Customer Reviews

Fishing for Amber

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

 

 

"Fishing for Amber" is one of those enchanting books one secretly hopes to acquire every time one purchases a book. It is a treasure-box filled with wonders, each more delightful than the last. Part James Burke's Connections, part Umberto Eco, part Chet Raymo and all delightful, the book is a melding of poetry, fact, and all the stops between. The text meanders through ancient mythologies of the Greek Gods and their progeny, ghastly Irish yarns of bizarre encounters with the Fae, baroque histories from when the Netherlands were the cultural and intellectual center of Europe, and reflections on the author's own father, an Irish storyteller himself. Magical and haunting, it is a wild ride on horseback at midnight not to be missed.

This is an amazing book - a mixture of Fables, Folk Tales, Greek Myths, Dutch history, and Lives of Saints.
26 chapters, one for each letter of the Alphabet, "Antipodes" to "Zoetrope".
There are so many stories here, going off on so many seeming tangents, that you can hardly believe it will hold together, but it does so brilliantly

As the other reviewers here have been quick to point out, this book is a gallimaufry of narrative strands taken from history, folklore, literature and imagination. But, someone will ask, "What is Fishing For Amber all about anyway?" - If forced to be reductionist about it, I suppose the one word that comes to mind is "Associations." In a sense, the interweaving narratives and histories mimic the human mind's tangential nature. Save that, rather than tangents, the associations' points de depart into another history or narrative are circuitous and eventually land one back at another point in the history of, say, amber.

All this makes for interesting, fascinating, enjoyable reading. So why am I, unlike the other reviewers, giving the book only four stars rather than the superlative five? Because methinks that this book, this woof of nested narratives, covering Proust, Vermeer, much Irish folklore, Greek and Roman mythology, a history of submarines, a (true) account of an actual language based on the diatonic scale, hagiography, ergotism and much, much more is a wee bit too clever by half to be a truly profound read. It takes on more than 350 pages can handle, as is evident in the eight page bibliography of 107 sources.

But it's fun, and you will certainly learn much between the covers of this book. I surely did. So, go ahead, drop your nets into these waters. Just beware that what you pull up will certainly be strange without necessarily being rich. You'll have to cast deeper into some of the books in the bibliography for that.