Do You like book Airships (1994)?
It feels strange to give an explanation of why I love this book so much. I gave one of the stories, "Testimony of Pilot" to a group of kids I was teaching last winter, and I am afraid to say not a one of them found it the least bit interesting. In fact, they were mightily confused by it. We had been reading an O'Henry Prize collection, and I think they had gotten used to a very structured, rigorous kind of short story; the Hannah didn't really do if for them. But the reason I like Airships so much, I think, has something to do with the fact that these stories aren't at all what you're supposed to expect from "classic" short fiction. They're messy, they have ridiculous, over-the-top turns of phrase, and they often don't coalesce into any sort of moral or tidy meaning. Which is precisely why this book is one of the best examples of how the short story is a far more flexible medium than most people give it credit for. And why I'll teach this book to any short fiction class I ever have, even if they hate it.
—Sam
What makes this widely varied (size and subject) collection of stories unique is that all are told from inside the mind of (mostly) unbalanced narrators. Each seems to start in a state of confusion or sheer chaos, but Hannah masterfully brings the facts and the motivations into play, and his descriptions are truly fresh and raw. His style is like few others I’ve read, evocative of TC Boyle’s finest and whacked out storylines like Vonnegut. One must be alert and reading carefully as his prose is exactly, though at first will appear sloppy or amateurish. But the master is at work here, and I found I needed to be awake and not overly tired to truly appreciate the particular blend of hilarity and tragedy of his people, often recurrent across stories and mostly in the 1960s south. It must be acknowledged that his experimental style, at the time of his writing, was likely the first of its kind in the short story. But one should not be afraid of “experimental” here, these are wildly entertaining and every page howls with highly quotable and piquant snippets (many of which are already covered here in Goodreads). It has been 19 years between Hannah’s for me, but I intend to read chronologically now and look forward to his novels. Hannah writes often of the elderly, a theme being the old “liars” at the end of the pier, maligned and diseased and drinking warm beer as they evoke tales staring into the gulf from the end of the edge of Mississippi’s delta: “There was a gallery of pecking old faces scrutinizing him from the rail. Some fo them were widowers too, and some were leaking away toward the great surrender very fast. Their common denominator was that none of them was honest”. Or the reminiscence of couples, thinking back on spouses, times which weren’t so rosy: “Carlos was a Presbyterian then, trying to be a preacher in Tucson, where Navajos started a fistfight during Carlos’s sermons and the women simply fell dead asleep, this being their only period of rest in the week. His wife ate near five pounds of food a day. She was a wonderful cook, but mainly for herself. She ate directly out of the big iron pots while the food was still steaming, using a big ladle… Food gave her an insufferable burst of energy, as if she’d swallowed a pound of drugs. Carlos would be thinking about God, about what a wretched nasty trip it was in this world of clumsy sorrow, about the holiness of the Law, about converting to Catholicism because of its stubborn travel throughout history. She, who was dead now by heart attack in the actual fornication, would roll and swagger into his bedroom, ‘Get them trousers down, you little dude. Old Nancy needs some fun’”. And so it goes. Oh, yes, religion is covered in spades, and Hannah parodies and explores the divide between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in a most original and insightful manner.The last story was a favorite of mine, a longer one, is about a tilted old house, where an old bedraggled woman in Jackson, MS endures the insults of her downtrodden boarders, takes a tumble and reminisces about her life while lying in wait to die: “Mother Rooney surged up on her haunch bones. She worked her lips together to make them twinkle with spittle. She shucked off her ugly shoes by rubbing each ankle against the other, folded in her legs under the moon in blue roses of her hip, pushed herself against the stairwell. In general, she arranged the corpse so that upon discovery it would not look dry, so that it would not look murdered or surprised in ugliness”. Remember her youth and conversion to Catholicism: “I was happy, sucked right into the Church, because I got its feeling…. It was a thrill to cover your head with a scarf because you were such a low, unclean sex, going back to Eve. I guess, making man slaver in lust for you and not be the steward he was meant to be. You were so deadly, you might loop in the poor man kneeling next to you with your hair…Woman, which even the monks have to trudge through waist-deep before they finally ascend to sacredness. God told me this, and I blushed, knowing my power”. The story has a tidy ending, when her cruel tenants, drunkenly dropping by for yet another mean trick, finally see the human being in the old woman: “’I know it’s horrible now. But I and Silas wanted to make amends to you, really. We are so sorry for what happened in this house. You know, it started with the little joking insults and then it grew to where hurting you as a cult. You really occupied us. Especially those of us who were taking a lot of bad traffic in the shit of the outer world and were originally endowed with a great amount of rottenness in our personal selves.’”
—Ned Mozier
Someone gets beaten up with a banana. I think that was my favorite part. As my sense of humor starts to corrode, I have to look around carefully for dumb things to laugh at. There are plenty in Airships.I may be biased in my love for this book, since it is a book filled with Southern narrators and I am still preoccupied with all that because I am new to it. Really, tho, these are psychotic narrators and the South is the perfect setting for insanity. Insanity is my biggest fear and so I am living in the wrong place, but reading about it makes it all the more easier to accept.I almost never feel the need to own a book, but this is one I wish I had on my miserable little book shelf.
—Sarah