description: The Barnes &amp; Noble Review The Man Who Would Be King  A hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the north coast of Borneo. The microcosm that resulted, boasting three Christian means of worship, stone quays, great swaths of lawn, a recreation club, and musical levees, eventually encompassed a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns for decades paid for solely by the opportunity to take heads.... In this preface to her astonishing new novel, KALIMANTAAN, C. S. Godshalk neatly sums up the bare historical facts of the life and accomplishments of Sir James Brooke, the English adventurer and self-styled Rajah who established a dynasty that would rule Sarawak for a century and served as inspiration for Joseph Conrad's LORD JIM. Ruthless Dyak pirates and aboriginal headhunters, empire building and the lure of the great game  Brooke's real-life exploits are indeed heady stuff. But this is a story others have already told. The focus of Godshalk's fiction is the quotidian drama of men and women trying to lead normal lives in a brutal, alien environment. As one character best in the position to know reminisces, "The story appears most clearly in the marginalia."  KALIMANTAAN is set during events of such epic proportions that its marginalia yield an astonishing wealth of individual stories. At its center is the love story of Gideon Barr, Rajah of Sarawak, and his 18-year-old bride, Amelie, a love frustrated and at last overwhelmed by misunderstanding, disease, tragedy, and emotional and physical distance. In counterpoint tothisdoomed romance is the obsessional love Barr's cousin (and eventual successor) Richard Hogg bears for Maureen Dolan, auburn-haired wife of the territory's surgeon and Anglican missionary. Between these unbalanced poles, all manner of lesser loves and liaisons flourish and die at an accelerated, tropical pace. In a climate that breeds snakes, cholera, infection, and smallpox, it is this very impermanence that the Europeans must confront if they are to prevail in Sarawak, to learn to accept the Dyak wisdom, "All that is living...is rushing toward death. All that is dead is rising to life." This strange new world attracts still stranger visitors: naval megalomaniacs, demented clergy, a Russian from Vladivostok with two trained bears, an olive oil salesman, an Austrian dentist, and an Italian operatic troupe whose diva, an extravagant "little pigeon," would continue to "flap around the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea for a decade and a half, so full of holes the most violent typhoons passed through and left her intact."  Godshalk's prose is both challenging and incandescent, ranging from the literal distillation of malarial delirium to clear-eyed assessments of Dutch, Chinese, and British political machinations. Her subtle command of the third person allows for a deeply intimate connection with each character  nuances of personality, poetic insights, and unexamined secrets are revealed organically and believably. The sheer number of characters animated in this manner is staggering. Hardly a cook, governess, or minor factotum of the raj makes an appearance without some singular, unforgettable aspect of their personal lives being revealed.  Minutely researched and vividly imagined, KALIMANTAAN is an immensely satisfying novel, a stunning invocation of the storyteller's muse.
language: English
title: Kalimantaan
titlecomplete: Kalimantaan
genres: Fiction, Historical, Asia, Adventure, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 365
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
publisher: Books on Tape, Inc.