Customer Reviews

Mango Lady and Other Stories From Hawaii

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MANGO LADY AND OTHER STORIES FROM HAWAII by Ted Gugelyk

Review by Wanda A. Adams Advertiser Features Editor

This slim collection reads like a pau hana talk-story hour with the guys gathered around the back of the pick up truck, slurping Buds and munching poke. Or what you'd hear around a campfire on a North Shore beach after a long day of surfing. Ted Gugelyk is one of a vanishing breed of Mainland surf bums who moved here in the '50's and '60's, took what ever job they could get in order to stay, and watched the Hawaii they loved go away.

This particular surfer, now retired from the University of Hawaii where he taught sociology, has an eye for detail, an ear for the telling quote and a sensitive heart. In "Mango Lady," for example, his juxtaposition of an aging Hawaiian woman with his immigrant Ukrainian grandmother is insightful and right on. Both, he writes, sufffered from "the drawn-out fatigue that comes from bridging the old country to the new." This labor of love ranges from Waikiki to Russia to Vietnam and back, tracking gugelyk's life experiences. But like the best storytellers, he knows how to extract a little more than mere narrative from these tales - lessons learned, perspective gained. I can't help feeling, though, that what Gugelyk has here is a start: "Mango Lady," especially, begs to be reworked into fiction: it's a powerful subject, but a journalistic treatment necessarily dulls the effect. Worth a look, anyway.