This Is Paradise

April 29, 2013
Kahakauwila’s debut short-story collection offers a stirring glimpse into the daily lives of contemporary Hawaiians torn between native traditions and the pull of mainland lifestyles. The profound differences between a Hawaiian and her white boyfriend threaten their relationship in “The Road to Hana”; a girl mourns her grandmother’s death in “Thirty-Nine Rules for Making a Hawaiian Funeral into a Drinking Game”; and in the title piece, young Hawaiian women working at a beachside resort observe a naïve tourist’s tragic fate. Varying in style and theme, the book’s six stories conjure up memorable characters, from a man struggling to reveal his homosexuality to his sister and dying father (“The Old Paniolo Way”) to a woman who seeks to avenge her father’s death by engaging in the gruesome business of cock-fighting (“Wanle”). Beyond questions of identity, Kahakauwila also explores domestic life, as in “Portrait of a Good Father,” about a family torn apart by a husband’s affair and his son’s death. Filled with an energy and outrage reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid, Kahakauwila also gives her characters distinct voices that mix Hawaiian and mainland-American dialects. Altogether, a well-crafted work that compassionately treats the men and women who love and suffer in an island paradise. Agent: Markus Hoffman, Regal Literary.

May 1, 2013
Tourists don't see the Hawaii unsparingly yet lyrically depicted in Kahakauwila's debut collection. "It's like Hawaiians are all pissed off," says vacationing Susan in the title story. "They live in paradise. What is there to be mad about?" Plenty, affirms a chorus of three different groups of women: the housekeeping staff laboring for a pittance in the hotels; the local girls who can't afford housing thanks to unbridled development; and the professional women who have "dedicated their education and mainland skills to putting this island right." Each group observes Susan at various stages of her visit, which goes badly awry when she picks up a local in a bar; for all their irritation with clueless tourists, they feel an uncomfortable kinship with her. Ambivalence and ambiguity are characteristic of Kahakauwila's nuanced work. In "Wanle," a young woman who believes she is honoring her dead father by training and fighting birds knows that she has provoked her gentle Indian lover to revert to the violent ways of his own brutal parent--and it's all the more awful since she's learned that her father cheated in fights. The collection's best story, "Portrait of a Good Father," depicts a troubled marriage, the other woman and the devastating impact of a child's accidental death with tender compassion for all parties, wringing powerful emotional shocks from the misunderstanding of a single word and from the musings on an old photo that open and close the tale. "The Old Paniolo Way," in which a gay son returns from San Francisco to nurse his dying father and face his sister's resentments, is more obvious, but it too makes the point that lives in "paradise" are just as complicated as anywhere else. The author's assured use of both pidgin and standard English mirrors her characters' uneasy feeling of straddling two worlds: a timeless one in harmony with nature and a commercial, modern one that is both invasive and enticing. Finely wrought work from an impressive new talent.

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June 1, 2013
For visitors from Oklahoma to Okinawa, the Hawaiian Islands are paradise, even if only for a little while. But for natives and locals, surrounded by tourists, tormented by a heritage they can no longer maintain, life on these lava rocks is anything but perfect. Maui's up-country is home to a family of cock fighters whose legacy is left in the hands of a young woman with a devious plot to avenge her father's murder, one that will compromise her very identity. Honolulu's luxury hotels lure a young mainland woman whose innocent acceptance of vacation-brochure hype leads directly to her death. And on the Big Island, a gay man sits by his father's deathbed, tortured by his desire to reveal his sexual identity before his parent dies. Cogent explorations of regret, remorse, ambition, and ambivalence can take place anywhere on earth, but in a land known for its beguiling enchantment, such fatalism takes on a forbidding, even sinister, mien as Kahakauwila deconstructs the aloha myth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)