Mark your calendar for the celebration of the release of DON’T LOOK BACK: Hawaiian Myths Made New. The book will be for sale during the event at the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu December 14 at 6pm, and thereafter on the Watermark website.
See you there!
Pele in therapy. Maui as superhero. The cannibal king O‘ahu Nui in a world of shady deals and political corruption. The star-crossed naupaka lovers as Honolulu high-school sweethearts. In this one-of-a-kind anthology, old meets new as Hawai‘i’s best writers, including Ian MacMillan, Maxine Hong Kingston, W.S. Merwin, Victoria Kneubuhl, Alan Brennert and more, present favorite myths and legends in surprising contemporary settings. Here are 17 tales of old Hawai‘i—lovingly reimagined and retold for the 21st century.
Editor Christine Thomas is a freelance features and travel writer and book critic.
Full list of contributing writers:
A.A. Attanasio
Robert Barclay
Alan Brennert
Timothy Dyke
J. Freen
Darien Gee
Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui
Christopher Kelsey
Maxine Hong Kingston
Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
Ian Macmillan
Marion Lyman-Mersereau
W.S. Merwin
Wayne Moniz
Gary Pak
J. Arthur Rath III
Christine Thomas
Softcover; 176 pp
Editor: Christine Thomas
Release Date: November 2011
Lee Cataluna is known for her voice, first heard live via television and radio and later through her newspaper column. But she also has an ear for local people’s voices, until now expressed in her plays and monologues, such as those collected in her first book “Folks You Meet at Longs.” This flair for channeling local life shines just as clearly in her first novel, “Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa,” yet this dark and absurd story often reads less like a novel and more as a collection of erratic first-person monologues by the same character—ex-con, addict and perpetually troubled Bobby Pacheco.
It’s easy to imagine the book’s early chapters as separate entities, and if spoken aloud, eliciting easy laughs as Bobby is let loose on Maui after spending 37 months in prison for a drug offense. For the first half of the book, the action stalls as Bobby relays in pitch-perfect pidgin his Sisyphean attempts to get his act together while squatting on his sister/cousin Doreen’s beat-up sofa. She and her kids treat him with pointed vitriol while his goals are continually thwarted by naps on the sofa, stealing, using and making bad choices.
Being anchored in Bobby’s point of view can at times feel oppressive—and in the more raunchy parts, make one pray for an escape hatch–but eventually his repetitive narrative becomes hypnotic. And luckily for the novel, a plot finally develops once Bobby leaves Doreen’s, lending the book cohesiveness and brisker pacing. But this doesn’t mean readers will like Bobby any more than Doreen does.
He is a changeable rogue who appears at different times sarcastic, naïve, incapacitated, savvy, and simply oblivious. Bobby believes he’s nice, but lacks empathy, pretending to listen to people’s problems only for selfish reward. He shows some awareness—“I was screwed up before I went inside, but it was just a random thing. Now I get all these permanent screwed-up habits all ingrained inside me.”—but more often acts ignorant. He claims Doreen’s abuse is proof of her love, but there’s little evidence in her behavior to support it: “Doreen does care. That’s why she made my ear bleed with the towel.”
His account of events trends hyperbolic, and all of his contradictions inject uncertainty into the narrative. Bobby is either an unreliable narrator or outright liar, but whether that’s Cataluna’s design is never transparent. The only hint provided lies in this exchange with Doreen: “‘Why you act stupid on purpose?’” asks Doreen. “‘Because it’s funny,’ I told her. … I never did think of stupid not being funny. I always thought was the same thing.”
Readers must ultimately decide how to interpret Bobby, as well as his story and Cataluna’s book. Whether seen as good-natured satire, compassionate depiction of the underbelly of local life, or something else entirely, “Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa” promises an unexpected and memorable roller-coaster ride on the back of a truly singular character. LL
Deeply visual but problematic novel explores themes of cultural obligation.In the opening marketplace chase — an event better suited for a flashy film opening than an engrossing foundation for a thoughtful novel — Soo-Ja appears theatrical and narcissistic. When she quickly thereafter plots to use marriage to gain independence and seeks “[s]omeone weak. Who will let me make decisions,” she comes off as naively manipulative, at best working to circumvent women’s constrained options at that time in Korean culture and history while securing her selfish desires.
Yet somehow Park manages to keep readers connected to Soo-Ja throughout the novel, primarily because she soon flips from a petty youth to a more dutiful child and mother, ostensibly matured by expectations of obedience to her new husband’s family. Her purported but little evidenced lust for adventure and travel becomes trapped but not extinguished alongside an unrequited and somewhat implausible love and its accompanying dream of a better life. Rather than developing this love story and Soo-Ja’s inner dreams and emotions in the best ways novels can do, through explication of inner motivations and yearnings as well as nuanced interaction, Park’s novel remains alighted on the plot’s surface.
Thus this and other potentially more fascinating story aspects largely remain backdrop, such as the deposition of Syngman Rhee and South Korea’s conversion to democracy, a newly booming Seoul and a woman’s opportunity to carve out an honest life apart from societal expectation. Park instead sums up such changes and themes in short descriptions: “Her country was changing. Some folks lived like peasants, toiling in rice paddies all day and coming home to huts with thatched roofs at night, while the men and women of the city … bought into Western-style apartment buildings.” This makes sense when envisioning a film focused primarily on a heroine’s life arc and love story, but a novel offers the opportunity to enrich characters and story with details and depth, and Park chose another route.
But while neither a true epic nor a richly detailed historical novel, This Burns My Heart
for the Miami Herald
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/07/2346667/postwar-dreams-in-a-changing-korea.html#ixzz1UNLKSa6A
Growing up is hard to doTypical for Yoshimoto, whose debut novel Kitchen was a near-instant hit, the novel’s prose is upbeat and generally amiable, here delivered in the journal-like first-person narration of Chihiro, an almost 30-year-old Tokyo mural painter. She and her pseudo-boyfriend, Nakajima, a genetics student, are the ghostly and enigmatic main characters, and enter the story mired in grief from the death of their mothers. The plot easily treads water as it unhurriedly reveals how this young couple, who memorably meet after observing each other through adjacent apartment windows, have come to exist in a sort of numb, juvenile cocoon.
Continual references to childhood and childlikeness not so subtly drive the point home, such as Chihiro’s continual observations of such characteristics as the “childish fullness” of Nakajima’s cheeks, or that he “cried like a child” and looks at her “with the eyes of a boy in elementary school.” When she thinks of her parents — her father a small-town notable and her mom the Mama-san of a hostess club — she notes they, too, were like children together, and also describes herself as “still a child.” Chihiro appears to view the root cause of life’s problems as societal expectation, to which she saw her parents succumb and from which she attempted to escape by moving to the more anonymous Tokyo after high school. Thus, she also constantly observes facades, from how her dad tries to be the playboy but “it’s obvious that it’s just a pose,” to her mother’s plastic surgery.
She beautifully describes her mother’s duality, mirrored in herself, how on one side she was “a woman of the world” and on the other “extremely delicate, like a big, soft flower nodding gently on its stem, looking as if the slightest breeze would scatter its petals.”
Chihiro and Nakajima develop a physically isolated yet emotionally nurturing relationship; they sleep next to each other, feed each other and look after one another but rarely go out and don’t have sex. Together they attempt to recover from their losses, and in Nakajima’s case, from what is rather perfunctorily revealed to be childhood trauma at the hands of an unnamed cult, one that echoes Aum Shinrikyo (called Aleph since 2000), perpetrators of the 1995 Tokyo Subway sarin nerve gas attack.
Only after a bizarre visit to a mysterious lake and conversations with the ghostly people who live there are Chihiro and Nakajima able to cautiously embrace inspiration to live as free adults unconfined by the past. “You don’t necessarily have to want to become an adult; it happens as a matter of course, as you go, making choices,” Chihiro eventually realizes, as the novel becomes infused with subtle notes of redemption. “The important thing, I think, is to choose for yourself.” When they make that choice, time begins to flow, and the book can come to its simple but touching end.
Pared down to plot, Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel centers on six people who find themselves in possession of a notebook filled with curious one-liner love notes, at a time during which people’s wounds begin shining with light. What at first seems destined to be a bizarre melding of science fiction and romance is surprisingly neither, and also much more. The Illumination imagines a real universe of pain and pleasure, connection and disconnection and quest for meaning that defines human experience delightfully anew.
The perspective of Carol Ann Page, a data analyst in the hospital for a hand injury, opens the novel at the start of what becomes “the illumination”—or the time when, as Brockmeier strikingly puts it, “[e]verywhere, everywhere, in bars, locker rooms, parks, and emergency wards, the wounded were burning with light.” This explosion of intimacy — seeing inside another person’s pain and being confronted with how to respond — links humanity through the visibility of what has always been a shared experience: suffering.
Brockmeier successfully keeps the book from sinking into the realm of the weird by spotlighting five other characters in separate, third-person narratives. Each occupies a distinct pole on the spectrum of pain and painlessness, understanding and connection. Jason Williford, who dives and unexpectedly into pain as if immersion will keep his lost love alive, stands in opposition to another riveting figure, the writer Nina Poggione, who suffers from chronic, unrelenting mouth ulcers and desperately yearns for escape from pain and delivery into love and pleasure. Chuck Carter, a gentle and misunderstood young boy, and Morse Putnam Strawbridge, a homeless man who trades books on the street, occupy the periphery, alternately lost and found in their unusual “deep understanding” of others and life’s objects. The reluctant missionary, Ryan Shifrin, seeks connection to the truth of god’s presence through service, whereas divorced and lonely Carol Ann seeks it in love. Each one shines, beacon-like, through Brockmeier’s universe of light, reflecting facets of pain like glittering kaleidoscope patterns.
The narratives are also connected by each character’s internalization of the notebook, which reveals a glowing window into love and pleasure as intimate as the events of the illumination. First seized by Carol Ann, and written for her hospital roommate by her husband, Jason, the notebook is filled with new reasons he loves his wife each day. As the missionary describes it: “I love it when you fall asleep while I’m driving, because it lets me feel like I’m protecting you. I love the way you’ll call me in the middle of the day to apologize for the littlest things. That was all there was to the book, page after page of I love you’s, yet something about it was curiously beguiling.” As much as imagining life inside the illumination, the book arrests and entrances all of its readers, propelling the narrative and uncovering the depth of its acute pleasure.
The Illumination takes us through 40-odd years of this deeply altered world, one that is nonetheless achingly familiar. While one can become accustomed to the light, pain is something that can never be ignored, “[t]he agony…nearly indistinguishable from bliss.” Brockmeier’s effortless prose and the book’s rich but frothy imagination reveal the longing of love and the light of pain to be beautiful and grotesque, real and unavoidable, and in the end, one and the same.
Read more here LL
I recently interviewed attorney and novelist Scott Turow for Five Books, about what he considers the five best legal novels. Here’s what he had to say:
Why does the 1924 book Billy Budd top your list?
It’s Herman Melville and it’s kind of great. It’s a clear classic. It’s a pretty simple tale except for its clear gay subtext, which I think would be pretty obvious to contemporary readers but probably was not to Herman Melville. And, it’s about the extraordinary divide that sometimes arises between law and justice.
So from an attorney’s perspective, it’s a great reminder that law and justice are not always twain?
Why does the book stick with you and with the country generally?
People also say this isn’t a crime book but about the lawyer and the lessons he learns. Is this what books about the law do well—at least the books you like? 
do—takes readers to the heart of living in a political community. 
We’re transported to the Gilded Age in this debut novel about circus curiosities.Today, no ticket is necessary to gawk at the freakiest aspects of modern humanity; a quick Internet search delivers them in seconds. But in 1865, morbid curiosity was assuaged at such places as P.T. Barnum’s pre-circus American Museum in New York City. There the larger-than-life showman paraded odd objects and such human curiosities as Bartholomew Fortuno, the World’s Thinnest Man and fictional narrator of Ellen Bryson’s promising debut novel.
After a slow beginning tripped up by cumbersome, overwritten prose, The Transformation finds firm legs in Fortuno’s entrancing voice and the atmospheric reimagining of Barnum’s museum. The story opens on the eve of President Lincoln’s funeral, 10 years after Barnum rescued Fortuno from the circus. Artfully inserted historical details — from sewer smells to the reading of the latest Dickens’ installment in Harper’s — make the period tangible.
When Fortuno spies Barnum with a veiled woman, he is threatened and intrigued by what can only be a new act. Then the famously smiling Barnum asks Fortuno to spy on the newcomer, Iell, the Bearded Lady. The ensuing entanglement upends his routine, the curiosities’ hierarchy and eventually his identity.
On the surface, Fortuno is the consummate gentleman, forever respectful of his best friend and opposite Matina, the Fat Lady. He’s a loyal employee and a passionate performer who believes his act provides an important service to audiences. “[O]ur destiny insists we use our gifts to show others who they really are or show them what, in an ideal world, they could become,” he opines. “It may shock them at first, but, deep down, we open their eyes to greater possibilities.”
But, as Fortuno admits, some visitors stare in awe and others in disgust, so perhaps some readers won’t delight in sticking close to tall, thin Fortuno, whose deeper psychology can be as grating as his physique. Until Iell enters the scene, Fortuno is a naive shut in whose delusional arrogance helps him rationalize his refusal to leave the museum: “Normal people needed the context of my show to understand my place in the world, and I needed the distance from normal people. Idiots, every one.”
But when Barnum and Iell force Fortuno to connect with the outside world, his reality expands, and being swathed inside his point of view becomes less limiting. Amid this broader world still rich with magic, Bryson plucks readers’ curiosities to probe timeless questions: What happens when we suppress our appetites? What do we sacrifice to belong? What is lost when we hide?
Uncovering Iell’s secrets leads Fortuno to expose his own, and this subtle but profound transformation casts a spell over the narrative until the last pages. Novel and character are awakened by the magnetic Iell, who makes Fortuno feel “empty and full at the same time. Hungry and satiated.” By the end of the novel, readers should feel that way, too.
Collection explores relationships — romantic, erotic and miserable.At times the best way to communicate the struggle of humanity is simply to write it down; even in today’s instant messaging, friended Twitter-verse, the old-fashioned letter still serves a much-needed purpose.
The prolific Ben Greenman, a New Yorker editor and Palmetto High school graduate, investigates the interplay of the why, what and how of such communication in his epistolary collection. The 14 stories in this slim but substantial volume — the length has more than doubled since its first incarnation as the six-story, limited edition letterpress box Correspondences — are set in a range of locales (from Paris to Harlem to the moon) and eras (from 1851 to present).
A few stories unfold during the Internet age, when Greenman’s characters must sidestep modern communication’s brevity and instantaneousness. They usually do so artfully, save for the narrator in the perplexing yet intriguing Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That, set on a U.S. moon settlement in 1989. He shuns technology and stubbornly clings to letters, what everyone else views as “an antiquated practice.”
Letters are integral parts of the plots and messages. Some impart news, such as the erotic missive to an ex-wife in Country Life is the Only Life Worth Living, pulsing with the narrator’s boundless appetites, while others are considered “particularly efficient delivery mechanism[s] for additional misery.” Some letters are conduits for the blossoming or wilting of love, like the words written by the man in the title vignette who separates from his wife via postcard or in the effortlessly unfurling To Kill the Pink, where deeper connection between two lovers rests on a short note. And some are never meant to be perused, like the more than 2,000 over-the-top romantic love letters Tomas Tinta writes in Hope to a woman he met once.
Throughout, a limber Greenman, author of the rock and roll novel Please Step Back, plays confidently in his customary milieu of human and romantic relationships, inhabiting rapacious male and devious female narrators (as well as quite a few observant painters and lawyers) with practiced ease. Yet his stories are at once weighty and genuine and light and breezy, as he subtly nudges hefty themes of permanence and transience, meaning, isolation and connection. Intensifying mystery and rescuing the collection from a formulaic devotion to letter writing are the intimate yet diaphanous connections the stories share, perhaps a word repeating in two parallel stories or the uncertain sense that characters repeat.
What rises to the surface is that What He’s Poised to Do isn’t just about communication, but what drives it — man’s eternal dilemma, articulated slyly in Against Samantha: “[I]t is every story, told all the time, in every language, with every available flourish. Man is asphyxiated by choice, not in the abstract but in the concrete. It hardens around him.”
Sometimes choices can’t be communicated and shouldn’t be received quickly. Because, like Greenman’s earnest, troubled and deeply human characters, sometimes we need more time to ponder what to do next.
Read more at the Miami Herald
Photo by Dorothy Hong
Literary Lotus 