Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories

by Bienvenido N. Santos

This collection of sixteen short stories brings the work of a distinguished Filipino writer to the attention of an American audience. Bienvenido N. Santos first came to the United States in 1941, and since then, he has lived intermittently here and in the Philippines, writing in English about his experiences.

Replaced by ISBN 9780295995113

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Asia, Cultural, Literature, Asian American

178 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Bienvenido N. Santos was born in Tondo, Manila, on March 22, 1911. When Santos started school, the Philippines was already a colony of the United States and instruction was in English. In his early attempts at creative writing, Santos developed an ear for three kinds of communication: Pampango in the songs his mother sang at home; English in the poems and stories his teacher read at school; and Tagalog in the street life of the Tondo slums.

Santos left for America in September 1941 as a pensionado (scholar) of the Philippine Commonwealth government. Thirty years old and an established short story writer in English at home, he enrolled at the University of Illinois in the master's program in English. When war broke out in December, he found himself an exile in America, cut off from his homeland and his wife and three daughters he left behind. The heartbreak of this separation during his first sojourn in America is crucial to Santos's development as a writer.

Exile defined the central theme of his fiction from then on. In the summer of 1942, he studied at Columbia University with Whit Burnett, the founder of Story magazine, who published his first fiction in America. After studying Basic English with I.A. Richards at Harvard in 1946, Santos returned home to a country rebuilding from the ruins of war. He came back to America in 1958 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. His first two novels, Villa Magdalena and The Volcano, written under a Rockefeller grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, were published in Manila in 1965, the year Santos won the Philippine Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature.

In 1972, Santos and his wife Beatriz were on their way to the Philippines to "stay home for good," when news of the declaration of martial law reached them in San Francisco. The new regime banned The Praying Man, his novel about government corruption, and he was once again exiled from his home. From 1973 to 1982, Santos was Distinguished Writer-In-Residence at Wichita State University. In 1976 he became a U.S. citizen. His short story, "Immigration Blues," won the best fiction award given by New Letters magazine in 1977. In 1980, the University of Washington Press published Scent of Apples, his first and only book of short stories to appear in the United States. The next year it won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Santos died at his home in Albay on January 7, 1996.

Santos's stories can be grouped into three literary periods. The first period, the prewar years in the Philippines (1930-1940) are set in the fictive Sulucan slums of his Tondo childhood and the rural towns and villages in the foothills of Mayon volcano in Albay, where Santos married Beatriz Nidea, started his family, and built his house. These stories are in the collections Brother, My Brother and Dwell in the Wilderness. Santos's exile in America during the war years produced stories set in Chicago, Washington, New York, and other cities, where he lectured extensively for the Philippine Commonwealth government in exile. You, Lovely People, The Day the Dancers Came, and Scent of Apples belong to this period. In the postwar years Santos set his stories in different places as he commuted between the Philippines and America. These years mark a period of maturation and experimentation, and a shifting away from the short story to the novel form.

His use of memory--or, rather, a fictionalized memory--evokes empathy for his characters. A variation of this technique is Santos's use of other "I" narrators, like the Pinoy old-timer Ambo, he of the trembling hands ("The Door" and "The Faraway Summer"), or Tingting, the tennis player, in the San Francisco novel. But even with the voices of Ambo and Tingting, the stories are told from within, as if Santos had been inside them and felt their pain. Santos believed it was important for a writer to feel compassion for his characters: "When you have cr

Reviews

[Kym Hamer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this on Christmas morning with the very moving Foreword by Jessica Hagedorn and only just got around to reading the whole book now. After revisiting the Foreword, I started reading the Introduction(s) but gave that away - I'd much rather dive into the stories themselves than trawl through someone else's summary/views.

High points for me were Quicker With Arrows (about heartbreak and belonging), Letter: The Faraway Summer (about disconnection) and Ambo, a character who appears in several of the stories. I did not find every story engaging but overall this is a lovely and gentle read about the place that many expatriates find themselves in: A nostalgic longing for past comforts combined with a need to build something else worth giving your heart to.

[Cyke]

this book I very nice and inspiring to me..

[MSJLibrary]

The sixteen short stories presented here reflect the work of the distinguished Filipino writer Bienvenido N. Santos over four decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s. The experiences of Filipinos at home and abroad as an immigrant in America are profoundly explored in this new collection, which is the first time Santos has been published outside of the Philippines.

[Maggie May · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read one short-story, The Day The Dancers Came, for my Asian American Literature class.

(4.75 stars) not my favorite. Would put it at the bottom of the seventeen books we have to read for the class.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heartbreaking and beautiful. Favorite stories:
- And Beyond, More Walls: the silence of two people once close meeting again
- letter: the faraway summer, of how found families can't stay families forever
- the contender: for those that have to die alone

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful, I wish Santos had more recognition these days in the US.

[R.C. Gonzales · Rating 4 out of 5]

An honest ode to all the hurt men. 🇵🇭

[eyletsread · Rating 3 out of 5]

16 stories in one book. Para kang nakinig ng mga kwento ng 16 katao na mga kababayan mo, while you’re in a travel sa isang foreign country

3.5 ⭐️

[jem · Rating 5 out of 5]

the apple orchard being the philippines planted in american soil did something to me

[John Rey Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Scent of Apples” contains the narratives of the immigrant Filipino in America post-Second World War. Immigrants in various walks of life—academics, a doctor, old men, a husband-less lady gunning for the ‘green card,’ and more. Reading the stories, I was preoccupied with the idea of distance: these immigrants find comfort in meeting each other, for they share a nationality, and solace in looking back towards their lives in the Philippines. The distance wrought by their migration to America is well-expounded by the longing, if not nostalgia, of their constant looking back—Fabia compares his American wife to Filipino women back in the homeland (“Scent of Apples”), Fil finds joy in listening to the music of Filipino performers who came to Chicago (“The Day the Dancers Came”).

However, it’s not only the distance from the homeland that evokes the melancholy in the stories. I think there is a distance between the immigrant Filipino and the new country, America. Unlike the first distance that can be closed by moving back to the Philippines, this distance cannot be closed because one is already in America. This longing for the new country may only be closed by belonging to the country, and I suspect that this is a difficult process. Perhaps a Filipino immigrant and their descendants cannot fully belong in this new country, and almost seventy years after some of the stories in “Scent of Apples” were published, I can only regard this statement as possibly true.

[Andie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed some stories, namely Scent of Apples, The Hurt Men, and Manila House. I loved how multiple short stories involved the same cast of characters and continued their journeys. The stories circled on themes of immigration, loneliness, loss of culture, and were always touched by the melancholic, the nostalgic, and the hopeful.

I appreciate reading Filipino literature, though I only relate to some aspects of these stories. I think that these are stories of the older generation, the first-generation Filipinos. This perspective was valuable to me, but ultimately not as hard-hitting as I thought it would be. There are noticeably weaker stories and many dragged. A mixed bag.

[Lalaine May · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmm.. It took me a second read to understand what it was trying to tell but when I did I am awestruck (or as my bestfriend says it, "bitch- slapped")... So apparently getting me to second read was a good thing... It did not disappoint. If anything, I am quite insecure by how he came up with a literary piece that equates the torment that comes with being away from home...

[Always]

nce

[Hep Pineda · Rating 5 out of 5]

i want to read!!!

[Nicole Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scent of Apples

[Riza Joson · Rating 5 out of 5]

v

[Francis Santiago]

qwe
qwe

[Frances Ivy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Educational :D

[Khim · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Gerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

wssss

[Angelo Delos Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

good....