Novelist Paul Theroux at his home on Oahu’s North Shore.
Michelle Mishina KunzIt can be tricky to write about a place like Hawaii because everybody knows it’s a paradise. To the prose-conscious writer, the state presents a minefield of clichés. These are “sunsets, Mai Tais, soft breezes,” notes novelist Paul Theroux, from his home on Oahu’s North Shore. “All that is true. There’s just more to it.”
Much more, in fact. Between its extreme geography, dramatic history, and colorful residents, Hawaii, portrayed well, makes for a uniquely attractive setting for a story. Yet lasting books are rare. For every thousand Hawaii-set pulp romances and vacation guides, there is maybe one worthwhile literary work. They are books like The House Without a Key (1925) by Earl Derr Biggers, The Bone Hook (2009) by Ian T. MacMillan, and Sharks in the Time of Saviors (2020) by Kawai Strong Washburn. There are also Jack London’s many Hawaii-set short stories, and a few by Somerset Maugham.
Fresh to that list is Theroux’s new novel, Under the Wave at Waimea, published in April through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The lengthy book follows an Oahu big-wave surfer, Joe Sharkey, as he struggles with aging, losing his “stoke,” and the aftermath of a deadly car accident on a rainy road overlooking Waimea Bay. It is a terrific, haunting read. Like Hotel Honolulu (2002), Theroux’s other Hawaii-set novel, the book explores Hawaii’s darker corners: drug addiction, class division, homelessness, gossipy locals—what visitors overlook.
“This place is very divided,” Theroux says. “You have different microclimates, religions, ethnic groups. Each of these situations is its own island—it’s islands upon islands. I wouldn’t expect a visitor to understand that. But when you live here, you see that’s the case.”
Theroux, 80, most famous as a travel writer, pens Waimea from the perspective of a local. His handsome home sits up a mountain overlooking Waimea Bay. Gabbling pet geese wander the backyard, which slopes to his writing cabin, all of it gated by towering bamboo groves. This is the famous North Shore, “the edge of the known world,” as it’s described in Waimea, “the absolute limit: beyond it was unreadable ocean, strange lands.”
Theroux spends around half the year here; summers are for Cape Cod. When not writing, he gardens, visits the shooting range, or paddles his outrigger canoe (His 1992 travelogue, The Happy Isles of Oceania, details a journey through the South Pacific via kayak.)
Theroux has never surfed. “My experience of surfing is purely as an observer,” he says, lounging barefoot in shade on his back porch, tossing scraps of cookie to lingering red-crested cardinals. “Most of my friends are surfers. Even the guy that fixes the roof is a surfer. So is the plumber. If the surf’s up, they don’t come.”
Language, and its signifying power, is a theme in Waimea, as it is in the real Hawaii. Locals often speak pidgin English, also known as Hawaiian English Creole. Language and identity are common themes throughout Hawaiian literature.
It is of particular importance in Milton Murayama’s poignant 1975 novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, which follows a family of Japanese nisei laborers on a Maui sugar cane plantation during World War II. “Whenever anybody spoke goody-good English outside of school, we razzed them, ‘You think you haole, eh?’” notes the teenage narrator, Kiyoshi Oyama.
Immigrants have always made up Hawaii—even the natives arrived from elsewhere in the South Pacific, around 400 A.D.—and the subject is another common theme throughout its literature. In the 19th century, waves of workers came to toil in Hawaii’s extractive industries, first in sandalwood, then sugar cane, rice, and pineapples. Hawaii became a melting pot of Filipinos, Koreans, Japanese, Portuguese, Russians, Chinese, and U.S. mainlanders. Plantation laborers lived in poor, largely segregated shantytowns. Racial animus was common.
Yet to visitors, Hawaii was always, in part, a sparkling idyll. Mark Twain spent four months there in 1866, when it was known as the “Sandwich Islands,” a title bestowed by Captain James Cook, the first European to write about Hawaii. In Twain’s slim volume, Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands, he deems Hawaii “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.”
“No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one,” Twain wrote, nostalgically, 20 years later. “No other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me.” He never returned.
Some two decades prior, Herman Melville visited. His travels are recounted in Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). The 26-year-old, who would birth Moby Dick, was critical of the foreign missionaries, who sought to impose Western ways of life on a native population still reeling from the arrival of foreign capital and industry.
“What has [the native] to desire at the hand of Civilization?” he writes. “Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible.”
Theroux, who alongside his two Hawaii-set novels has penned around 10 short stories set in the islands, says he is finished writing about the state. “All of that is my contribution to the literature of Hawaii,” he adds. “I have nothing more to say.”
Best Hotels To Read In
Sensei Lanai:
Located in the misty foothills of tiny Lanai, off Maui, this newly launched resort offers an array of health and wellness options, from mountain biking to meditation. Recommended reading spot: Lounging in one of the many hot spring baths on the manicured tropical grounds.
Espacio:
An oasis of calm in the Waikiki strip, this new, small hotel fuses privacy with top-notch modern opulence. Recommended reading spot: In your hot tub on the patio overlooking Kuhio Beach.
This article appeared in the December 2021 issue of Penta magazine.
"search" - Google News
December 07, 2021 at 02:00AM
https://ift.tt/3EyCe6h
A Search for Literary Hawaii - Barron's
"search" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QWB6Sh
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "A Search for Literary Hawaii - Barron's"
Post a Comment