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When you speak to Ben Anderson, you must bring your best game. The formidable Anderson with Lav Diaz.

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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 latest translations of these books, by Harold Augenbraum, are from Penguin, with Augenbraum’s introductions. Rizal is required reading in grade schools and colleges in the Philippines, like Machado de Assis in Brazil. 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. But it’s precisely this reduction that produces the book’s provocative effects. 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.

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.

Read it in the LA Review of Books.