Captain Maximus

by Barry Hannah

Book Overview

"Oh, help me!" cried the narrator of Ray- possibly the most outrageous and surely the most celebrated of Barry Hannah's four With Captain Maximus, Barry Hannah carries the principle of obliterating... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394544587
• ISBN13: 9780394544588
• Release Date: April 1985
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 101 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Even Greenland

These were the very first Hannah stories that I read--short, startlingly energetic bursts of comic misdirection that made me rummage round and pull on my big black boots in a species of brimming triumph that I bet I'm not the only one out there who's ever experienced the likes of. I remember literally bouncing diagonally round my little apartment in kinks and frisks of laughter. It must have been somewhere in there roundabout the middle 1990s--a decade despite the well-publicised notoriety et cetera and ad bleeding nauseam that turned out to be for the discerning and retiring outer borough type a bit of a bleeding riot in more ways than one. My own story abbreviated and reduced gives the following: a fourteen-year stint in Astoria, Queens, beginning upon my arrival here on these shores in 1990, and lasting until I fled to the suburbs in 2004, where to this day day I mooch about on weekends doing the vacuum cleaning and pretending to garden but I still work on weekdays so nowadays with the economic climate and the outsourcing and what have you that means at least three hours total commuting time per day which turns out pleasantly enough to also mean many good books just gobbled up in no time. Astoria is a fine place to have had a hut in I must say, suited me in any case right down to my Frye boots, which I bought in the summer of 1988 in Flushing--I was here just for the summer that year, reconnoitering you might say, very bleeding hot it was I remember, that particular season. I worked in a fencing company based in Jamaica, Queens. Paradise Fence on Hillside Avenue. Six days a week too and in the 80s I used to wear these tiny little round tortoise-shell-like glasses with wire wraparound bits for the ears, belonged to some powdered old biddy from way the hell back in the Big Smoke, and everybody thought I was sort of slow and harmless on account of such alarming magnification tightly enclosed in what were really just ridiculously small plastic circles. Had me head shaved too that summer, on account of the heat, which added some to my image as some sort of loony on leave. During one sweltering domestic job in Rego Park a woman came outside and gave the crew lemonade--she found out where I was from and asked how long I'd been in New York. "Nearly three months now," I said. "You're English isn't bad for just three months," she said. "Thanks very much," I replied. "I really like it here. I think I'm going to come back someday and maybe stay a little longer." And I did. Three apartments I shacked up in between 1990 and 2004, the first lasting a little over eight months coz the utterly repulsive and money-grubbing super slash landlord there was this pasty-faced Romanian peasant who hated me from the get-go and tried to gouge me right, left and center until I snapped and told this cash-crazed tinker that he could stuff the security deposit right up his Bucharest coz I'm keeping this month's rent and oh yeah I'm moving to the next building too and you sme

Barry Hannah, wonderful as always.

Barry Hannah, Captain Maximus (Penguin, 1985)Barry Hannah is America's most sadly neglected literary author since John Fante, and that's a shame. Hannah's place in literary history should be carved in rock, if for no other reason than having written one of the world's few absolutely perfect novels in The Tennis Handsome; had he retired after that, he should have been able to retire secure in the fact that his literary legacy would stand as long as humanity does. But he kept writing, and every once in a while he'd turn out another wonderful and overlooked gem. The short story collection Captain Maximus is without doubt one of them.Hannah hands us a small (too small, for my tastes, but you can't have everything; it runs ninety-two pages in trade paperback) collection of stories, many of which had only appeared in limited runs or places one normally doesn't find short stories (for example, the newspaper) before appearing here. Spanning the first half of the eighties, the collection shows once again why Barry Hannah should be hoisted on the shoulders of the literary establishment to tapdance on the heads of vacuous New York Times bestseller list residents; his characters are savage, unrepentant, funny, mixed-up, and above all fiercely intelligent and with a finely-honed sense of the ironies of their existences. Most of the stories here are only a few pages long, but still manage to pack a wallop. As a side note, this is unmistakably work of that genre known as "southern fiction;" had a genetic engineer taken the best parts of the creative genes of Flannery O'Connor and mated them with the same from Faulkner, they might have gotten Barry Hannah (or, at least, the oddly fraternal twins of Hannah and Ferrol Sams). So let your taste for whatever it is that makes "southern fiction" southern be your guide, but one way or the other, give Hannah a try. If you want a small dose first, by all means, start here.(Side note: it is amusing that 90% of the bibliographies of Hannah I found on the web list Captain Maximus as a novel. Ah, the hazards of letting books go out of print for years.) *** ½