Customer Reviews

Father of the Four Passages: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Many people who read this book will miss and not appreciate the stylistic and artistic virtues of the book. It is not like a typical Yamanaka book that is full of comedy and pidgin english. Rather, the book tells the tragic story of a confused, beaten girl who gets lost in the drug dependent dark world that many of us have seen along the fringes of our lives.

Lois-Ann truly expresses the anger and anguish that could be experienced in raising a child with challenges, or for that matter, any child. Most of us don't have what it takes to clearly articulate our deepest, most true inner thoughts openly to the public. This book captures an unfortunate reality of self-induced, attempted, and clinically performed abortions that is a part of the life experiences of some people. It is a reality that many choose not to see, as is unsafe sex.

Father of Four Passages tells a story of a life that may be foreign to many of us. It is a very difficult book to read, both emotionally and artistically. The triumph and freedom of light in the end, is like a chapter in our lives. We live in valleys and hills, but must have the bravery and stamina to climb the tops of mountains to overcome adversity and see the light.

I've never experienced such a work in my entire life. The use of fervent Christianity, symbolism, paranormal experiences, and emotional instability result resonate through my emotions. The surreal images were heartbreakingly beautiful when combined with the grittiness of seedy strip bars and junkies smacking up in filthy apartments. The experiences are intensified with the parallel surroundings of oceans versus Las Vegas. At first, I sat there reading it, racked by the explicit violence, hatred, and sadness, but soon I became numbed to the beauty of Hawaii and the heartache of Sonia Kurisu. I've never read another work by Yamanaka, but after reading this book, I believe I'll go look around for more. Definately try this book.

I bought this book based on the glowing review that appeared in Elle, and while I agree that the writing is excellent and the subject intriguing I found the descriptions of the child abuse and haunting voices of the aborted/murdered fetuses were really too dark and disturbing to bear. I will say that Ms. Yamanaka's ability to deftly interweave descriptions of past events and dream-like sequences into the narrative flow of the novel is extremely engaging, but I really couldn't get past the utter depth of despair and pain that all of the characters in the book seem to be immersed in. I'm not saying don't read this book, I'm saying that if you do, be prepared for a really dark and creepy ride.

On a recent afternoon my wife lost her purse in the KTA parking lot. Next day lunch time "Loke" calls to let me know she found the purse in a trash can. I pick it up in a Wainaku walk up parking lot from a young man with no shirt & tatoos who I gave a reward to pass on to the young lady that called. All the purse contents had been removed and neatly put back in the wrong order. Cash gone. Credit card had been used unsuccessfully at a gas station. But, thanks for the return.

Whats the point? I don't know exactly, but I got a glimpse into a very different world from my own. Like Sonia Kurisu who struggles so desperately with challenges most of us don't even want to think about, but author Yamanaka delivers it to us raw to deal with. I was judgemental, disgusted, angry, confused, and eventually bored as Sonia's massive blunders unfolded. And her "father", hoo boy.

Indeed, if the only purpose of "Father of the Four Passages" was to make the reader hate a loser drug addict abusive failure of a human being, I would not waste my or your time writing this. But, the story had, well, an ending...

Only those of us lucky enough to hit a personal rock bottom and survive will probably understand Sonia's redemption. Author Yamanaka has somehow conveyed this feeling of revelation to me with mere words on paper. The light! For this I give her book my highest rating. Thank you.

I have read all of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's books and I have to say that this one was the most difficult to complete. Not because it wasn't good but because it was far more painful than the rest. Ms. Yamanaka has always portrayed hardship in its most raw form, however in this novel she makes the reader endure the pain of her characters without the benefit of the love and closeness that were interspursed in her other novels. Despite this difficulty, this novel is well worth reading. Ms. Yamanaka's ability to hold the reader's eye open through the most painful moments is truly artful. It is the readers ability to endure the pain of the characters that makes the end of the novel even more beautiful.

It is almost impossible to believe that an author with the talents of Lois-Ann Yamanaka could write a novel as awful as "Father of the Four Passages." Ms. Yamanaka's three previous novels treat the traumas impoverished, alienated ethnic Hawaiians encounter as they come of age in what mainlanders would consider paradise. "Four Passages" presumably tackles these themes and tacks on how a dissipated, unconfident woman handles single motherhood in the shadow of suffocating guilt resulting from three previous abortions. Instead, this dreary, choppy story drowns in a disaffecting stew of alcohol, profanity and confusion.

If that weren't bad enough, Ms. Yamanaka has abandoned those qualities which make her previous books luminescent. Instead of using the patois of the island's lumpenproletariat, she forces her characters to mouth lines a television soap-opera writer would be embarrassed to use. Yamanaka's earlier works feature characters whose pain, isolation and dislocation compel both empathy and identification; the people who populate "Four Passages" are, ugly, mean and brutish. Her protagnoist, Sonia Kurisu, is a pathetic loser, completely without redeeming qualities. Her most salinet attribute is her seemingly endless capacity for self-pity. Yamanaka has failed so miserably in humanizing Sonia, that the protagnoist's ruined childhood -- replete with abandonment, religious hypocrisy and sexual insecurities -- engenders boredom rather than compassion. The supporting cast is even worse; stereotypical relatives and other low-life losers are simply unbelievable.

This lack of reality and basic believability crushes whatever art "Four Passages" may pretend to have. Even Yamanaka's style mocks her ability. For reasons beyond my ability to understand, Ms. Yamanaka frequently capitalizes words in the middle of the sentences. (Is this because what we are reading is some kind of experimental prose/poetry?) Her narrative dissipates its energy between unimpressive transitions from present to past. An absent father's poetic, third-person letters to Sonia, serve as constant reminders as to the unreality of the novel's entire premise.

Sadly, "Father of the Four Passages" reminds us that even our most creative and bold young authors miss their mark. This brutally vulgar novel fails. It fails to provide insight into the shattered hopes of a frightened, bewildered single parent. It fails to create characters with any dimension. It fails to enlighten, inform and instruct. However, its single greatest failure is its author's abandonment of those talents which rightfully propelled Lois-Ann Yamanaka to national attention.

Imagine if Michener's "Hawaii" had been a collaborative effort by Toni Morrison and Mary Gaitskill: in place of all that tropical grandeur, the book might have seethed with emotional veracity. The grinding details of poverty and cultural oppression could have taken flight in passages of magical realism, informed by a scathingly feminist perspective. That comes pretty close to describing Lois-Ann Yamanaka's "Hilo" books. With "Father of the Four Passages," Yamanaka continues her chronicle of contemporary working-class Hawaiians. The main character of this one, Sonia Kurisu, flees a past of abuse and abandonment to settle in the surreal landscape of Las Vegas, where she peddles herself as a demeaning travesty of exotica while attempting to create a stable environment for her autistic son -- the effort is doomed. Sonia is as haunted as the mother in "Beloved," engaged in a constant internal dialogue with the infants she aborted while scarcely more than a child herself, and the ghosts drain her, leaving nothing for the living child who needs her so desperately. A return to Hilo is their only hope of salvation.

Despite Yamanaka's poetic and even dreamlike prose, her characters inhabit a dysfunctional paradise as ravaged as any post-apocalyptic battlefield. Not for the squeamish, the book details Sonia's abortions as well as the bleeding, both physical and spiritual, she experiences in their wake. That a novel so steeped in pain, drug and alcohol abuse, catastrophic relationships and family betrayals can ultimately be so full of hope (becoming a tale of reconciliation and forgiveness) is something of a miracle.

This is my least favorite of Yamanaka's novels - not because it isn't well written or uninteresting but because it put me in a deep, deep depression. Even though the ending really brought everything together it was a difficult read. I think this is the most poetic of Y's book and the plot is really heavy. The "happy" ending wasn't a burst of sunshine and rainbows...more like a couple of weak beams of sunlight breaking through the darkness after a stage 10 hurricane devastated your home but you think "at least i'm alive".

It still a great book because it makes you hate, makes you frustrated...it makes you feel - something I really appreciate especially in a contemporary writer.

I think Lois-Ann Yamanaka intends us to take the last two chapters of mumbojumbo in her novel seriously. In fact, after reading the acknowledgments, I'm sure of it. This spoils what was otherwise going to be a good, if perhaps not an excellent novel.

Few writers paint with as dark a palette as Yamanaka, and in "Father of the Four Passages" she almost manages to pull off one of the more difficult tasks a novelist can set herself - portraying madness without being either stultifying or incomprehensible.

I had glanced at Yamanaka's first three, well-regarded novels set in Hawaii without being specially attracted by them, but her young adult novel, "Name Me Nobody," struck me as a very good, realistic and tough-minded book - as well as very adult for a young adult novel. Apparently, young adults are harder to shock these days. And I thought "Father of the Four Passages" proferred more of the same.

Seldom has an author dealt her protagonist a worse hand: child abuse, madness, suicide, abandonment, addiction, incest, religious mania, autism. Sonia Kurisu is introduced after having gone through three abortions (or two and a brutal miscarriage, it's not quite clear).

One of the things I liked about "Name Me Nobody" and which Yamanaka also manages in "Four Passages" is her ability to unfold a story without being coy. Too many novelists withhold information for no better reason than to trick us into continuing on just to find out what the narrator knows and ought to tell us now. In "Father of the Four Passages," the narrator, Sonia, isn't sure if the voices she hears or the images she sees are veridical or not. Nor is the reader sure when she switches from more or less grounded to drugged. However, the confusion seems genuine, not a confidence trick by the writer.

There is not a great deal of local color in the book, much of which takes place in Las Vegas anyhow, but Yamanaka manages to convey a lot about living in the islands with just an occasional word or phrase. People who are not familiar with Hawaii will not get it. That will not detract from the overall force of the book, but for locals, there is an extra layer of reference.

The book is full of reference. Christians come off poorly here, especially Baptists, and the novel is loaded with New Testament parallels: Bob is John the Baptist and Sonny Boy an autistic christ (although his given name, Solomon, also makes him an Old Testament figure and this is made explicit by calling him a priest). Sonia's father seems to be Saul, or perhaps Peter. Sonia herself might be Mary Magdalene, and her aunts are Pharisees. Or not. In this chaotic life, not everything is as it seems; just as Sonia is only a local Japanee girl from a working class family in Hilo, and not really the exotic torch singer Tiger Lily Wong at the 14-Karat Lounge.

I don't know who that makes Jacob, lover of Sonia, unless the name is supposed to have Old Testament rather than New Testament associations. Possibly the Biblical associations are mere artefacts. It's hard to tell.

In any event, it makes for 210 pages of interesting, if not always entirely coherent, fiction. The last 20 pages, with the kumbyah ending, spoiled it.

I no caya wot da buggah wit da highmakamaka words said, like anyting else yo'readem yo'ownself & decide. So wot if somebody wen talkstink about dis book.

Eh titamoke, dis was hud fo'read. At first. Anden lilobit by lilobit, I wen gettum' o'maybe not but da point is I wen buy da book & readem'. I tink peoples got all huhu ova dis book cause was all intense wired kine mana'o hah. Faka tree(3) misscarriages I would be nuts too and az witout da drugs. Add drugs, auwe big time pilikia. Frikas trute hurt yeah.

Peoples prolly piss off at TitaLoisAnn; da way peoples stay piss off at me fo'writing all hammajang la dis as not propa English. And... Yeah and my English teachas stay all doing 360's in dey grave but as okay cause dey wen teach me/us and I/we wen learn even do no look like cause us no sked make our own. LOL

Hele on, hana hou write somme moe!

KULIA