4thace reviewed Pilot Impostor by James Hannaham
Review of 'Pilot Impostor' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Seeing it as part art book, part prose poem collection, part written performance art, and part homage to Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, I took to this work with growing enthusiasm. The author doesn't explain his ideas which sometimes slide off into near-obsessions, but it's pretty clear that they all have at least a little to do with the modern facades which we encounter in life. That would come off as pompous but he keeps a light touch on his little snippets, bringing farce into accounts of destruction, nonsense and word play in among intelligible narrative pieces which have the beginnings of plot. There is racial tension along the way, disturbing mid-air mishaps, avant-garde visual art alongside scenes of disaster and horror, and by the end a group of poems split up into actual lines of verse. I thought it was fresh and intriguing, other people might find this book less …
Seeing it as part art book, part prose poem collection, part written performance art, and part homage to Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, I took to this work with growing enthusiasm. The author doesn't explain his ideas which sometimes slide off into near-obsessions, but it's pretty clear that they all have at least a little to do with the modern facades which we encounter in life. That would come off as pompous but he keeps a light touch on his little snippets, bringing farce into accounts of destruction, nonsense and word play in among intelligible narrative pieces which have the beginnings of plot. There is racial tension along the way, disturbing mid-air mishaps, avant-garde visual art alongside scenes of disaster and horror, and by the end a group of poems split up into actual lines of verse. I thought it was fresh and intriguing, other people might find this book less substantial than what they would like. One thing it did do was to make me go looking for works by poet Fernando Pessoa which he wrote under numerous pseudonyms so I could try figuring out what that was all about.
I received an advance reading copy of this book without DRM through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review the publisher could use as promotion.