the hawaii novels moloka i and honolulu alan brennert

There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Not a comfortable read, but certainly instructive.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Rachel, though, is a survivor, and unexpected reunions compensate as she returns to a much-changed Honolulu. Amid the heartbreak, Kenji is murdered and Rachel’s symptoms worsen (she loses the fingers of her right hand). She bears a daughter, but Ruth must immediately give the child up for adoption to avoid infection. While Hawaii changes, Rachel grows up, falls in love, and marries Kenji, a fellow patient. Brennert also details changes in the treatment of leprosy-herbal injections, surgery, and, finally, the cure in the 1940’s: sulfa derivatives.

Poor Rachel is doomed not only to suffer horribly but also to bear witness to history: a history that includes the end of the monarchy, the US annexation, the arrival of movies and airplanes, the Depression, and Pearl Harbor. As the years pass, Rachel’s friends die she befriends Sister Catherine, whose affection will sustain her but, with the exception of her father, she has no contact with her family. There, in a hospital run by Catholic nuns, she lives with other young girls affected in varying degrees. Considered dangerously contagious, Rachel is sent to the settlement on Molaka’i. A few months later, Rachel is found to have leprosy, and the happy life the family has enjoyed ends. She’s five at the start, when her father, a sailor, comes back in time for Christmas with another doll for her collection and gifts for her older siblings Sarah, Ben, and Kimo. As much a record of her life as of the changes in Hawaii itself over the years, screenwriter and fantasy author Brennert ( Her Pilgrim Soul, 1990, etc.) vividly and graphically details both the landscape and the disease as he tells Rachel’s story. The chronicle of leprosy-infected Rachel Kalama begins in 1891 in Honolulu and ends in the late 1960s on isolated Moloka’i, site of the Kalaupapa Leprosy settlement. A gritty story of love and survival in a Hawaiian leper colony: more a portrait of old Hawaii than a compelling narrative.

The hawaii novels moloka i and honolulu alan brennert