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BEHOLD
THE MANY
Lois-Ann Yamanaka
0-374-11015-8
February
2006
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"Beautifully tragic, this should garner
Yamanaka the wider attention she deserves."
-Kirkus
Reviews (starred review)
"Tender,
poignant, and written in unadorned prose, this is
a book to savor. Highly recommended."
-Library
Journal (starred review)
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Praise
for BEHOLD THE MANY from Paste Magazine
The
Ghosts That Haunt Me from the The Washington Post,
reviewed by Tananarive Due
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More
praise for Lois-Ann Yamanaka's latest Novel, BEHOLD
THE MANY
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Publishers
Weekly
"A cacophony of voices both living and dead who
speak a variety of Hawaiian dialects spikes the
narrative . . . Yamanaka's
beautiful, harsh prose and thematic vision unify
this intense novel."
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High praise from Booklist,
01/01/2006
A mystical, magical, and, at times,
macabre world unfolds in
Yamanaka’s elegiac tale of three
sisters outcast from their family
and society in turn-of-the-century
Hawaii. Reminiscent of Father
Damien’s leper colony on the
island of Molokai, Oahu’s St.
Joseph’s orphanage is a bleak
haven of last resort for children
afflicted with the tuberculosis that
is devastating the Kalihi Valley. As
first Leah, then Aki, and finally
Anah contract the disease, the
sisters are banished by their
monstrous father and forsaken by
their powerless mother, left to fend
for themselves under the callous
negligence of the orphanage’s
nuns. Of the three sisters, only
Anah will survive, but when she
leaves St. Joseph’s on her
eighteenth birthday, she, her future
husband, and their burgeoning family
are destined to be haunted by the
ghosts of Anah’s long-dead
siblings and the boy who once loved
her.
Redolent with the island’s
lush and languid atmosphere,
Yamanaka’s richly atmospheric
novel paints a chillingly spectral
portrait of souls tormented by love
and guilt.
—Carol Haggas
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Library
Journal, Highly
recommended
All of the ethnic groups who worked
on Hawaiian sugar plantations in the
early part of the 20th
century-Japanese (mainly Okinawan),
Chinese, Portuguese, and
Hawaiian-were equally exploited.
They lived in unsanitary conditions;
worked long, grueling hours for low
wages; and could not afford medical
care or much of anything beyond
subsistence. Yamanaka (The Heart's
Language) introduces us to a
fictional family in just those
circumstances, but worse. All three
Medeiros daughters contract
tuberculosis. Anah, the eldest,
tries to give her sisters hope, but
her promises can't stop the
disease's progression, and Leah and
Aki, brave as they are, eventually
die. Even after Anah gets a chance
to start over again, she has trouble
finding happiness with her sisters'
spirits in a state of unrest.
Yamanaka lovingly describes how
these fragile yet lively girls
maintained their dignity and
comforted one another. She wholly
sympathizes with her resilient
characters and will arouse this same
compassion in her readers.
Tender,
poignant, and written in unadorned
prose, this is a book to savor.
Highly recommended.-Lisa Nussbaum,
formerly with Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst.,
Harrisburg, PA
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Publisher's Weekly, January 2006
Taking up her familiar
themes-family, guilt, abandonment
and the curses invoked by the dead
on the living-Yamanaka's latest
novel builds nicely on her previous,
Father of the Four Passages. In
1913, sisters Anah, Aki and Leah are
sent to an orphanage on the Hawaiian
island of Oahu when they fall ill
with tuberculosis. Their family,
headed by their hard- drinking
Portuguese father who abuses their
Japanese mother, is already strained
before their departure. Anah
promises her sisters that their
mother and brother, Charles, will
rescue them from the orphanage, but
she is wrong: Leah and Aki die. As
vengeful ghosts, Anah's sisters
taunt and torture her for surviving
and for what Aki terms her
"lie" to them. With their
parents' deaths and the
disappearance of Charles, Anah
remains cursed even as she attempts
to go on. When Anah eventually finds
happiness and marries, the chorus of
voices from the dead extends the
curse to her children. Only many
years later-following much suffering
and one horrifying event-does Anah
find a way to appease the ghosts and
to forgive herself. A cacophony of
voices both living and dead who
speak a variety of Hawaiian dialects
spikes the narrative, but Yamanaka's
beautiful, harsh prose and thematic
vision unify this intense novel.
(Feb.)
Behold the Many
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Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2006
In this superb seventh novel
from Yamanaka (Father of the Four
Passages, 2001, etc.), the ghosts of
children curse the living, and a
young woman finds salvation in
early-20th-century Hawaii.
Anah Medeiros finds some
consolation in being sent to St.
Joseph's to recover from
tuberculosis--she can comfort her
young sisters Leah and Aki, already
there. And at least away from
home, she'll be safe from her brute
of a father, a Portuguese laborer
who molests her on drunken mornings,
and she can escape her Japanese
mother's decline into numb sorrow.
Abandoned at St. Joseph's, the girls
are beaten and berated by the nuns
who deem them unclean half-breeds.
Only Leah has some joy in the form
of ghostly Seth, a dairyman's son
who died tree-climbing on the
grounds. Soon, though, Leah
dies, as does fierce Aki, leaving
Anah alone, but not alone, as she is
now haunted by a crying Leah, a
violent, naked Aki, a silent Seth
and the legions of children who have
died at St. Joseph's begging Anah to
take them home, feed their hunger,
find their mothers. Yamanaka
creates a heartbreaking portrait of
these ghost children, made more
wretched when Anah's father dies,
and in his spirit form begins to
abuse Aki and Leah. Anah finds
a friend in Sister Mary Deborah, who
teaches her everything about
beekeeping, and Anah finds love in
Ezroh Soares, Seth's brother.
When she turns 18, Ezroh steals her
away from St. Joseph's and into
marriage, but Seth puts a curse on
Anah that all her children will be
girls and monsters. Yamanaka's
magical story of Anah is also an
uncompromising depiction of a hard
immigrant life in Hawaii, of Chinese
opium dens and Japanese laborers and
Portuguese cowboys and whites eager
to tame the lot of them.
Finally, though, Anah becomes
prosperous in the beekeeping
business, Seth's curse holds sway
and Anah must sacrifice what she
loves best so the crying ghost
children can find their way home to
God.
Beautifully tragic, this
should garner Yamanaka the wider
attention she deserves.
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| There
is a feature interview in the Village Voice
to look forward to as well as mention in this
month's Poets & Writers.
Reviews are forthcoming from the San
Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Paste, San Diego
Reader, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Honolulu
Magazine, and Maui
News. |
Lois-Ann will be on tour in
early February, if you have the opportunity to go see her
in person I highly recommend it. She is a brilliant
performer.
Sarah Russo, Publicity
Manager, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
| 2/6/2006 |
New
York |
92nd
Street Y |
| 2/8/2006 |
Seattle |
Elliott
Bay |
| 2/9/2006 |
San
Francisco |
A
Clean Well Lighted Place for Books |
| 2/10/2006 |
Berkeley |
Cody's |
| 2/10/2006 |
Half
Moon Bay, CA |
Moon
News Bookstore |
| 2/11/2006 |
Los
Angeles |
Japanese
American Museum |
| 3/2/2006 |
Honolulu,
HI |
Native
Books |
| 3/3/2006 |
Mililani,
HI |
Booklines
Hawai'i |
| 3/4/2006 |
Maui,
HI |
Borders |
| 3/26/2006 |
Honolulu,
HI |
Borders |
| 4/10/2006 |
Riverside,
CA |
University
of CA at Riverside |
| 4/12/2006 |
Wellesley,
MA |
Wellesley
College |
| 4/13/2006 |
Storrs,
CT |
Asian
American Cultural Center, University of
Connecticut |
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