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Tropic of OMG
Apr. 26th, 2013 08:19 pmI think my brain is rotting from not being in school for years because I have no damn idea what to say about Tropic of Orange.
Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita was assigned reading in my Ethic America literature course senior year, which had to be dropped from the syllabus due to some cancelled classes. It then languished for three years in my Ye Olde Stack Of Books What Were Dropped From Syllabi Due To Cancelled Classes But Which I Am Totally Going to Read One Of These Days.
Tropic of Orange is about a whole lot of things. A lot of it is about two big fiery truck crashes that happen at either end of a mile-long stretch of freeway in Los Angeles, The Other City That Americans Tell Stories About. The car owners all get out of their cars and run off the freeway, and then the homeless people the weird no-man's land the freeway cuts through (I cannot visualize if this is space under the freeway or if there's a strip of land between the northbound and southbound sides of the road or what; I don't know how the roads in LA are set up) move into the abandoned cars in between the two on-fire trucks and it becomes a big thing. The other major plotline involves oranges; there seems to be a shipment of drugged or poisoned oranges coming into LA and people who eat the oranges are dying mysteriously, and so oranges quickly become banned and the juice companies desperately start trying to hype passionfruit juice, like, mid-infomercial (it's very 1984), but there is one orange making its way up to LA from Mexico that seems to be dragging some sort of magical thin line through it that is apparently supposed to be the Tropic of Cancer, except that it's an actual line and not imaginary. There is also a third plotline involving illegally harvested infant organs, which I am a bit sad didn't get gone into in more depth.
There are at least five perspective characters here, including Gabriel, an LA reporter with a house in Mexico; Rafaela, who housekeeps Gabriel's Mexico house after leaving her husband and LA; Bobby, Rafaela's husband, a Chinese immigrant who moved to LA from Singapore by pretending to be a Vietnamese refugee; Buzzworm, a guy who always seems to know how to help people and who is working with Gabriel to try and get some reporting done on what's going on in the less glamorous parts of LA; Manzanar, a homeless guy who used to be a surgeon but now spends his time conducting traffic like it's an orchestra; and Emi, a hilariously inappropriate TV news producer and Gabriel's sometimes-girlfriend. There is also a man who is five hundred years old and performs odd feats of strength, who is known by a bunch of names, and whose story makes up the most postmodernist/magical realist part of the book, except possibly the bit where Rafaela eats somebody (I think that's what happened, at any rate). He is traveling North to wrestle Supernafta, which is apparently NAFTA incarnated as a Terminator pro wrestler.
Race and class--and particularly issues of globalization--are major, major themes in this novel. Wrestling NAFTA and the homeless taking over LA's busiest freeway are just the beginning. The novel has a lot to say about ethnic identity, multiculturalism, immigration, eminent domain, gangs, the news media, materialism, and pretty much everything else that relates to access and distribution issues. It doesn't give any pat answers that I can tell you about right here in a sentence or two; Yamashita definitely is very well-informed and has pretty clear opinions on these topics but they're dealt with in the novel in more of an exploratory kind of way--it's not the kind of book where stuff wraps up neatly; more the kind of book where everyone thinks a lot about things and that makes you think about them too.
Overall I think that this book is extremely good, and I really wish I'd had the opportunity to read it in class, with a bunch of related criticism to read and the ability to discuss it with a bunch of very smart people. There's a hell of a lot going on here.
Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita was assigned reading in my Ethic America literature course senior year, which had to be dropped from the syllabus due to some cancelled classes. It then languished for three years in my Ye Olde Stack Of Books What Were Dropped From Syllabi Due To Cancelled Classes But Which I Am Totally Going to Read One Of These Days.
Tropic of Orange is about a whole lot of things. A lot of it is about two big fiery truck crashes that happen at either end of a mile-long stretch of freeway in Los Angeles, The Other City That Americans Tell Stories About. The car owners all get out of their cars and run off the freeway, and then the homeless people the weird no-man's land the freeway cuts through (I cannot visualize if this is space under the freeway or if there's a strip of land between the northbound and southbound sides of the road or what; I don't know how the roads in LA are set up) move into the abandoned cars in between the two on-fire trucks and it becomes a big thing. The other major plotline involves oranges; there seems to be a shipment of drugged or poisoned oranges coming into LA and people who eat the oranges are dying mysteriously, and so oranges quickly become banned and the juice companies desperately start trying to hype passionfruit juice, like, mid-infomercial (it's very 1984), but there is one orange making its way up to LA from Mexico that seems to be dragging some sort of magical thin line through it that is apparently supposed to be the Tropic of Cancer, except that it's an actual line and not imaginary. There is also a third plotline involving illegally harvested infant organs, which I am a bit sad didn't get gone into in more depth.
There are at least five perspective characters here, including Gabriel, an LA reporter with a house in Mexico; Rafaela, who housekeeps Gabriel's Mexico house after leaving her husband and LA; Bobby, Rafaela's husband, a Chinese immigrant who moved to LA from Singapore by pretending to be a Vietnamese refugee; Buzzworm, a guy who always seems to know how to help people and who is working with Gabriel to try and get some reporting done on what's going on in the less glamorous parts of LA; Manzanar, a homeless guy who used to be a surgeon but now spends his time conducting traffic like it's an orchestra; and Emi, a hilariously inappropriate TV news producer and Gabriel's sometimes-girlfriend. There is also a man who is five hundred years old and performs odd feats of strength, who is known by a bunch of names, and whose story makes up the most postmodernist/magical realist part of the book, except possibly the bit where Rafaela eats somebody (I think that's what happened, at any rate). He is traveling North to wrestle Supernafta, which is apparently NAFTA incarnated as a Terminator pro wrestler.
Race and class--and particularly issues of globalization--are major, major themes in this novel. Wrestling NAFTA and the homeless taking over LA's busiest freeway are just the beginning. The novel has a lot to say about ethnic identity, multiculturalism, immigration, eminent domain, gangs, the news media, materialism, and pretty much everything else that relates to access and distribution issues. It doesn't give any pat answers that I can tell you about right here in a sentence or two; Yamashita definitely is very well-informed and has pretty clear opinions on these topics but they're dealt with in the novel in more of an exploratory kind of way--it's not the kind of book where stuff wraps up neatly; more the kind of book where everyone thinks a lot about things and that makes you think about them too.
Overall I think that this book is extremely good, and I really wish I'd had the opportunity to read it in class, with a bunch of related criticism to read and the ability to discuss it with a bunch of very smart people. There's a hell of a lot going on here.