Kalimantaan

Rating:
Summary: A malarial dream
Review: A true story of power and adventure in the jungles of Borneo, complete with killer crocodiles, pirates, and blood-thirsty headhunters... But with Godshalk as the author, the story becomes, for good or bad, not an adventure story but something else entirely.

Her prose is certainly lush but it's as if she wrote the book in the delirium of one of the tropical fevers she describes. A particular sight or scent is described in great detail while the action remains blurred.

Godshalk has a love of personal pronouns which only adds to the feeling of being lost in some malarial dream. She'll begin a new scene with a unidentified "he" or "she" and only after many paragraphs or pages does it become clear who she's actually writing about.

Like some other readers, I often found myself rereading passages just trying to determine who the unnamed characters were. Or vainly searching the glossary for the meaning of some undefined native term.

The book is full of rich imagery. But the plot is weak and the characters dreamlike and unsubstantial. I wouldn't recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Kalimantaan - botched history or great novel?
Review: Do you have to be interested in British colonialism in the Far East to enjoy this book?

Emphatically not. The establishment of a precarious enclave of Victorian civilisation in the jungles of Borneo is just the backdrop to CS Godshalk's tale of ordinarily-well-meaning-but-deficient human beings, with - in this case - most of the "ordinary" filleted out by the rigours of the place.

What is left is convincing, moving, rounded, tragic. The "hero" is Gideon Barr, accidental(?) founder of the British outpost at Kuching; the "heroine" Amelia (Melie), his teenage bride, growing to understand herself too late (?); the "villain" cholera, or the jungle, or chance.

The prose is a constant delight. Godshalk's delicacy of touch reminds me of Gide, her compassionate omniscience of Stendhal. Characters (European and "native") shimmer into view, completely described in their carriage or their hat, disappear for 200 pages and then reappear not as they were but suitably changed. It takes a bit of work to follow these creatures around, but - well - it's worth it (the same applies to Dostoevsky).

Is this what really happened in Borneo around 150 years ago? Of course not. No merely historical reconstruction could offer such depth. This is a novel, and a glorious one.

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite, despite flaws
Review: First, the flaws. Entirely too many characters, most inserted seemingly at random to perform perfunctory actions. Entirely too many untranslated terms. I would suggest to Ms. Godshalk that she either include a glossary of all necessary terms or none at all. The frustrating experience of finding widely known terms translated and more obscure ones not was disheartening.

Despite these flaws, I found Kalimantaan to be a stunning read. Godshalk's language is elegant and lyrical. In the context of the story and its overwhelming sense of place, her florid language could almost be described as economical. Incidentally, I would not have believed this myself until finishing the book.

The story of a Englishman creating a private Raj in Borneo in the latter half of the 19th century, Kalimantaan is bursting with restrained vitality and morbidity. Births, deaths, and violence seem to collect rather than get swept away, leaving an aggregate of emotion that I couldn't help but share.

Not an easy read, but highly rewarding.

Rating:
Summary: kalimantaan
Review: great book. challenging, reminding me of when i was attempting to read my father's _tales of washington irving_ when i was in 2nd grade. at first, i was finding my feet, getting the jist of _kalimantaan_, and then i found myself immersed. piercing insight into flawed humans in relationships in a 19th c. exotic setting. very real characters, horrific death scenes (not written in order to make us squirm, fortunately--and originally), and exact portrayals of love in many, many forms. a broad, swashbuckling adventure story, and those involved are tragic, memorable, and deeply affecting in their humanity.

Rating:
Summary: For awhile I was transported to another world
Review: I'm not sure why I found this book so fascinating, except that it allowed me to enter a world that I might never have known. I didn't like the main character, Barr, or many of the others, except the children, always the children, but that wasn't the point. The juxtaposition of good and evil is beautifully realized as we are slammed from one to the other, feeling the steaming tropical land, seething, forever changing. The author has somehow captured the essence of the duality of man and his prideful attemts to conquer the unconquerable. There were times I wasn't even sure who was speaking, but it didn't matter. Like Barr's European wife, I just followed her lead and drifted through this amazing world. It is a wonderful gift when a writer can offer such a feast to her readers.

Rating:
Summary: An absorbing book - which needs reader engagement
Review: Kalimantaan is a book which transports the reader, but requires of them a serious involvement. Its not an easy bedtime read, or at least not unless like me, you immerse yourself in it until the extemely small hours and then surface from the Bornean depths like a deepsea diver. It is a Conradian book, but with attention to womens characters. (I could have wished for more development of the Bornean women,however) There are dozens of characters, and despite what some readers have said , once you have familiarised yourself with Godschalk's style, you DO know who the "he" is. The story, which is of the fabled Rajah Gideon Barr (based on Brooke)and his contemporaries is fabulous enough, but it is the detail which conveys the true ambience of the place. Dreamlike passages are interspersed with shocking facts, often delivered in such a way that they almost slip by you. The death toll of children lost to tropical diseases and the benumbed state of their grieving parents in the hands of a lesser author would be milked for Hollywood tears, but Godschalk avoids all this and her queer flawed, courageous inhabitants stay with you . So too do the magic, mystery, and 'otherness' of the world she makes them inhabit. As has been said of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose wonderful books are mostly set in India, she makes you feel as if the world she describes IS the world, and the one you inhabit is the fiction If I have a negative comment,it would be the paucity of the glossary, which appears to contain about a quarter of the words I for one would dearly have liked to understand

Rating:
Summary: Overrun with lushness
Review: Like an earlier reader, I stayed up all night to finish this book. I was transported to a dirty, difficult life in Borneo with death, disease and danger always lurking in the menacing darkness.

But, also like earlier reviewers, I found it difficult to keep track of the story: who "he" or "she" was, what the many native terms meant. There is a sketchy family tree and an abreviated glossary, but neither is adequate.

That said, reading the book with a eye to tracking only Amelia and Gideon's stories is not too hard. Leave the other characters as colorful background, interesting but indistinguishable.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult, ambitious work
Review: There is so much that is lovely and fascinating about this book, that it is especially sad that it fails to come together on so many levels. Others reviewers have, rightly in my view, criticized her cryptic style. She tends to use pronouns in the place of names so frequently that often it is difficult to know who did what to whom, and while her use of Dayak words can give a sense of place, the glossary in the back is so incomplete that it became a running joke for me to spot the occasional word that is defined. Characters drop into and out of the narrative with such amazing speed that recognizing their names when they die seems almost a triumph -- and they do tend to die. Godshalk spends almost all of her emotional capital by the end of the book.

While each of these elements contributes to one's overall frustration with the book, the larger problems emerge with the narrative. We view the story first from Gideon Barr's perspective until he marries and we take up his wife's view. Barr disappears, as a rounded character, in favour of the wife, who despite what seems like a great effort on Godshalk's part, never becomes one. She remains a largely passive figure, who's tribulations and mental anguish become the central focus of the book. Much of this reads like a bloated exercise for a creative writing class -- and often makes the book's four hundred pages seem interminably longer.

The fact that Godshalk puts fictional characters into a real time and place, usurping the fascinating people whose story is apt to be more interesting is itself problematic, but I couldn't help feeling for the great naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace who becomes, in Godshalk's hands, a sort of lovesick puppy.

Rating:
Summary: Heart of Darkness, but on steroids
Review: This is a huge novel about a relatively unknown and exotic place, Borneo, in an exotic time (the English colonial period of the 1830's.) Gideon Barr sets out for Borneo frankly and openly to carve an empire, as men in the East India Company did. Barr is brutal and effective in quelling pirate attacks on the coast. In exchange for ridding the coast of a nuisance, he demands that he be set up with a land holding and names himself Rajah. The Rajah sails back to England and pragmatically chooses for himself a Rani, Amelia, daughter of a cousin. Amelia is not attractive, but possesses the useful characteristics of strength, health and a no-nonsense attitude that Barr knows will help her survive the almost impossible conditions of heat, disease and other disasters.

The opening of the novel focuses on Barr and his obsession to please his dead mother, who actually cared nothing for her son and abandoned him early in life. Barr spends his adulthood creating a fantasy-saint and making a living offering of his achievements to lay on her altar. Thus his drive to build an empire, complete with the trappings of royalty.

The focus then switches to Amelia, his young bride. She survives the terrible conditions in Borneo, where fabrics and paper rot from the humidity and heat, where the top of walls in the houses must have a gap open to rain and wind lest the moisture fester inside the rooms. Disasters such as cholera epidemics, savage attacks are common. Children die of diseases; they become viewed as necessary casualities, replaceable parts. The servants are not be trusted; Amelia makes a particularly perceptive observation that the Chinese staff is not eating the food they prepare. They would never turn down good food; what are they putting in it--poison? There is also the enigmatic figure of Barr's native mistress, a local sorceress. What is her role in the goings-on?

The scope of this novel is large, but it has some of the theme of Heart of Darkness, where a man can hide and become a king, though at a perilous price. It is loosely based on Conrad's other tropical novel Lord Jim, hence the similarity. It's a fine, adventurous read. Although not really all that similar to it, if you liked the Poisonwood Bible, this book would probably appeal to you as well.

Rating:
Summary: Too distant
Review: This is the kind of story that I expected to get deliciously lost in, with its exotic locale and adventuresome characters, but Godshalk's style would not let me.

The story, of an English explorer, Gideon Barr, and his young wife in the mid-19th century who created his own empire in Borneo, is rich with the opportunity to let the reader feel transported to a far away time and place. But that never quite happens. The first 150 pages or so are extremely tough going, with dry accounts of Barr's successes and failures as he slowly establishes himself in this untamed world. Then, he sends for his young cousin, Amelia, or Melie, to become his bride. At this point, the story seemed to open up a bit, and I began to feel involved. But never completely.

There were many horribly sad circumstances, that didn't have the emotional impact on me they could have, if the author didn't keep me so distanced from them. There are interesting secondary characters, like Maureen Dolan, and Hogg, but they aren't well developed. I'm giving it three stars, because the bones are there for a really great story; I just wish there was a bit more meat on them.