Customer Reviews

Fishboy

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The above advice is given to our humble narrator, Fishboy, from the mouth of a 'rumored cook' on board a ship at sea. Fishboy has seen the cook's predecessor cleaved in two with an axe by a sailor who was angry about the food he and his shipmates had been served. Fishboy decides that he most likely doesn't want to become a cook.

Author Mark Richard has definitely stirred the literary soup in FISHBOY, his debut novel. There's a quote on the back cover from a review in ESQUIRE: "An eloquent fever dream, a tale told headlong in the language of incantation" -- and that 'fever dream' description fits this work to a 't'.

As I read my way through this ghost story, a fable replete with inner fables, I felt like I had been dunked into a boiling pot of Herman Melville and William S. Burroughs, illustrated by S. Clay Wilson (those of you who remember his 'perverted pirates' underground comix of the 60s will cringe at this reference), with the film directed by David Lynch. Richard's story bubbles and seethes -- he evidently relishes giving the reader the feeling of being unstuck in both time and place, for there are characters and images in this novel that are plucked from sundry eras and locations, stirred up into an intelligent, interesting, albeit not always appetizing stew. This is a world turned topsy-turvy, reflecting 'reality' like a cracked mirror.

Richard's metaphors are sometimes staggeringly beautiful and captivating -- the sea turned to shorebound landscape with mountains of waves, the land turned to ocean by the rolling tide of subterranean upheavals. Consider this short sample from p.163: 'A loose timber from the sun's sunken wreckage floated up and was dawn on the water. In its cool red light you could see how the waters around us were disturbed from beneath. Globes of old air rose to the surface and shattered, spritzing blooms of kicked-up mud. Mobs of waves rushed crowded swells, slapping faces and knocking caps off to the wind.' Whew.

The narrator of the story -- we know him only as Fishboy -- starts his tale by telling us (from p.1): 'I began as a boy, as a human-being boy, a boy who fled to sea, a boy with a whistling lisp and the silken-tipped fingers of another class. A boy with put-away memories of bedclothes bound tight about the head, knocked by a hammering fist; the smell of cigar and show leather and the weighted burlap bag, thrown from a car into a side-road swamp.' The odyssey he undertakes is a fantastic, circular one -- and he views it with an extremely limited perspective, realting the events that occur with both sheltered naivitee and blinding insight.

The novel is sub-titled 'a ghost story' -- and that it is, although it is unlike any ghost story you are likely to have come across. Richard has imbued this work with a 'graspable' surreality -- and I'm not sure if it's the reader or the story who is doing the grasping. This is an unusual, highly unsettling read.

This book catches you from the first sentence/ paragraph and doesn't let go. All rules are off in this book from grammar to linear plot. This is not at all irritating. It's refreshing that Richard assumes that the reader is clever enough to keep up. This is easily one of the best books I've read in years. It has been 3-4 years since I last read it, but I still have lucid memories of passages. Too bad Richard doesn't publish more.

This book serves as a parable and fable. It is a strange world which Fishboy lives in, and the beautiful way the book is written will no doubt lead to strange dreams, as it did with me.

This book was recomended to me by a friend.
It made such an impression on me that when I recall chapters from the book it's as if I'm remembering an old familiar dream in washed out cepiatone colors.
To me, this book reads like David Lynch's film Eraserhead.
Dark, beautiful, ugliness!
Brilliant!

I purchased this book at a used book sale, and had it on my nightstand for two years before I picked it up. When I finally read it, I fell in love with it. I passed it on to my boyfriend -- who's no big fan of fiction -- and he read it, then read it again immediately. I have since purchased probably ten copies of the book. I have a first edition, a signed first edition, a reading copy, and the rest have been purchased for gifts. I am an avid reader, but I'm pretty certain I've bought more copies of this book than any other book. It's a very different kind of book, but I'd recommend it to just about anyone. Anyone who's up for an adventure of a book. "You's all mine, Fishboy."

This book carried me into a merky afterworld that I normally would have been afraid to go- but was compelled to travel with Fishboy as his invisble witness. Its hypnotic pros drew me into the novel as the journey of a soul is never an easy one - but incredibley rewarding. Richard's voice is similar to Angela Carter and Mikial Bulgakov but with a smokey southern drawl. This book reads like a beautiful and terrible painting. If you enjoy well crafted pros and are unhibited about exploring the darker psychological side of human nature, I highly recommend Fishboy.

Fishboy became part of our multi-coastal family in ways we could not of imagined! The story of Fishboy worms into your brain right from the beginning, and each chapter stays with you, like the taste of the ship cooks' soup! We love Fishboy and his shipmates;even the "weeping man who says ----". I challenge readers to see how long they can go before they peek at this story a second time.

Whoa! Like a cross between William Burroughs' "The Western Lands" and Amos Tutuola's "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts." Surely Mark Richard's "Fishboy" is on that level of mastery.
It took me about two months of casual reading to get through this short (227 pages) book but it was worth it. Getting lost in this book is part of the journey, as you'll soon discover. Eloquent chaos and heart wrenching beauty. But not for linear readers!

When I first began reading, I did not know whether the author, Mark Richard, was speaking literally or figuratively - was this a fantastic novel that went beyond reality or was this simply metaphor for what is really going on? Finally, it dawned on me that this story of a crew of fisherman is a series of fishing tales told by the crew members as well as the main character, a young boy.

I felt that I had to re-read many sections just to capture everything that he was saying. This is a very dark tale, one which truth is seldom validated, where savages reign and the impossible is nothing like. I really enjoyed reading this, but after going through several sections multiple times, I feel like there is some slight disconnect in some places. For that I give it a 4-4.5 stars out of 5.

I do not recommend this book for people to don't think and read visually or that rely on literal descriptions. This book is great for those who love Kafka.

I didn't really like this book very much at all. This could be, in part, because I had pretty high expectations for it. After all, according to the book's description, it combined two of my favorite elements in literature: the ocean and feral children. But, much like the sea the book revolved around, my interest lapsed in and out with the regularity of the tide. There would be a fascinating snippet, the imagery-laden text sucking me in, but it would be inevitably followed by a paragraph-long single sentence so heavily overwritten, my interest would completely deflate. I am just so disappointed that I didn't enjoy this more, but at least it was a short novel.