Tropic of Orange
Seven characters, most of them in Los Angeles and one of them in Mexico, are followed through a single week in which the city's freeways seize up, a package arrives at the airport and a man who used to be a doctor conducts the traffic from an overpass as though it were music.
About
Tropic of Orange is a novel by Karen Tei Yamashita, first published in 1997. It is set in Los Angeles and Mexico, and it has been read as magic realism, as speculative fiction and as a story about the way the two countries are bound together.
The book is built out of seven characters and seven story lines that cross one another, and it is organised by days: seven of them, with each character taking a chapter on each day. In Los Angeles a television news executive named Emi and her lover, the journalist Gabriel Balboa, are chasing the stories of a local disaster, including a freeway brought to a standstill and the people living in the abandoned cars.
Gabriel's most reliable source is a man called Buzzworm, who walks the streets handing out advice and information, and it is he who points him at the package that has arrived at the airport and at Manzanar Murakami, a former doctor who stands above the freeway and conducts the traffic as if it were a symphony.
Book details
- Author
- Karen Tei Yamashita
- First published
- 1997
- Series
- No series listed
- Subgenre
- Magical realism
- Primary genre
- Literary Fiction
- Tags
- No tags for this book.
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Baby Bat
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