Customer Reviews

The Dead Fish Museum: Stories

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In reading this collection, you get the impression that D'Ambrosio is a writer who understands pain--not just his own--that of those around him and that of our culture as a whole. The Dead Fish Museum is another name for a refrigerator that holds the bodies of fish pulled from a filthy river. Fish that will never be eaten, for they are too plentiful, too damaged. They are rotting.

The characters in these eight stories are those fish, and so are we.

Instead of being a culture which hangs onto rites of passage, rituals, ways in which we scar our body that show we have come through childhood--that we have made it into adulthood and are reborn--we are a culture which scars itself in private, which hides in closets and nicks its skin with razor blades, which takes burning matches to its flesh.

In short, we are a culture who holds onto our pain so tightly--indeed, is shackled to it--that the only way to express it is through violence--directed at others, directed at ourselves. And why? Because we don't know what else to do. We have lost our survival skills and escape is no longer an option--fight or flight means nothing.

"Charles D'Ambrosio's second collection of fiction is superlative. The Dead Fish Museum demonstrates that Mr. D'Ambrosio can write about anything he chooses. Indeed, his stories are so various that he remains mysterious; his author-personality cannot be caricatured into a marketable outline that would haul him into the American spotlight, where he so richly deserves to be. Mr. D'Ambrosio can write in a humble voice. He can write quiet stories. He can write busy stories. He can write about aggressive, troubled youth. He can quickly sketch a Chinese bodega, kill of the owner, and leave him, a bare resonance at the beginning of a long story. And he can create characters who care almost as much about God as Flannery O'Connor's characters: "If your mind's too great for you," Pete was saying, "you should just let God take it. That's what Christ did. He was braindead. He never thought on his own."

At the same time, Mr. D'Ambrosio can invent a Manhattan screenwriter who keeps "cranking out those bigtime Hollywood screenplays in order to bankroll a lifestyle that broke the sillymeter." He is one of the few writers who can satirize hipster consumerism without sounding small: "In the little syncretic boutiquey spiritual figurines lined up on the windowsill and the crystal prisms strung from the ceiling on threads of monofilament I saw the very same occult trinkets that had decorated every bedroom I'd ever been in." He can also write like a wise old poet, with a character reflecting, "Our life together took on a second intention," after he learns that his wife was raped as a teenager. Or, like a young poet, he can write about a woman's eyes that "When you looked into them, you half expected to see fish swimming around at the back of her head, shy ones."

The Dead Fish Museum collects stories of beauty, insight, and rare eclecticism."

I don't write many reviews, but I had to for this one. D'Ambrosio is a favorite author of mine and his books are few and far between (I'll be looking through The New Yorker for my next fix). One of the stories didn't capture me, but I'm not going to ruin anyone's time by saying which one - we all have our opinions. If I had to pick a favorite though, that would be The High Divide: trenchant emotions, so beautifully expressed. And the ending sticks with you. I had previously read this short story and I happily read it again. It's a book you won't want to give away.

Charles D'Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum (Knopf, 2006)

The people who inhabit Charles D'Ambrosio's stories (which I can't yet figure out is they're interconnected or not) do not live in our world, as much as they seem to. In D'Ambrosio's slightly alternate universe, there is no such thing as hope. These people live in an exceedingly dark world, but they do their best to make the most of what they have; at least, his main characters do. The minor characters often revel in the darkness, exploiting it for their own ends. Take, for example, the building crew in the wonderfully-named title story (the reason for whose name is revealed within, and is one of the novel's finest pleasures). The guy whose POV is the story's focus is one of those who's just trying to make the best of it, but it seemed to me that the main character was one of his underlings, a South American expatriate who relocated to New Jersey after the administration for which he worked was overthrown in a junta. More cynical readers might consider him a stereotypical immigrant, coming to America and being quickly disillusioned with the idea that the streets aren't paved with gold, but his outlook is quietly optimistic as long as he can keep it that way. Arrayed against him is the other underling, an African-American who seems obsessed with the idea of goading him into a racial confrontation. No one in the story (and outside the story, for example the writer of the jacket copy) seems to understand why this confrontation is destined to take place, but you can't help but feel that it is.

It's this sort of layered presentation that separates these stories from the general pack. These characters are both interesting and well-presented, while the situations they're in are just realistic enough not to be able to be called absurd, though that scrim of absurdity is always just around the corner, out of sight. I know there are folks out there who don't like short stories, but as long as you're not one of them, this is a book full of small pleasures that's well worth your time. ****

The amazing thing about this octet is how fully developed the key characters and in some cases the support protagonists are; this level of depth usually requires a novel and that often fails to produce well rounded players like Charles D'Ambrosio has done with his short stories (and a few short novellas). The prime players share in common a fatal flaw that they fail to recognize as each one deceives themselves on what is causing their woes and how to fix their unhappiness. Instead they tend to misread the tea leaves and compound their inner turmoil and discord. All the inclusions are excellent and the collection will be recognized as one of the year's best anthologies with its insight into human needs and desires thwarted by personal negative traits in which rationalization, passing culpability and coping become the norm. The fascinating tales such as the twisted obsessive "Up North" with the husband fixated on bringing justice to the unknown family friend who raped his wife when she was a teen grip readers as few compilations can.

Charles D'Ambrosio's collection will not disappoint. I have been a fan since reading his collection "The Point" in the 90s, one of my all-time favorites. His simple yet haunting writing seems effortless in its execution, showing a distinct mastery for his craft. Highly recommended.

I read a review for this short story collection in a local paper and felt the desire to find it no matter what. For one thing, I was tired of reading huge, thick novels (after slogging through The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower by Stephen King, of course I would) and felt like a few good short stories would do me fine, but more than this I was taken in by excerpts of D'ambrosio's searing writing style; the "my mouth is full of dead boys" line taken from "Screenwriter" cinched the deal. As I later found, while it was his writing style that took me in, it's also the only thing he's got going for the majority of his stories.

For the most part, D'ambrosio takes on a plotting style where he starts up a story, gets you good and hooked, and then ends it randomly. For some stories, this works, wherein it's not the resolution of the plot you're looking for but the message it carries; the two best stories, "Up North" and "Screenwriter", deal with secrets kept between spouses and the distance an artist keeps between his subject material and his own personal life (respectively). The rest just kind of ramble on and on until D'ambrosio gets tired and moves on to another story. Some seem to hint at a message (does "Drummond and Son" contrast the father's meticulous habits to his son's disorganized schizophrenia? How about "Blessing" and its touch upon leaving one's history behind for others to find?), but most don't even bother ("The High Divide", "The Scheme of Things", "The Dead Fish Museum", and "The Bone Game" are a few good examples of stories that flounder about with nothing crucial to say).

I dunno. I'd like to think that I'm a fairly open-minded individual who can appreciate a story that goes for the unconventional, but D'ambrosio does nothing but prove himself to be a horribly pretentious writer who squanders his excellent writing style on stories that mostly go nowhere. While I felt like this book was a waste of my time on an enjoyment level, I'll still learn from it. As a writer myself, it's good to know what not to do, and D'ambrosio teaches me that in spades. For the rest of you, though, who knows if you'll fetch anything worthy out of this mess.

I had never read anything by Charles D'Ambrosio before this and I had no idea if his short fiction writing was any good since I couldn't pinpoint what kind of short story collection this was, but the premise in the back cover seemed interesting. The Dead Fish Museum centers on unstable, confused who have no real concept of who they are and they usually make a stink of things in their lives rather than improve them. The stories that stand out the most here are "The Bone Game," "The Scheme of Things," "Blessing," and "Screenwriter." "The Scheme of Things" is especially good. It illustrates the sort of depth and flawless characterization that I love in short stories. Kirsten is a very compelling character and she is by far the best character in this book. Most of these stories had been previously published in magazines like The New Yorker and had received great praise from readers. While some of the stories have insufficient depth and failed to spark my interest, The Dead Fish Museum is nevertheless an interesting read. I may give future works by Charles D'Ambrosio a whirl in the future.