Word: guterson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...enemy on an island is an enemy forever," muses one character in David Guterson's luminous first novel. That is another way of saying there are no hiding places on a relatively small island: everyone is forced to be conscious of others and the need to be removed from others. In the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound in the early 1950s, both the residents of Japanese descent and the "American" communities are further divided and shadowed by their recent memories...
...Guterson's particular gift is for description: he takes you into one fully researched scene after another -- gill-netters at work, an autopsy, digging for geoduck clams. With equal precision, Guterson traces the shadow lives of Japanese in the Northwest at a time when Americans of Japanese descent were referred to by Census takers as "Jap Number 1 ... laughing Jap, dwarf...