timid, one reason he was not at once enrolled as an interno at the Ateneo. But by dint of will he was able to develop his physique into something brawny enough to serve as painter's model.

How did he look as a grown man? A nephew of his (Mrs. Bantug's own father, then seven years old) remembered him as being, in 1892, "fair of skin and rosy of cheek, like someone just come from cold countries." Such details have the force that vibrates in a famous line of poetry: "Oh, did you once see Shelley plain?" Again and again, in Mrs Bantug's book, we get this excited feeling that we are seeing Rizal plain. The national monument has become flesh and blood.

— From the Preface by Nick Joaquin

Published in 1982 by Intramuros Administration, Ministry of Human Settlements

Hardcover