Present Tensed

Looking Back: April 1999 — Snow Falling on Cedars

D. Guterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars” was the only book I read dur­ing the final month of Peace Corps train­ing in South Africa (April 1999).

Bor­rowed from a fel­low vol­un­teer, I recall most the lan­guid pace and the tra­di­tional mys­tery setup writ large (and well).   Try­ing to immerse myself into the com­pli­cated dis­course on race in South Africa, Guterson’s story about race rela­tions between the Japan­ese and (white) Amer­i­cans in the Pacific north­west post-WWII allowed me to retain some amount of the­matic con­sis­tency with the world around me.

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