Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i

by Garrett Hongo

Overview

Part memoir, part Japanese American family chronicle, part luminous work of natural history, Volcano tells what happened when Hongo returned to his birthplace in Hawai'i, as a young man, to reclaim its dreamlike landscape and his own elusive past. A magnificant evocation of heritage and place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593314562
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/16/2020
Series:	Vintage Departures
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Garrett Hongo attended Pomona College, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Irvine, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in English. He is a professor at the University of Oregon, where he was Director of the Program in Creative Writing from 1989 to 1993. He is the author of two books of poetry, Yellow Light and The River of Heaven. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his wife and their two sons.

Editorial Reviews

On visits to and long stays in Hawaii, award-winning Japanese American poet Hongo (The River of Heaven), born in Hawaii but reared in Los Angeles, set out to understand his family and his heritage. Like many immigrant families intent on succeeding in America, his parents brushed aside their child's questions about their past. In his early 30s he visited Volcano, Hawaii, with his wife and young son, renting a cottage near Hilo, where his father had farmed and run a general store. There he felt ``as if I were entering a book about my own life.'' Overwhelmed by the paradisal landscape, ``a visual sonata, lavish and detailed as any jungle fantasy painted by Henri Rousseau,'' Hongo evokes its ecology, geology and ambience as he looks up relatives and friends of his parents, witnesses an eruption of Kilauea, walks on lava beds and through rain forests and visits Honolulu. He interweaves all this with his youthful experiences and puzzlement about L.A.'s Japanese American community, his struggle to become a poet against the wishes of his parents and his astonishment and anger on discovering racial discrimination. This memoir contrasts two worlds and comes to terms with both. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Award-winning Japanese American poet Hongo tracks his roots back to Volcano, Hawai'i, where he was born.

Library Journal

Poet Hongo, a Japanese American born on Hawaii and raised in L.A., was estranged from his culture, his homeland, and his family history until he returned to his place of birth. The moment he arrives in the Hawaiian village of Volcano, he feels a bone-deep connection to the sublime lava landscape, the lavish vegetation, and the majestic clouds. And strangers know him by his face: he looks just like his father. He begins his quest for the truth about his past in nature, spending hours hiking and marveling at the island's beauty, but revelation arrives in a far more personal form: an aunt simply tells him the entire tangled saga of his paternal grandparents. The tale itself is startlingly dramatic, spiced with scandal, broken hearts, and abandoned children, but Hongo's compelling, candid, and lyrical manner of storytelling is the real draw. He uses his discoveries in Volcano as a springboard for an analysis of his life, from his youth in racially complex L.A. to his entry into the world of literature and his ongoing struggle with that bane of so many creative people, free-floating angst.

Donna Seaman

My favorite kind of book is a poet's first prose work. The poet comes upon a story so large — his life, nature, history — hat he must break out of careful verse into the freedom of prose. William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver, Louise Erdrich — and now Garrett Hongo."

— Maxine Hong Kingston

"When I finished this brave and sharp story I wanted to start again because of the honesty in the author's voice and the many gifts — beautiful language, vivid and apt anecdotes, a novelist's narrative instinct — that await the reader. Garrett Hongo elucidates here a Dragon; he reveals intelligence as love. And he magics time."

— Barry Lopez

"In this memoir, the village of Volcano is both a place on the map and a beacon in the far more elusive terrain of a man's personal history. In charting that history, Garrett Hongo has produced a lyrical and penetrating work grafting intimate recollection with broad insight. He has aspired to Rousseau's standard for himself — and for all memoirists — to recount comprehensively 'what I have felt . . . and what my feelings have had me do.'"

From the Publisher