Customer Reviews

Fiskadoro

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is a glowing work, rendered in a luminous prose that seamlessly undulates between bright-pale caprice and dimmed, primitive(in tone, not execution) heaviness. Fiskadoro is a tale of the ancient human tribes of the future and Johnson is our masterful archeologist/anthropologist, an amnesiatic clairvoyant of the end of the world. We're presented with a post-apocalyptic glimpse of humanity's persistence in the lush yet devastated area south of the Florida Keys. It's a story about time's confluence, the ghosts of history's wandering presence in the present(our future), the self as a product of culture, the self as an ever dying vessel of forgetting, family, greed, born leaders, born failures, birth, death. To attempt to further encapsulate this novel is to truly do it a disservice for it unfolds magically before the reader's eyes, transports us far away to the here and now... if that makes any sense. Its somber tones(somber in the way a cello seems to lament at the same frequency of the heart) are moving, its compassion mixed with sudden moments of darkness is striking, its thematic, structural, and philosophical complexities are easily savored, devoured, drunk, basked in... for Johnson tells it with a sensitivity and a love and a vision that is both unique and rare(inspiring).

I have had a difficult time wrapping my head around this book, what it is supposed to mean, what it means for me. So this is less of a review and more of a stream of consciousness dump of some of my thoughts on it. First of all, it is set in the post-nuclear war Florida Keys. This area of the planet was saved from nuclear destruction (twice actually, giving one local town the new name of Twicetown), and the residents seem to be divided into several camps, one of which is a hallucination-infested swamp-living voodoo people. But back to Fiskadoro--the main character, a young kid who has a still-intact clarinet and who learns to play it under the tutelage of an old Chinese fellow whose grandmother dreams about her youth during of the American exodus from Vietnam during the final days of the war and is purportedly the oldest woman still alive.

I tried to find the point of the book, and I'm sure I missed it on my own efforts, but since it was written by a poet, I assume it succeeds on many literary levels that I haven't taken the time to explore and didn't digest slowly enough during my read to perceive them.

If you're looking for a different type of post-nuke story, and appreciate the fine art of trying to understand a language consisting of a mix-mash of English, Spanish, and who knows what else, spoken by introspective, dreaming, hallucinating, memory-tripping people who have little qualms about public nudity, this may just be the book for you.

The used book store that sent the book to me (on a promotion they had about giving away their surplus books and my suggestion they send me something in the post-nuclear war genre) wrote in the inside cover "a book of genius." I think they're right, but I am not sure I spent enough serious effort trying to understand the book to completely know why, so I'll just take their word for it and let the themes of the book simmer in my subconscious for all the effect that may have.

One final thought: a connection that I did make, perhaps a stretch but still one that occurs to me, is that I couldn't help but chuckle at the setting, in light of the post-nuclear (neutron bomb) computer role-playing game, "Fountain of Dreams," set in the swamps of Miami, Florida. At least there were no mutant killer clowns to make a mockery of things in Fiskadoro!

FISKADORO is a radically different work than the other Johnson books I've read, JESUS' SON and ANGELS. In those works, Johnson renders gritty realities with poetry and spirituality that make them transcendent. The language is still poetic here, but now Johnson is rendering a strangely mutated, postapocalyptic world.

While the language is lush, and spiritual themes constantly emerge and submerge, FISKADORO strikes me as one of the most realistic portrayals of the post-apocalypse that I have seen. Too often, the post-apocalypse is portrayed as a hellish nightmare where basic humanity has disappeared (see Jack Womack's work). Johnson's survivors are shamefully ignorant by today's standards, and the cult offshoots of this future world demand horrific and seemingly needless blood sacrifices, but Johnson's future never devolves into caricature. In fact, at times I find myself considering that Fiskadoro's world, with the survivors eking out a quarantined existence starved of resources and information in the Florida Keys, is probably how most people on the Earth live NOW. Johnson seems to be suggesting this as well, with the interpolation of Fiskadoro's post-apocalyptic world and Grandmother Cheung's similar escape from the chaos of collapsing South Vietnam in the 1970s.

All in all, this is an extraordinarily thoughtful and exquisitely rendered work, almost more of a portrait in poetry than a traditional work of fiction.

I have to admit the first time that I read this book I had almost no idea of what was going on. After I second reading I now see that it was not the authors fault but my own. This book, sometimes just very haunting, is also at the same time very beautiful. It's the fourth book of Johnson's that I've read, and it was entertaining enough for me two read two times, so that is saying something. It is not as powerful as say "Jesus son" or as poetic as some of his other works, but I think that if you are a fan of Johnsons than you will not be dissapointed.

What is a culture without a collective memory? When the structures of a society have collapsed what good is information or knowledge? They are useless, according to Denis Johnson's post-apocalyptic novel Fiskadoro. Like most novels set after some great, world destroying event, the characters in Fiskadoro live among the shards of a grander time. There is little collective memory of the time before the atomic war in the Key West of Fiskadoro, and the characters live with an acute awareness of their fallen state. This fixation on memory and reality, on the unknown past and the uncertain present, gives the novel a dream-like, disjointed quality. Nothing makes much sense in the world of Fiskadoro and the mixed patois of English and Spanish the characters speak fails to convey precise nuance of emotion or thought. Any information the citizens of Fiskadoro can glean about their world only confuses their sense of reality. Without an overarching culture to ground them, facts and information disorient. At one point Fiskadoro, the main character, points to the sky and the ocean and says "I don't know what es." The world itself is an ontological question mark. In the shadow between one world's destruction and (perhaps) the birth of another, there is only a persistent and inexplicable now.

Johnson has written a very different post-apocalypse novel compared with the normal fare. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, but the latter sections didn't draw me in nearly as much. While it's fine to leave some loose ends in this type of book, he left too many.

I really feel this should have been twice as long so he could more completely construct his world. I still rated it four stars for the inventive language and writing.

Is it a novel about *the* End of the World, the horrifying vestiges of a nuclear war? Or, is there something else at play, in this master writer's intriguing novel? On the one hand we have a fascinating examination of humanity rebuilding, picking up its own shattered pieces and putting itself back together. On the other hand, Johnson reminds us that The End of the World is, in many ways, both a collective and an individual experience.

One parralel (End of the-) World is the Fall of Saigon in 1975, for a refugee, Maria/Grandmother Wright. Against her experience, the novel is hinged. So too, Fiskadoro's coming of age ritual experience is also his own End of the World--the end of all that he once knew, and his rebirth as a new man.

In the end, Johnson asks us to reflect on memory and existence, and the subjectivity of life's great epochs. He leaves us with a novel not easily forgotten.