I liked half of this book which is a fictionalized account of the life of the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearns (whom I had never heard of). Beginning in Greece, the story tells of his mother, a beautiful naive young woman protected by her father and brothers. She has an affair with an Irish soldier/surgeon who was stationed in Greece. After their marriage she eventually leaves her son Lafcadio in Ireland with an elderly but supposedly wealthy great aunt.

The next section of the book is set in Cincinnati where Hearns now goes by Patrick and is a young journalist struggling to get by. He boards in the house where a young Black woman is working; they eventually marry. Hearns leaves her later.

It is the third section of the book which completely lost me. Set in Japan, there are so many references to Japanese history which I am totally unfamiliar with. There are terms, names, etc. which I just couldn't wade through.

Each part of the book is told as an interview to someone else who is writing about Hearns who apparently becomes famous for his writings about Japan. ( )

What a pleasure it was to read this book!

The Sweetest Fruits, by Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong, is a fictionalised life of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Of Greek-Irish heritage, Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkada; was abandoned by his father and then by his mother who unwisely left him under guardianship in Ireland. From there he was tutored in Wales and educated in France; but learned the craft of journalism and translation in the US; and subsequently in Japan became a teacher who introduced its culture and literature to the West. As we learn from the Afterword, Truong discovered the bare bones of his life story during research for a previous book Bitter in the Mouth. The novel had to have an authentic cornbread recipe from the South not the North, and the brief but intriguing bio that she found in an encyclopedia of food alerted her to Hearn's La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes (1885). As a child refugee from Vietnam, Truong is fascinated by people who choose to live in exile from country, family, language, and the physical and emotional assemblage of home so she had found the topic for her next novel and The Sweetest Fruits is the result.

A deft mixture of fact and imagination, Hearn's story is told in the distinctive voices of three women who were crucially important in his life, punctuated by the contrasting voice of his real-life biographer Elizabeth Bisland. The effect is not to make the reader doubt the veracity of these women but to acknowledge that people present different versions of themselves to others for all sorts of reasons, dubious or otherwise.

BEWARE: MILD SPOILERS

The first narrator is the illiterate (real-life) Rosa Antonia Cassimati, (1823-1882) dictating her story to Elesa, who is nanny to her second but (so far) only surviving child, Patricio Lafcadio Hearn. En route to Dublin where she hopes to reunite with the father of this child, Charles Bush Hearn, Rosa has escaped the bullying and cruelty of her childhood home where she was held to blame for her mother's premature death and destined to live out her days in a convent. Naïve and inexperienced in the ways of men, Rosa has to learn the hard way that men like Charles care more about their military careers in far-flung places than they do about their families.

The reader does not learn about the betrayal of Rosa's hopes in this part of the story. That comes later in the second narration, which is by (real-life) Alethea Foley (1853-1913) in Cincinnati.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/12/23/the-sweetest-fruits-by-monique-truong/ ( )

It is not a bad book but I just found it rather dull with fairly unengaging characters. Aletheta was the most interesting story but it was so inconsistent that I never really got the energy together to figure out what was going on. Only about 3/4 of the way through did I finally wonder if there actually was a Lofcadio Hearn to find our there was. Clearly, I am not clever enough to know him or his work but this didn't make me want to seek it out.

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The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong is the imagined story of three women who were all attached to Greek-Irish writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn. Ms. Truong came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam, and is an award winning, bestselling author.

The novel is divided into three parts, three women talking about their relationship to Lafcadio Hearn. The first is his mother, a Greek woman who married an Irish officer in the British Army to get out of her father’s house. She followed her husband to Ireland, only to be forced to leave him.

The second, a former slave, an African-American woman from a Kentucky plantation. Making her way to Cincinnati after the Civil war working at a boarding house cook. At the boarding house she meets, and marries Hearn who is trying to make his name as a reporter.

The third, a Japanese woman named Matsue who got married to the new English teacher… Mr. Hearn. Matsue, a samurai’s daughter, gives birth to four children and collaborates with Hearn in his literary ventures.

I knew nothing about Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, I actually only found out he was a real person after finishing to read this book. The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong is the author’s attempt to tell the readers about the Greek-Irish writer through the women who knew him throughout his life, through their words, acts, and deeds.

The book has its ups and downs, the last third took a bit of concentration and perseverance, but overall I though that the writing was witty, and the narrative sharp. The author does not shy away from showing the humanity and flaws in the women who tell the story, as well as Mr. Hearn who had a tremendous impact on each one of their lives.

I almost skipped this book because the synopsis made it seem like it would be a history of one of those “great men” no-one had heard about. Instead we get different view points of what made Mr. Hearn’s voice so memorable to his fans, through tales from the women who fell by the wayside, but have had as much an impact on the writer as he had on himself.

What I thought was remarkable is that the author did not make Mr. Hearn the villain, nor the antagonist even though the story is told through the eyes of the women who loved him, the ones he loved back, and did wrong during his life. The author simply implies that due to childhood disability and dark skin he can relate to people who were marginalized at the time, and some are still marginalized today.

Frankly, I had no sympathy for Hearn, I am not familiar with his work and – even though I don’t think it was the author’s intention – he comes off as a jerk, arrogant, and even cruel. Even though Mr. Hearn is the focus of the book, the women telling it, survivors one and all, are the ones to give the reader insight. ( )