Synopses & Reviews
One hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world he created eventually took in a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. Here, polite Victorian conventions coexisted tenuously with one of the most violent cultures on earth, often with startling results: pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing where least expected.
Into this world flowed a small tribe of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, and saints-- the madly talented and simply mad. And the women followed: wives and would-be wives, spinster nursemaids and heartless schemers, the rigidly virtuous and the virtually desperate. And always, the children, innocents too often the victims of an elemental nature both lush and deadly.
Kalimantaan is the story of this world, these people. But the deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius.
C.S. Godshalk, who now lives north of Boston, began Kalimantaan while working in Southeast Asia. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized, her last two stories having been selected for Best American Short Stories by guest editors Mark Helprin (1988) and Richard Ford (1990). Joseph Coates, in the Chicago Tribune, hailed one story as a "small Flaubertian masterpiece." Ms. Godshalk is at work on her second novel, which is set in contemporary New England. One hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world he created eventually took in a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. Here, polite Victorian conventions coexisted tenuously with one of the most violent cultures on earth, often with startling results: pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing where least expected.
Into this world flowed a small tribe of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, and saintsthe madly talented and simply mad. And the women followed: wives and would-be wives, spinster nursemaids and heartless schemers, the rigidly virtuous and the virtually desperate. And always, the children, innocents too often the victims of an elemental nature both lush and deadly. Kalimantaan is not only the fictional story of this world, these people, but it is also about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius. "Kalimantaan contains a whole worldone that, upon reaching the last page, you'll immediately want to revisit."Michael Upchurch, Chicago Tribune
"The work of a born storyteller . . . a first novel of formidable imaginative power."Annette Kobak, The New York Times Book Review
"Kalimantaan may be the wisest book about love since Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera . . . It may also be the best historical novel of the past ten years."Scott Stossel, The Boston Phoenix
"Ravishing . . . Godshalk has a genius for cutting to the heart of things, as if the time for leisurely and considered acquaintance didn't exist."Alice Truax, The New Yorker
"Readers will never think of Kipling or Conrad in quite the same way again."Brian St. Pierre, San Francisco Chronicle
"A spectacular book and at times a superb one."Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review "At the height of the Victorian Empire, a young officer of the East India Company carves out a small raj for himself on the forsaken island of Borneo in the Malaysian archipelago. Creatively using historical models in her vivid debut, Godshalk constructs her imaginary imperialist with painstaking local research and well-paced prose that unfolds in evocative vignettes. Gideon Barr braves dreaded pirates, insidious disease, monsoons and bloody reprisals from the native headhunters and the Chinese merchants who resent Britain's trade leadership. In a short time, with swift brutality, he manages to establish a thriving entrepot of English society based on the trade in rare spices and metals, opium, the 'currency of heads' and 'youth disposable as water.' Godshalk's point of view shifts . . . from Barr, as he writes to his dead mother, to those who join him in his megalomaniacal pursuit, including his dangerous cousin and "dark counterweight," Richard Hogg, who will carry out his own ruthless expansion in the territory as the rajah's deputy . . . Godshalk finds her steady narrative strength in the voice of Barr's 18-year-old English bride, Melie, through whom we are able to absorb the rich, sodden beauty of the archipelago, the startling diversity of its inhabitants and the humanity in the 'phenomenon' of Barr himself. Godshalk's use of native names and words . . . helps bolster the illusion of an extraordinary, vanished world."Publishers Weekly
Review
"The work of a born storyteller . . . a first novel of formidable imaginative power." (Annette Kobak, The New York Times Book Review)
Review
"Kalimantaan may be the wisest book about love since Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. . . . It may also be the best historical novel of the past ten years." (Scott Stossel, The Boston Phoenix)
Review
"Ravishing . . . . Godshalk has a genius for cutting to the heart of things, as if the time for leisurely and considered acquaintance didn't exist." (Alice Truax, The New Yorker)
Review
"
Kalimantaan contains a whole world-- one that, upon reaching the last page, you'll immediately want to revisit."--Michael Upchurch,
Chicago Tribune"The work of a born storyteller...a first novel of formidable imaginative power."--Annette Kobak, The New York Times Book Review
"Kalimantaan may be the wisest book about love since Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera....It may also be the best historical novel of the past ten years."--Scott Stossel, The Boston Phoenix
"Ravishing....Godshalk has a genius for cutting to the heart of things, as if the time for leisurely and considered acquaintance didn't exist."--Alice Truax, The New Yorker
"Readers will never think of Kipling or Conrad in quite the same way again."--Brian St. Pierre, San Francisco Chronicle
"A spectacular book and at times a superb one."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Synopsis
One hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world he created eventually took in a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. Here, polite Victorian conventions coexisted tenuously with one of the most violent cultures on earth, often with startling results: pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing where least expected.
Into this world flowed a small tribe of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, and saints-- the madly talented and simply mad. And the women followed: wives and would-be wives, spinster nursemaids and heartless schemers, the rigidly virtuous and the virtually desperate. And always, the children, innocents too often the victims of an elemental nature both lush and deadly.
Kalimantaan is the story of this world, these people. But the deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius.
About the Author
C.S. Godshalk, who now lives north of Boston, began
Kalimantaan while working in Southeast Asia. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized, her last two stories having been selected for
Best American Short Stories by guest editors Mark Helprin (1988) and Richard Ford (1990). Joseph Coates, in the
Chicago Tribune, hailed one story as a "small Flaubertian masterpiece." Ms. Godshalk is at work on her second novel, which is set in contemporary New England.