An obtuse collection with flashes of genuine fun and humanity.
Callahan offers a debut book of brief works that’s strange but undeniably unique.
It’s an odd fit to call this a collection of short stories. The tales have no rising action as they build to a natural conclusion or some sort of twist; indeed, there’s not much action at all. Instead, the stories are abstract and exist mostly as the interior monologues of particular characters. Many don’t contain much dialogue at all, and what’s there is handled with dashes and infrequent attributions, rather than traditional quotation marks. In “A Gift,” the first story of the bunch, Callahan knocks readers off-kilter from the first line, “The narrator was in pain,” but never explains why this person is called “the narrator.” A first-person voice is added later, meaning that the character of “the narrator” isn’t the narrator of this particular story. Characters are often in some sort of existential crisis and sometimes obsess over well-known, real-world people, such as author Rick Moody or professional basketball player Dirk Nowitzki, whose lives then become part of the narrative. The one constant in these tales, however, appears to be pain itself. The main character in “Cymbalta,” for example, seeks out Moody as a life coach and writes to him of his own struggles with his self-image, his drinking, and even his bowel movements. Readers will find pathos and humor in these exchanges. Too often, though, the prose seems impenetrable. Readers must buy into Callahan’s stream-of-consciousness style from the beginning for the tales to have any impact. He writes in great waves of clauses, sometimes stretching a single sentence over a couple of pages, and there are also times when the stories try too hard to be clever and fall flat. “The Great Challenges the Good to a Duel: Pistols, Dawn,” for example, beats the cliché “the great is the enemy of the good” into the ground by anthropomorphizing “great” and “good” and having them fight it out for 12 pages.
An obtuse collection with flashes of genuine fun and humanity.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9837405-7-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Starcherone Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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