with her parents-in-law and her sister-in-law and is
basically their unpaid cook and maid. When Priya
does not have a baby within the first year of her
marriage, her parents-in-law encourage her to find
a job so she can contribute to the financial well-
being of her family.
Priya gets a job as a receptionist in a Hollywood
media firm and, due to a series of coincidences, gets
to interview a major movie star for the entertain-
ment magazine published by her company. Priya
has the rare talent of getting celebrities to reveal
their deepest feelings and also has discretion about
how she uses this information in her writing. She
experiences a meteoric rise in her career, but at
home she has to keep her glamorous life a secret.
Her husband and his parents are not supportive of
what they see as a corrupt American lifestyle and
insist that Priya dress in Indian clothes and give up
a major career. Priya manages to keep her home life
and her work separate from one another for a short
while. When her secret becomes known to her fam-
ily, she realizes that her situation is untenable, as
her husband does not support her. She tricks him
into marriage counseling, but his reaction to that
experience compels her to leave the marriage. She
returns to India an unhappy woman. However, her
husband realizes his mistake, undergoes therapy,
and returns to India to court his wife. This time
he works hard to win her over, and Priya finds the
romance that she has always been looking for.
As in her previous novel, Daswani produces en-
gaging characters, and her novel is fast-paced. She
returns to the themes of love, romance, cultural
clash, and familial relationships in this novel. Her
focus is not so much on a critique of cultural insti-
tutions as on creating a character who manages to
find a middle ground between two vastly different
cultural worlds.
Nalini IyerVolcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i
Garrett Hongo (1995)
GARRETT HONGO’s Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i
examines his own experiences to connect to his
Japanese ancestry. A fourth-generation Japanese
American, Hongo was in his thirties when he felt
the internal pressure to seek out his roots. Vo l -
cano chronicles his first and subsequent journeys
to the village where he was born. Having grown
up in multicultural Los Angeles, Hongo felt a cul-
tural dissociation from his Japanese ancestry. His
family’s silence on the subject of the Japanese relo-
cation camps during World War II was especially
frustrating to him. The book grew out of a need to
discover his identity.
Reviewers of the book praise Hongo’s beauti-
ful descriptions of his birthplace near the Kilauea
volcano. Hongo says that Volcano is written in the
form of a Japanese nikki, a travel diary in the vein
of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. In a review of
the book, Mark Jarman says that Hongo’s minute
descriptions of the plants and geological forma-
tions of the area surrounding Kilauea, the world’s
most active volcano, frame an analogous compari-
son to the imagination’s “geologic upheaval” in cre-
ating a homeland. Hongo’s visits to his homeland
place him in the midst of a family that has been
disrupted for decades. The healing process begins
as the poet reconstructs his past. Hongo attempts
to recreate the island of his father and grandfather.
His grandfather’s nightly retelling of his arrest by
FBI agents during World War II compels Hongo
to remember and to pass on the stories of his own
and his people’s losses—those of land, possessions,
and identity.
Volcano, then, becomes a story of a quest.
Through the narratives and anecdotes of his rela-
tives, Hongo goes beyond the confines of the im-
migrant memoir to forge an almost mythical
account of a people who have kept their traditions
alive. By listening to them in his many visits to his
birthplace, Hongo internalizes this mythology and
makes it his own, creating for himself an iden-
tity from which he has hitherto felt alienated and
dispossessed.
Volcano is a travel book, a memoir, and a nar-
rative of the poet’s rebirth. In lyrical language
that has been compared to Walt Whitman’s for
its use of repetition and lists of images, Hongo
treats many of the themes that are present in hisVolcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i 305