Vibora!

F. Sionil José’s accidental hero, Benjamin Singkol, was imprisoned by the Japanese in Fort Santiago after he had escaped from the front in Bataan in World War 11. In the last days of that war, he served in the American Army as a medic in the Cordillera. It was also there where the 1896 revolutionary general, Artemio Ricarte, lived his last days with the Japanese. Was he a collaborator? Or a patriot who was simply grateful to the Japanese for having given him a sanctuary for thirty years? Benjamin Singkol who collaborated with the Americans wanted a definite answer to this issue which riles many Filipinos to this day. There are no easy answers, for collaboration is also a huge grey area wherein men act out their beliefs and succumb to their fates. This brief but thoughtful novel, F. Sionil José’s latest, challenges the reader to make judgment—at his own moral peril.F. Sionil José is the Philippines’ most widely translated author; his major work, a series of five novels about a small town called Rosales, encompasses a hundred years of tumultuous Philippine history—from 1872 to 1972.