Finely wrought work from an impressive new talent.
Tourists don’t see the Hawaii unsparingly yet lyrically depicted in Kahakauwila’s debut collection.
“It’s like Hawaiians are all pissed off,” says vacationing Susan in the title story. “They live in paradise. What is there to be mad about?” Plenty, affirms a chorus of three different groups of women: the housekeeping staff laboring for a pittance in the hotels; the local girls who can’t afford housing thanks to unbridled development; and the professional women who have “dedicated their education and mainland skills to putting this island right.” Each group observes Susan at various stages of her visit, which goes badly awry when she picks up a local in a bar; for all their irritation with clueless tourists, they feel an uncomfortable kinship with her. Ambivalence and ambiguity are characteristic of Kahakauwila’s nuanced work. In “Wanle,” a young woman who believes she is honoring her dead father by training and fighting birds knows that she has provoked her gentle Indian lover to revert to the violent ways of his own brutal parent—and it’s all the more awful since she’s learned that her father cheated in fights. The collection’s best story, “Portrait of a Good Father,” depicts a troubled marriage, the other woman and the devastating impact of a child’s accidental death with tender compassion for all parties, wringing powerful emotional shocks from the misunderstanding of a single word and from the musings on an old photo that open and close the tale. “The Old Paniolo Way,” in which a gay son returns from San Francisco to nurse his dying father and face his sister’s resentments, is more obvious, but it too makes the point that lives in “paradise” are just as complicated as anywhere else. The author’s assured use of both pidgin and standard English mirrors her characters’ uneasy feeling of straddling two worlds: a timeless one in harmony with nature and a commercial, modern one that is both invasive and enticing.
Finely wrought work from an impressive new talent.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3625-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
PROFILES
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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