A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

see that it doesn’t matter what family he’s from. Everything gets mixed up
anyway, in the end (139).
At the end of the novel, things are no more fixed than in the beginning, but Alice knows
there was no affair, so she can trust her friend again. She seems to bear life with just a
little more ease, which is expressed in the seemingly mundane image of sleeping in a
waterbed:
Takes me a while to get used to this. […] But now that I know how to lie, it isn’t
that bad, and Beatrice is right about the one thing it’s good for. When Sammy’s on
top of me, I’m floating, not sinking, and when I’m alone, I can lie right in the
middle and bounce. Lurline likes to jump on the bed with me. We pretend we are
riding in a boat and the mural on the wall is life passing us by (288).
In a more philosophical vein, her husband Sammy compares mastering life with not
fighting its current, allowing for drifting out to sea, makai, and being pulled back in,
“back home. Mauka” (289, mauka literally means toward the mountain).
Though his ‘Localness’ is arguable and he has been termed a “touristic” writer,
Garrett Hongo’s Volcano. A Memoir of Hawai’i is, as the San Francisco Chronicle wrote
in its review, simply “eloquent.” 367 In contrast to writers such as Murayama or Yamanaka,
who assume a simple and uneducated voice in their characters, Hongo nonchalantly
displays his familiarity with both Asian and Western literature, history, and philosophy,
showing off that he is truly well read. Moreover, when he talks about the Local
experience, he inserts explanations of customs, translates Pidgin and Hawaiian, and
captures the mood of a ‘talk story’ session accurately. His meticulous passages about
Hawaiian plant life and his descriptions of all the facets of the volcano are almost
obsessed with precision and completeness. His images and metaphors are witty and true.
367 Quoted from the front blurb of the paperback edition of Garrett Hongo, Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii,
New York 1995. Hongo has also published two collections of poetry, Yellow Light (Hanover 1982), and
The River of Heaven (New York 1988). For a critical assessment of Hongo’s writings, see Rob Wilson,
“From the Sublime to the Devious: Writing the Experimental/Local Pacific,” in boundary 2 28 No. 1
(2001): 121-51: footnotes Nos. 12 and 30 (125, 134).
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