Fiskadoro

Rating:
Summary: Hallucinatory, profound, brilliantly scattered
Review: A friend gave me copies of Denis Johnson's "Fiskadoro" and "Already Dead," and told me to read "Fiskadoro" second since it was maybe too bizarre an introduction to the author's work. As a lover of the bizarre, I ignored his advice and read "Fiskadoro" first.

As noted by other reviewers, probably Johnson's greatest strength is his poetic and creative use of language. Like Bruno Schulz (as so brilliantly translated by Celina Wieniewski), he gives you sentences and paragraphs that are truly breathtaking, like unexpectedly stumbling across a scene of incredible beauty. Also like Schulz, Johnson is also quite adept at conveying dreamlike states of mind, and can inspire the conviction that delirium is more true than "objective" reality.

"Fiskadoro" can be called a science fiction book only in the most hair-splitting sense. It's not a druggy fantasy like the Carlos Castaneda books. Nor is it a cautionary tale warning us of the effects of nuclear devastation--although it certainly does convey some of those horrors very effectively. This is more of a psychological adventure, a meditation on human consciousness and being, with plenty of entertaining experiences along the way.

Johnson's humor is very sophisticated. It's a sign of his great skill that much of the humor is totally contextual, but nonetheless very amusing. His humor is not the knee-slapping variety, but more the awe-inspiring, thought-provoking variety. But very funny nonetheless.

Some of the imagery is so cinematic, so well described--with fairly ordinary language surrounding precisely the correct word to unlock the door to mysterious imaginings--that I would find myself thinking, "Wow...Can someone really do that with just words?" The guy is truly a gifted writer.

Occasionally, too, Johnson throws in a wise observation or imparts a philosophical nugget of the sort that a serious reader might jot down in a commonplace book, and that's always very rewarding.

The characterizations are less satisfying, for the most part. There are a number of very interesting characters, and we do get to know some of them pretty well, but I sensed a certain distance from most of the characters, except maybe Mr. Cheung. This is less a character-driven story than an idea-driven one. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but some readers may be disappointed by that.

The attempts of Mr. Cheung, gardener, clarinetist, and Manager of the "Miami Symphony Orchestra," to maintain a civilized sensibility in the face of choas and entropy are very touching. He reminded me of Mr. Tagomi in Philip K. Dick's "Man in the High Castle"--thoughtful, dignified, worried, prim, self-critical, conscientious, dogged, earnest. And Johnson does an excellent job of helping us see things through Mr. Cheung's eyes when he's the POV character.

I thought the latter portion of the book, after Fiskadoro himself goes through his transformation, was less satisfying than the earlier sections. (This may be because I embarked on that section the day after seeing the second part of the Ken Burns documentary on Mark Twain. Suddenly "Fiskadoro" seemed trivial in comparison to the monumental works of Clemens.) Even though some very intense things happen, the story became more symbolic and less emotionally involving for me in its concluding stages.

I was also a little put off by the growing feeling that the author regarded black and poor folks as very alien. Maybe that's unfair, but there's sometimes a condescending, patronizing vibe toward some of the characters. I prefer a writer who's in there with the characters to one who could be slumming. (Or is that my own prejudices rearing their hydra heads?)

Overall, though, I highly recommend "Fiskadoro." There is much more going on here than a beautiful writing style. Johnson shows you wonders, he embraces pain and fear and death as integral to life, and he reminds you that despite everything, life is precious and profound, and, yes, worth it--and sometimes strange in ways that are almost impossible to imagine. He gives you much to think about, but he slips the ideas in skillfully, organically, so that they appear in the light-bleached, desolate splendor of the landscape in a way that makes them seem like they always belonged there.

Rating:
Summary: Allah, Quetzalcoatal, Bob Marley
Review: Have you ever wished you could believe in ghosts? Or Jesus or Bob Marley or Bruce Lee? "Fiskadoro" creates a bizarre, poetic world where the civilization that stands between us and earlier forms of belief has been wiped out in a nuclear attack.

The new denizens of Twicetown (once Key West) live among the fragments of a half-remembered time, where scraps of different languages, musics, religions and machines exist without the memory of their earlier meaning or purpose. With no history to understand, the characters return to a more primal (primitive?) instinct for magic, ritual and resurrection.

Johnson writes with the weird precision of dreams, where details like the heat or the color of a tree are crystal-clear, but the larger meanings stay blurred. He's especially good at describing extreme states--epileptic fits, the Saigon airlift, a druggy tribal initiation rite.

But the characters themselves never felt very real to me. Maybe that's part of the point: without memory, identity softens and leaves a new margin for the spirit-world, for the deaths and strange rebirths that fill the story. But I found it hard to stay interested in what happened to anyone, and the novel ends (for me at least) with more muddle than mystery.

Still, Johnson's makes his fractured world every bit as believable as ours. His sharp, lyrical prose will haunt you long after you've forgotten the plot.

Rating:
Summary: A Denis Johnson fan
Review: I have to admit the first time that I read this book I had almost no idea of what was going on. After I second reading I now see that it was not the authors fault but my own. This book, sometimes just very haunting, is also at the same time very beautiful. It's the fourth book of Johnson's that I've read, and it was entertaining enough for me two read two times, so that is saying something. It is not as powerful as say "Jesus son" or as poetic as some of his other works, but I think that if you are a fan of Johnsons than you will not be dissapointed.

Rating:
Summary: Existence and Memory at the World's Ends
Review: Is it a novel about *the* End of the World, the horrifying vestiges of a nuclear war? Or, is there something else at play, in this master writer's intriguing novel? On the one hand we have a fascinating examination of humanity rebuilding, picking up its own shattered pieces and putting itself back together. On the other hand, Johnson reminds us that The End of the World is, in many ways, both a collective and an individual experience.

One parralel (End of the-) World is the Fall of Saigon in 1975, for a refugee, Maria/Grandmother Wright. Against her experience, the novel is hinged. So too, Fiskadoro's coming of age ritual experience is also his own End of the World--the end of all that he once knew, and his rebirth as a new man.

In the end, Johnson asks us to reflect on memory and existence, and the subjectivity of life's great epochs. He leaves us with a novel not easily forgotten.

Rating:
Summary: Existence and Memory at the World's Ends
Review: Is it a novel about *the* End of the World, the horrifying vestiges of a nuclear war? Or, is there something else at play, in this master writer's intriguing novel? On the one hand we have a fascinating examination of humanity rebuilding, picking up its own shattered pieces and putting itself back together. On the other hand, Johnson reminds us that The End of the World is, in many ways, both a collective and an individual experience.

One parralel (End of the-) World is the Fall of Saigon in 1975, for a refugee, Maria/Grandmother Wright. Against her experience, the novel is hinged. So too, Fiskadoro's coming of age ritual experience is also his own End of the World--the end of all that he once knew, and his rebirth as a new man.

In the end, Johnson asks us to reflect on memory and existence, and the subjectivity of life's great epochs. He leaves us with a novel not easily forgotten.

Rating:
Summary: beautiful, wondrous story
Review: This book is about humanity, and coming of age. I thought the language was beautiful. Like a symphony that is both sad and wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: An Anthropologist at the End of the World
Review: This is a glowing work, rendered in a luminous prose that seamlessly undulates between bright-pale caprice and dimmed, primitive(in tone, not execution) heaviness. Fiskadoro is a tale of the ancient human tribes of the future and Johnson is our masterful archeologist/anthropologist, an amnesiatic clairvoyant of the end of the world. We're presented with a post-apocalyptic glimpse of humanity's persistence in the lush yet devastated area south of the Florida Keys. It's a story about time's confluence, the ghosts of history's wandering presence in the present(our future), the self as a product of culture, the self as an ever dying vessel of forgetting, family, greed, born leaders, born failures, birth, death. To attempt to further encapsulate this novel is to truly do it a disservice for it unfolds magically before the reader's eyes, transports us far away to the here and now... if that makes any sense. Its somber tones(somber in the way a cello seems to lament at the same frequency of the heart) are moving, its compassion mixed with sudden moments of darkness is striking, its thematic, structural, and philosophical complexities are easily savored, devoured, drunk, basked in... for Johnson tells it with a sensitivity and a love and a vision that is both unique and rare(inspiring).

Rating:
Summary: An Anthropologist at the End of the World
Review: This is a glowing work, rendered in a luminous prose that seamlessly undulates between bright-pale caprice and dimmed, primitive(in tone, not execution) heaviness. Fiskadoro is a tale of the ancient human tribes of the future and Johnson is our masterful archeologist/anthropologist, an amnesiatic clairvoyant of the end of the world. We're presented with a post-apocalyptic glimpse of humanity's persistence in the lush yet devastated area south of the Florida Keys. It's a story about time's confluence, the ghosts of history's wandering presence in the present(our future), the self as a product of culture, the self as an ever dying vessel of forgetting, family, greed, born leaders, born failures, birth, death. To attempt to further encapsulate this novel is to truly do it a disservice for it unfolds magically before the reader's eyes, transports us far away to the here and now... if that makes any sense. Its somber tones(somber in the way a cello seems to lament at the same frequency of the heart) are moving, its compassion mixed with sudden moments of darkness is striking, its thematic, structural, and philosophical complexities are easily savored, devoured, drunk, basked in... for Johnson tells it with a sensitivity and a love and a vision that is both unique and rare(inspiring).