Word: guterson
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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...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...
Toward the end, Guterson describes a lighthouse room that "smelled of salt water and snow and of the past," and that is very much the aroma of his richly atmospheric novel. Though movie ready in its pacing and narrative vividness, it is also unusually lived in, focused and compassionate. As its title suggests, Snow Falling on Cedars is poised at precisely that point where an elliptical Japanese delicacy meets the woody, unmoving fiber of the Pacific Northwest. Out of that encounter, Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true...