Blu’s Hanging

Blu's Hanging

Lois-Ann Yamanaka
1997, Avon Books, $12.00 USA, Soft Cover, 260 pages

I've been so lucky to encounter a good book on the tale-end of another. Recommended by a friend, this book introduces me to Lois-Ann Yamanaka, an incredible writer whose frank, unflinching description of growing up in Hawaii is validated by my own experiences.

This novel is a breath taking rendering of Hawaiian life which completely captivates the reader from beginning to end. I've been disappointed in Hawaiian books before, but this story is compellingly truthful about Japanese Hawaiian life in the lower socio-economic areas of Molokai. Yamanaka is a poet, utilizing Hawaiian pidgin in a lyrical, legible story of a young girl who must make a choice between her past and her future, and whether or not to sever the family ties that bind and may possibly strangle her.

After their mother's death, Ivah and her younger brother, Blu, and their youngest sister, Maisie, do their best to survive the emptiness which was left in their mother's place. Their father becomes increasingly distant, hostile, oftentimes sorrowing for their loss as well as resenting the choices he had made in his life. Ivah, as children often are, frequently is the victim of his misplaced bitter mourning, experiencing a range of emotions, including confusion, anger, dismay, guilt, surprise. Being the eldest, Ivah is the new maternal figure, and she quickly is the protector of her siblings. I particularly enjoyed the comic interplays of younger brother to older sister, which deepened the reader's connection to the characters, serving to ultimately heighten the tension at the book's conclusion. Helping with homework, employed at various odd jobs to bring in additional income, defending her family against pedophiles, Ivah's thirteen year old voice depicts a raw, gritty story of a child entering into adulthood on a razor's edge. The title refers to either an actual hanging of the brother Blu's spirit or may possibly refer to the colloquial term "hanging", meaning to "survive, or exist".

There are many forms of symbolism throughout the book, beginning with a dreamed-remembered banquet of mother's cooking and ending with a brother's desperate but generous purchase of similar food to regain the loss of comfort and heart; also the deaths of three kittens by hanging which may be the souls of the three children. I wondered about the picture of raw eggs stirred into rice, by the loss of its potential life had nourished the opportunity for another to live. The practiced reader will enjoy the myriad connections between image and story employed by Yamanaka. Like all great novels, there are "under-stories", like an undertow, which sweeps the reader out to deeper, richer, ambient waters.

The details about Hawaiian food, incorporation of Japanese cultural mythology, depictions of racial prejudices, the eye-rolling umbrage of relatives with slightly more money, and a long running battle with malevolent neighbors creates a magnetic mixture, compelling the reader to head pell-mell to its cathartic end. On the heat scale, White Hot.

The End of the World as We Know It

The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

Robert Goolrick

2007, Alonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95 USA, Hardcover, 213 pages

A haunting, beautifully written tale of love in all of its facets: cherished, memorable, ethereal, painful, mysterious, cruel, redeeming. I read the book jacket over and over. Was this tale real? Was his story fiction or not? Because I could not believe it. I was both aghast and hypnotized. I was intrigued by the beginning, and awake, in painful awe, at the end. This is not a story for the weak. But it's a story that needs to be heard, and needs to be told by Goolrick. The calm, nearly medical tone underscores the sense of surreal maturity that has overtaken our hero. He is both touched, and untouched. As we delve deeper into his memories, there is a repeating theme of addiction: alcoholic, physical and emotional. A child whose life is changed, and his destiny altered by one ghastly event, who, becomes immediately protected and hated by the family he dreadfully wants to love and be loved by. I was hypnotized by his seamless interweaving of memories and reason. For some other writer, this would be a trite and boring effect, but Goolrick manages to utilize the skills of reflection in a masterful way, enthralling me as we spiral together, both reader and writer, descending into his bordering madness, and near its end, striving for air. This novel supersedes notions of sexuality and focuses on our universal human need to be loved, wanted and needed. The writer pays homage to the tenderness of children, his coming-of-age story embracing the hedonism of an alcohol infused family to rise from its eventual ashes, a thing of beauty, to be held and, we hope, loved forever and tenderly, as we all deserve. And especially you, dear, dear Robert. Overall, on the heat scale, "white hot".