The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong (Viking)

Each of the women who loved Lafcadio Hearn called him by a different name.

His father named him Patrick. His mother added Lafcadio, to identify his birthplace, the Ionian town of Lefkada, on an island that bore the same name. But to her, he was always Patricio, “who was born hungry,” and until she took him to his father’s relatives in Ireland, this was the only name he knew. There he became Patrick. The gold earrings he had worn from birth were stripped from his ears, and his memories of warm sunlight, the hills covered with golden ginestra blossoms, the flavor of garlic, all faded away, but not “the dark and beautiful face--with large brown eyes like a wild deer’s.” He cherished the memory of his vanished mother, saying “I would rather have her portrait than a fortune.”

He left Ireland as soon as he could, finding his way to Cincinnati where he launched his writing career as a journalist. It was here that he met Alethea Foley, the daughter of a slave and a plantation owner who made her living as a talented cook in a boarding house and it was she who called the new boarder Pat.  The two of them traded stories, fell in love, and managed to circumvent miscegenation laws by getting married. Inevitably their union fell apart when the world intervened. Pat made his way to New Orleans where he was became a writer who was known as Lafcadio.

As Lafcadio, he met the reporter who would become his biographer, Elizabeth Bisland, a journalist who achieved fame by racing Nellie Bly—and losing—in traveling around the world in eighty days.  She describes the man who would be her friend for his entire life as “most unusual and memorable...five foot three inches in height...with an almost feminine grace and lightness in his step and movements... abnormally shy.” He had, she says, “an astounding sensitiveness” that “drove him to flight,” and it was this perhaps that took him to Japan.

In a country where he never truly learned its language, Koizumi Yakumo found a kind of safety and came to life. Here he met and married Koizimi Setsu, who became his interpreter, guide, and storyteller. With the birth of their first child, he became a legal subject of Japan to ensure that his wife and children wouldn’t lose their Japanese citizenship. It was no sacrifice. As Yakumo, a member of the Koizumi family, he was given a home from which he had no desire for flight.

Through the voices of Hearn’s mother and his two wives, Monique Truong has stitched together an oblique but vivid portrait of a somewhat vampiric writer, a man who soaked up other people’s stories and made them his own. Truong’s poetic narrative is underpinned by portions of the biography wriiten soon after his death by Elizabeth Bisland, which was largely based upon Hearn’s own version of his life. Through eight years of exacting research and travel, including the discovery of an English translation of Koizumi Setsu’s memoir of her husband (Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn), Truong has created a work of beauty and brilliance, one that transcends Hearn’s life and enriches it at the same time.~Janet Brown