Father of the Four Passages

by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

2001

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

General Fiction

Fiction

Publication

Picador

DDC/MDS

813.54

813.54

Description

Abold new novel about the redemptive power of love Hailed by Jamie James in The Atlantic Monthly as "one of the most original voices on the literary scene," Lois-Ann Yamanaka is back with a novel about family and forgiveness. Set in Hawaii and Las Vegas, Father of the Four Passages tells the story of Sonia Kurisu, a street-wise young mother, who struggles to raise her child, Sonny Boy, as she seeks to come to terms with the three children she aborted. In sequences alternating between the past and the present, we learn of Sonia's childhood-her abandonment by her father and her mother; her contentious relationship with her sister, Celeste; her string of bad lovers; her problems with drugs and alcohol-and of her wish to reconcile with her father and make something of her life by being a good parent to her son, who has begun to show signs of developmental problems. A haunting novel about fathers, forgiveness, spirituality, and solace, Father of the Four Passages is Yamanaka's most ambitious work to date.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Rob_Dunbar

Imagine Michener’s “Hawaii” as a collaborative effort by Toni Morrison and Mary Gaitskill. In place of all that tropical grandeur, the book would have seethed with emotional veracity. The grinding details of poverty and cultural oppression could have taken flight in passages of magical

realism, informed by a scathingly feminist perspective. That description comes pretty close to Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Hilo books. With “Father of the Four Passages,” Yamanaka continues her chronicle of contemporary working-class Hawaiians. Sonia Kurisu flees a past of abuse and abandonment to settle in the surreal landscape of Las Vegas, where she peddles herself (as an “exotic”) while attempting to create a stable environment for her possibly autistic son. The effort is doomed. Sonia is as haunted as the mother in “Beloved,” engaged in a constant internal dialogue with all the infants she aborted while scarcely more than a child herself. These ghosts drain her, leaving nothing for the living child who needs her so desperately. A return to Hilo is their only hope. Despite Yananaka’s poetic prose, her characters inhabit a dysfunctional paradise as ravaged as any post-apocalyptic battlefield. Not for the squeamish, the book details the bleeding, both physical and spiritual, Sonia experiences in the wake of each abortion. That a novel so steeped in pain and substance abuse, in catastrophic relationships and family betrayals, can ultimately be so full of hope – becoming a tale of reconciliation and forgiveness – is something of a miracle.

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