Song of the Exile (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

"...Davenport possesses the character great writers must xa0have...passionate love for people, xa0dedication to the memory of people who have suffered. xa0 You can't read Kiana Davenport without being xa0transformed!" xa0 --ALICE WALKER"Impressive in its intensity of feeling, xa0its body of sensuous detail xa0on every xa0page, xa0 its dedication to a level of writing xa0few bestsellers possess. xa0It is not a meretricious fast-read. xa0I was so moved I read it twice." --NORMAN MAILER Kiana Davenport is the author of the novels House of Many Gods , Song of the Exile , and Shark Dialogues , and two story collections, House of Skin and Cannibal Nights . A native Hawaiian, her novels and stories have won numerous awards and have been translated into twenty languages. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From Publishers Weekly The devastating effect of WWII on two Hawaiian families pervades this haunting novel that spans three continents and decades. Davenport (Shark Dialogues) traces the stories of Sun-ja Uanoe Sung (Sunny), a Hawaiian/Korean student from an educated family, and Keo, a native jazz musician, who meet and fall in love in Honolulu in the mid-1930s. When Keo (sometimes known as Hula Man) gets a chance to travel with a jazz band, he leaves Sunny for New Orleans and Paris. His reputation as a genius hornblower blossoms as quickly as racist violence darkens Nazi-infested Europe. Sunny escapes her fractured family life in Honolulu and journeys to join Keo in the City of Light. She revolts against the Nazi brutality she finds there, worrying also about the fate of her clubfooted sister, Lili, who was cast out by their father before Sunny was born. Arriving in Shanghai to look for Lili, Sunny is kidnapped and held captive as a "P-girl," servicing Japanese soldiers. Sunny is selected by one officer for proprietary use; her harrowing plight and that of thousands of other women and girls (some prepubescent) are described in searingly graphic detail. After the war, these women (who've aged several decades for every year of captivity) are too traumatized and ashamed to aid the Allies' feeble attempts at prosecution. There seems to be no real recovery from this level of atrocity, and Keo's story cannot equal Sunny's in intensity. After the war, Keo continues to search for Sunny, mourning and playing music. While the novel's nonsequential structure feels disjointed early on, it gains focus and power as Sunny's story unfolds. In the political maneuvering for Hawaii's statehood in 1959, the two families, bearing their emotional and physical scars, find some form of healing. Davenport's prose can verge on the purple, especially when describing Keo's musical artistry, yet overall she tells a powerful tale of love and loss. (Aug.) FYI: Davenport grew up in Honolulu, the daughter of a native Hawaiian whose ancestors were Tahitians, and a U.S. sailor from Alabama. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Library Journal Hawaiian-born Davenport's new novel continues the forceful and lush yet unromanticized depiction of her native islands that characterized her debut, Shark Dialogues (LJ 4/1/94). Though Davenport reintroduces Pono, the kahuna or seer who dominated Shark Dialogues, star-crossed lovers Keo and Sunny are the heart of Song of the Exile. Keo, a talented jazz musician, leaves home and family to pursue his musical obsession. Sunny follows him to Paris, but the horrors of World War II separate them. Sunny eventually suffers the fate that thousands of women endured as "comfort women," or forced prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. Davenport's scope broadens to cover Keo's family, the Meahunas, but the suffering, tragedy, and survival of these lovers remain the haunting, mesmerizing centerpiece. This should join other Hawaiian fiction on library shelves, including Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (LJ 1/97) and Sylvia Watanabe's Talking to the Dead (LJ 8/92). Recommended.AFaye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon Libs., Eugene Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Davenport weaves the history and culture of Hawaii, the U.S., Europe, and Asia, from the period just before World War II to Hawaii's statehood, into the restless search for self-discovery of her unforgettable characters. Keo is Hawaiian born, but he is deeply stirred by the allure of jazz, what one character calls "the tongue of the exile." Talented enough to be invited to join a band in New Orleans, Keo strikes out, leaving behind Sunny, an ambitious young woman bent on saving her mother from an abusive marriage and rescuing a sister abandoned in Korea. The lovers are rejoined in Paris in 1939, at a time when Americans are headed home. The war and their divergent drives separate Keo and Sunny and send them on a lifelong search to regain what they've lost: for Keo, his sense of family and of himself as a Hawaiian; for Sunny, the humanity lost during her brutal internment as a "comfort woman" in the Japanese war camps. Davenport writes profoundly of human relationships, lyrically of jazz, and insightfully of racial issues in this incredible novel. Vanessa Bush --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Kirkus Reviews An engaging love story dissipates long before this chronicle of a native Hawaiian family's melancholy experiences comes to a minor-key conclusion with statehood in 1953. Davenport (Shark Dialogues, 1994, etc.) introduces us to Keo and Sunny, young lovers, in Hawaii during the late 1930s. After hearing a visiting jazz group, Keo is entranced by the musics energy and emotion and vows to master it. Dew, the group's leader, tells him he must come to New Orleans or Paris someday, and Keo vows to take Sunny with him in pursuit of his fortunes. Initially unable to travel, she finally reunites with Keo in 1940 in Paris. As the Nazis march into the city, pregnant Sunny flees to rescue her lost sister in Shanghai. Feeling guilty for having let her go alone, Keo follows and finds Sunny and his newborn daughter before hes imprisoned in Shanghai. Sunnys sister and daughter die, then Sunny spends the remainder of the war in Rabaul, where shes forced to serve as one of hundreds of thousands of comfort womengirls, really, some as young as tenfor Japanese soldiers. Released from prison, Keo returns to Hawaii, picks up his jazz music, and, while touring through postwar Asia, continues his unsuccessful hunt for Sunny. His heartache grows, his music declines, and the plot fans out to encompass several additional characters, including Endo, a former Japanese soldier who once saved Keo's life in Paris but who also participated in the abuse of Sunny on Rabaul. The tale ends with statehood affirming cultural pride but also bringing the expectation of further exploitation. Davenport has a clarity of vision that makes her descriptions of Hawaii a match for the island's lush environment, though her attempts to vary the themes of her core story add just complicated overgrowth. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. RABAUL NEW BRITAIN, 1942 "... SOON THE 'IWA BIRD WILL FLY. HUGE MAMMAL WAVES WILL breach and boom. It will be Makahiki time. Autumn in my islands ..." She sits up quickly in the dark, taking her body by surprise. Her fingers roam her face, a face once nearly flawless. She drags her knuckles down her cheeks. Outside, electrified barbed wire hums. She feels such wrenching thirst, she sucks sweat coursing down her arm. Then carefully she rises, gliding like algae through humid air. She listens for the sea. For that is what she longs for--waves cataracting, corroding her to crystals. From somewhere, gurgling latrines. Even their sound is comforting. A kerosene lamp is steered into the dark. Sunny watches as dreamily it floats, comes down. A soldier's hand, the hand of memory, places it on the floor, revealing a yeasty, torn mosquito net. Inside, a young girl on a narrow bed, so still she could be dead. In watchtowers surrounding the women's compound--twenty Quonset huts, within each, forty women--guards yawn and stroke their rifles. One of them half dozes, dreamily composing an impeccable letter to his family in Osaka. "Mother, we are winning.... The Imperial Japanese Army will prevail!" He is growing thin. In one hut a young girl, Kim, pulls her net aside. Burning with pain, she crawls into Sunny's narrow bed, into her arms, and sobs. Sunny calms her, whispering, "Yes, cry a little, it will help you sleep." "It's hardest when the sky turns light. I think of my family who I will never see again. I want to run outside, throw myself against the fence." Sunny sighs, breathes in the smell of sewage, failing flesh. "Kim, be strong. Think of music, think of books--normal things we took for granted." "I don't remember normal things." Kim scratches at her sordid legs, a girl of sixteen. "I don't remember life." Sunny shakes her gently, feeling mostly bone. "Listen now. When the whistle blows for mustering, we'll stand up straight, eat whatever scraps they throw. No matter how filthy the water, we'll drink. With what is left we'll bathe. We'll do this for our bodies, so our bodies will know we still have hope for a future." "What future?" Kim whispers. "Two years of this. I only want to die." "Hush, and listen. Death would be too easy, don't you see?" Sunny sighs, begins to drift. "... In Paris now it would be cool. We would stroll the boulevards." Her voice turns dreamy. "We might even take a cab." Kim looks up, asking softly, "Will the drivers be rude again?" "Oh, yes. And my French is so bad. Maybe this night we would go to Chez L'Ami Louis." "Oh! The food is rich, so excellent." Kim momentarily comes alive, for this is her favorite game. Imagining. "What wine shall we order? The house Fleurie?" "And paté. And oysters! Will you dip mine in horseradish, Sunny?" "Of course. And I will scold you when you pocket the matches, such a tourist thing." Her voice softens. She thinks of Keo, their time in Paris. Rocking in lush geometries of morning light, nothing between them but heartbeats. Then spinning under marble arches, through terraced parks, young and careless and exiled. Not seeing Paris collapsing around them, not seeing their lives were crumbling. "How happy we were. Grabbing each moment, so alive." "I have no such memories," Kim weeps. "I never shall." "Of course you will! One day this will end. You will heal. Life will help you to forget." "... Yes. Maybe life is waiting in Paris. Beauty and adventure. And shall we walk this evening down the Champs Elysées? Shop for the softest kid gloves? And cologne? Or maybe take a café and wait for Keo. I'll close my eyes, pretend I'm there, just looking on." "Shh," Sunny whispers. "Soon it will be daylight. If they find us together, they'll beat us again." She feels tears come: hunger, torture, incessant pain, the knowledge that she and this girl--all of them--are dying. "Don't think so much. It will consume you. You will never survive." "Survive. For what?" Kim's voice grows loud; girls sit up listening behind their nets. "You talk of life. How can we face life after this? How can we face ourselves?" Sunny's voice turns urgent. "We must live. Or what have we suffered for? Will these years have been for nothing?" Under her pillow is a makeshift map, drawn so she can remember where they are, where they were shipped to months ago. Here is the town of Rabaul on the island of New Britain, east of Papua New Guinea, just north of Australia. Here is the Pacific Ocean and, far to the northeast, Hawai'i. Honolulu, home. Farther out is the world, the great oceans. Far across the Atlantic, there is Paris. Yesterday. But, always, her mind snaps back to Rabaul. Exhausted, weak beyond knowing, Kim sinks back on the filthy mattress, stale grains of rice matting her hair. "I want to sleep, I want to dream. Oh, take me back to Paris, shops, cabarets. Tell me again how you and Keo rode in a car with the top down...." Paris, Sunny thinks. We were so innocent. Not understanding trains were already leaving stations, streets were darkening with blood. She sighs, begins again, dreamily, and as she talks, girls struggle from their beds, move down the aisle, brushing her mosquito net. Some so thin, their movements seem delicate, some so young they are children, ghosts weaving through a scrim. Wanting only to listen and dream, they sit with arms entwined, heads bowed against each other. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile In this WWII-era love story, author Kiana Davenport investigates her own Hawaiian ancestry through the lives of a couple who meet by chance in Honolulu just before the world erupts. Gabrielle de Cuir presents a stirring rendition of the story; her convincing dialects and emotion carry forward the saga as Keo (a jazz trumpeter) and Sunny (a Korean-Hawaiian beauty) struggle not only through the perils of war, but also through Hawaii's effort to achieve statehood. As lush in production value as the island it portrays, SONG OF THE EXILE does an excellent job of integrating its dual themes of love and patriotism. R.A.P. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more