Book Review: The Age of Calamaties
Here’s my review of The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad. Leave a comment if you’ve read it, plan to read it, or have any book recs to share. And don’t miss today’s writing prompt.
The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad is as poignant as it is entertaining… and very, very weird… but ‘very, very weird’ in an intellectually stimulating way that will demand your full attention and reflection. It will have you pausing every few paragraphs to gasp or sigh or chuckle and might even have you reaching for your most trusted historical resources to see how much history you really know and or understand.
First, it should be said that readers should prepare to immerse themselves completely in these short stories if they want to enjoy them. This collection is not one to read on the fly or when you can’t fully pay attention— at least, not if you want to revel in its literary theatrics and accomplishments.
Second, readers should prepare themselves for quite the literary journey once they start reading this collection. Each story challenges and contorts and transposes the concepts of space and time (literally and figuratively) for both the characters in them and the reader, inviting the reader to actively participate in what they’re reading. Choose Your Own Apocalypse literally invites readers to choose the direction of the story they want to read (like those choose-your-own-adventure books many of us read as children!) and starts with a potential ending. And Let’s Play Dead invites the reader to be a part of the story by addressing them with ‘you’ as they witness Anne Boleyn’s many beheadings, as does The Wolves— which implicates the reader in the stories and their ‘historical’ contexts and how they read and engage with them in the modern world in which they live.
Third, readers should be prepared to have their sense of corporeal reality challenged and upended far beyond what typical ghost stories offer. In Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune, the corporeal boundaries of a 1926 housekeeper named Claribel are overtaken by the ghost of Joan of Arc who repeatedly possesses Claribel’s sleeping physical form, turning Claribel’s body into a vessel for revenge and annihilation. And in It Was Probably a Very Nice Day, the Romanov sisters haunt their mother and brother on a ship at sea that comes and goes and is transposed over the palatial palace where they were all executed. And in Inside the House of the Historian, the house shifts and contorts itself and hides and reveals rooms and passages and other time periods while famous characters from various epochs get caught up in a murder mystery.
Of all the stories, Inside the House of the Historian is one of the most compelling, as it brings together the collection as a whole (to me, anyway) by way of its allegorical significance. Through its cast of seemingly incongruent historical characters, which include The Historian, The Professor, Marilyn Monroe, James Adams, Nefertiti, Blackbeard, Queen Victoria, and Ibn Battuta, it questions the influence and role of academia, media, historians, and audiences, in remembering and understanding historical figures and events— which arguably, the collection as a whole does, as well.
What is perhaps the most surprising feat of this collection is how the domesticity of its plots and settings, and the everydayness of its characters and their concerns, bring to light the ordinary humanity of the historical figures that fill their pages, those figures who tend to loom larger than life to most of us mere mortals thanks to how academia and the media have encouraged us to remember them. They force us to ask bizarre but interesting and practical questions like: What if Julius Caesar had a sense of humor? What was Napoleon like when he was at home, and in what ways do people embody his tyrannical behavior in everyday life that might go unchecked or unnoticed? And what figures from history would get along if they were all invited to a dinner party, regardless of their epochs, and why?
Overall, I would recommend this short story collection to those readers who love being reminded of the magic and power behind storytelling, and how it can upend everything you think you know or think you want to know. And I would insist that readers take their time reading these stories, as they’re full of so many things worth reflecting on and exploring. I will probably end up rereading many of these stories myself, as I’m sure there’s plenty more to unpack in their pages.
Have you read this book yet, or plan to read it soon? Leave a comment to start a discussion. Or tell us what we should read and review next!
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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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