Amazon.com Review
This elegiac sea story is one of those rare narratives likely to pleasure lovers of adventure and lovers of language alike. With beguilingly modest lyricism, and great attention to detail, Michael Koepf, a commercial fisherman for 19 years, conjures up a world he knows inside and out. Consider, for example, this riff on fishing lures: "Neil's favorites were the hootchi-kootchies attached on short leaders behind large blades of curved metal called 'flashers.' The 'hootchies' hid sharp hooks under colorful plastic hula skirts that resembled tiny octopi and squid. The flashers made circles in the water, and the hootchi-kootchies danced behind them. Neil wondered whether these lures looked like real food to the fish, or did they resemble banners in an underwater carnival, enticing the fish to one last deadly ride?" Every fisherman will recognize the rightness of this description, though few would think to say it quite this way.
In the novel's present, Neil Kruger is taking his own last deadly ride. In the wake of a drug-and-illegal-immigrant landing gone seriously wrong, he's adrift on a life raft. As his hope of rescue waxes and wanes, Neil remembers his father and the whole tightly knit community of salmon fishermen in California's Half Moon Bay in the late 1950s through the 1970s. He remembers his own apprenticeship in the seagoing, fish-killing arts. He evokes the moods, the colors, the smells, the shifting energies and voices of the sea, the fish that run below the boat and fill its pit, the gulls that shriek and feast on entrails, the fundamental loneliness and great loyalty of the "huntsmen" who struggle to survive in a world that increasingly disdains their independence and discounts the product of their routinely death-defying labors. He recalls the stories his father's comrades told each other to pass the time when the Half Moon Bay boats managed to rendezvous for an evening of whiskey and cribbage far out to sea, stories that extend the past back to the earliest decades of the century, told in voices that ring absolutely true. What at first seem like random snapshots ultimately sequence themselves into a convincing narrative. Although the book has been compared to The English Patient, Koepf's style and his structure are simpler and less self-consciously literary than Ondaatje's. There are pages of seafaring action here to make your heart beat faster, moments of loss and betrayal to make it heavy, and, finally, a portrait of time, place, and people so lovingly rendered that you end up grateful to Mr. Koepf for making it. --Joyce Thompson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The sea is an abiding presence in the life of Neil Kruger, whom we first meet as he is adrift on a raft somewhere in the Pacific, despairing of rescue and buffeted by a host of memories about the events that brought him to this perilous juncture. This strong coming-of-age novel from the author of Save the Whale evokes the mystical bond between men and the sea. As a boy, Neil is caught in a tug-of-war between his parents: his mother hates and fears the sea, but his father is determined to make a living as a commercial fisherman out of Half Moon Bay on the Northern California coast. Neil is forced to join his father's crew at age 12, when he is introduced to the backbreaking labor and monotony of the fisherman's life, punctuated by moments of fellowship, sudden danger and frightening premonitions: the sight of a dead woman's body floating "face down... as if she was embracing the sea she gazed upon below" continues to haunt the boy. In a style so stripped and plain it is sometimes pedestrian but sometimes vividly cinematic, Koepf conveys a child's confusion about the adult world and his burgeoning awareness of the shortcomings of parents and the dictates of the Catholic church. As his parents' marriage deteriorates and his father's spirit is broken by the near impossibility of turning a profit, Neil understands the older man's essential nobility and finds himself, too, committed to the sea. Koepf outlines his story in a series of vignettes that grow in cumulative power. The sea is the strongest character in the narrative: eternal, beautiful and bountiful; treacherous and deadly.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
