UWF book club
About the book About the author Karen Tei Yamashita, a Japanese-American writer, was born in 1951 in Oakland, Calif. She attended Carleton College, where she received degrees in English and Japanese literature. While enrolled, she spent her junior year living in Japan as an exchange student at Waseda University. She has also lived in Brazil for nine years, and later researched the Brazilian community in Japan. Yamashita currently teaches creative writing and Asian-American Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she received the Chancellor’s Award for Diversity in 2009. She is a novelist, short story writer, playwright and member of the Amerasia Journal editorial board. She has been praised by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Newsday for her wit and talent She has won the American Book Award and Janet Heidinger Kafka Award for her novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, which is set in Brazil. Her novel Tropic of Orange, set in Los Angeles, was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. She has written many other books and short stories, as well as essays on literature, most of which emphasize the necessity of multicultural communities in an increasingly globalized age.
16
pensacolamagazine.com
May/June 2013
Seven people are bound together by a single orange, as the city of Los Angeles and the novel’s characters meet unexplainable and often violent transformations. The novel begins with Rafaela Cortez, the caretaker of a ranch. Together with her son Sol, they discover a mystical orange that has a connection with the Tropic of Cancer. She soon finds herself in Mazatlan trying to figure what is next for her future. Bobby is a work-obsessed man who is in search of his wife and child, Rafaela and Sol. He constantly reminds readers of his hard efforts by putting his baby brother through college, sending money to his father, and providing for his family. Emi is a fast-paced city girl who likes to shock people with her outlandish and often insensitive comments. She and another character, Gabriel, have an on-again-offagain relationship. Although she has a big responsibility as a television producer, Emi is constantly leaving work to go to Gabriel’s rescue. Buzzworm loves Los Angeles and its palm trees. He gives the impression that he is an eccentric advice-giver, always accompanied by his radio. Gabriel finds Buzzworm a valuable informant because of his knowledge of what goes on in the city of Los Angeles. Manzanar Murakami is a homeless man who conducts imaginary music from traffic overpasses. He sees the traffic as art and also as an important component to his music. Towards the end of the book, readers will discover that this homeless man is no ordinary bum. Gabriel Balboa is a newspaper reporter who tries to fight social injustice. He owns a house that lies on the Tropic of Cancer and naively brings trees from around the world to this house where they ultimately die. He loves black and white films. He is involved with Emi, but is always dodging her attempts to annoy him. Archangel makes up the last of this fascinating cast of characters. He is immortal and has seen many great events through his long life. At one point, we see his superhuman strength as he hooks a bus to holes in his back and pulls it across the border to the United States. He is a man of many talents who carries a Mary Poppins-like suitcase that has never-ending capacity. Together these characters intertwine creating a novel with surprises, twists and turns.