A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Grace, easy.
Joseph, easier.
Blue-collar upbringing, yes.
Racism, yes.
Low self-esteem, good one.
Too many ethnic-female-with-dysfunction novels.
Which provide no solutions. Because life provides no resolutions.
So we’ll all be left hanging.
In our particular Victimhood.
God? 444
Sonia struggles with responsibility, expectations, and her own fear. But when she
rehearses her blame list again later, she has been learning to love:
Blame my mother. She abandoned me.
Blame my father. He abandoned me. […]
Blame all of this spiraling dysfunction.
Blame God.
Find comfort in the Victim.
I am not a Victim to this Life. […]
I am the Hero of this Life.
And fuck anybody and everybody who thinks otherwise. Because one morning
when I wake, I look at my son asleep beside me. Face of the cherubim, Thorn of
my side, Reason for being here. 445
In all of Yamanaka’s books, relationships between people are central. Besides peer
pressure, pecking order, love and abuse, and the questioning of authorities such as
parents, teachers, religious figures, and anyone who professes to be more experienced,
she relentlessly explores communication and its failure, the power, prestige, and
ambiguity of language, of words. One pertinent example is the issue of naming: Character
names like Grace, Celeste, Joseph, Jacob, Mark, and Solomon in Father of the Four
Passages tie in with its biblical motifs. Her novel ‘for young adults,’ Name Me Nobody,
makes naming, name-calling, and renaming oneself its central motif. And in the final
444 Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Father of the Four Passages, New York 2001: 31.
445 Yamanaka 2001: 172-3.
171