FISKADORO [Paperback]

Denis Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 1986

Hailed by the New York Times as "wildly ambitious" and "the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, 'The Wasteland,' Fahrenheit 451, and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones," Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all-too-possible tomorrow. Deeply moving and provacative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to breaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A leap of the imagination. . . stunningly delivered." -- -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A leap of the imagination. . . stunningly delivered." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A mythical story. . . coming-of-nuclear-age tale, the making of a new man from the ashes of the old world. . . a key to the conundrum at the center of the world." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"Haunting. . .an eerie and powerful visionary novel." -- Boston Globe

"Wildly ambitious. . .the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, 'The Wasteland,' Farenheit 451 and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. . . . Its strange, hallucinatory vision of America and modern history is never less than compelling." -- New York Times --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of The Name of the World, Already Dead, Jesus' Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Angels. His poetry has been collected in the volume The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 221 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (February 12, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394743679
• ISBN-13: 978-0394743677
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,483,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Allah, Quetzalcoatal, Bob Marley, March 2, 2001

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fiskadoro (Paperback)

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.

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hallucinatory, profound, brilliantly scattered, February 1, 2002

By 

Clear-eyed (GA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fiskadoro (Paperback)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Post-Modern Popul Vuh ?, September 1, 2006

By 

Skronk (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fiskadoro (Paperback)

You've gotta love an eschatology that encompasses Bob Marley, Jesus and Quetzalcoatl.
Denis Johnson's coming of age story revolves around the boy Fiskadoro, and his
clarinet teacher, Mr. Cheung. These inhabitants of Twicetown (set in the
post-WWIII Florida Keys), some of whom speak in a Spanglish or Rastafari patois, are
trying to restart civilization from the remains of the old. The apolcalypse has ruptured all
cultural continuity, leaving Twicetown's inhabitants with cryptic items from the past
from which they fashion their lives and beliefs. Old auto parts are fashioned into
furniture, phrases with forgotten meanings, song lyrics, and prophesies gleaned from a
children's book on dinosaurs all become part of their new creation myth: a post-modern
Popol Vuh.

Events in time seem to recycle and inform the future: One character, Grandmother Wright,
mute with age and senility, is trapped in her own memories of her escape from Vietnam during
the fall of Saigon. Her memories of her survival parallel the present: past becomes prologue
to the future.

With me so far? This book might be a tough introduction to Denis Johnson's work, but for me, his poetic turns of phrases made me stop several times in order to reread and savor select
passages. Overall, Fiskadoro shows that now matter how advanced our civilization may be, we're only a misstep away from new, spooky world.