Love in the Rice Fields

Book excerpt: The twelve stories in this anthology are some of the most riveting narratives penned by Macario Pineda in a writing career that lasted for less than two decades. Retold in English by Ms. Soledad S. Reyes, Macario Pineda’s Love in the Rice Fields and Other Short Stories offer readers a series of scenes in which various characters come alive in their respective journeys through life’s various stages—the idyllic innocence of youth, the pleasure and agony of young love, the disillusionment of old age, and the experience of death. Each story slowly leads its characters to an epiphany, for example, of the unconditional nature of a mother’s love, of war and its evils, of death and what possibly transpires after. In this collection of short stories, Pineda is the consummate chronicler of the barrio, a gentle historian, a masterful painter, a great Filipino artist who painstakingly depicted the varied aspects of the past he loved—an age slowly disappearing from the consciousness of most Filipinos in a world slowly deteriorating due to colonialism and its aftermath.