Customer Reviews

How I Came to Know Fish

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This gentle, unassuming book is one of the most powerful I have ever read. It is the story of a young boy's experiences with life as his days change from idyllic afternoons of fishing to the realities of WWII. Much more than a book about fishing, though it contains many wonderful espisodes about fish and fishing, it is a recounting of the hardships, terrors, and ultimate kindnesses that populate war. As you will learn, fish and fishing became the metaphor for freedom for Ota Pavel.

I fell quickly and completely in love with this book. Unpretentious, disarmingly honest, simple without being simplistic. It's also sneaky -- it purports to be a memoir of a simple, arcadian time and place, then blindsides you with the realization that this was not such a simple time after all. I wish I could give it six stars.

VERY MOVING AND BEAUTIFUL. THE WORLD BEFORE THE WWII FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A LITTLE BOY, SWEET AND TENDER. THE GREAT STARTING POINT TO EXPLORE THE CZECH LITERATURE. IN THE SAME CLASS AS WRITINGS OF BULHAKOV AND HUELLE, VERY MAGICAL AND MYSTERIOUS.

One sentence on the first page caught my attention - the remainder of the book continued to hold my attention with the same mastery of depicting the complexity of people in simple terms. The sentence? "He could plow and sow, milk cows, cook potato pancakes, find wild boletus mushrooms even out of season, ferry people in his boat during high waters, weave baskets, hunt deer, rescue travelers and half-frozen animals, silence the stupid, and he knew how to laugh." - that is the description of Uncle Prosek who, to the young narrator, knew how to do everything.

It is Uncle Prosek who taught the narrator to fish, who helped the narrator's Jewish father poach a deer ... The independent chapters which make up this novel tell of the family adventures before the war - father becoming the world's best Electrolux salesman for the love of the wife of his boos, falling for a scam on purchasing a carp pond and years later giving the scam artist appropriate revenge. During the war, the two older sons and the father are sent to concentration camps; they survive but grandmother does not. Here the novels tells of the narrator's escapades fishing to survive - encountering mill owners who cheat him and fish wardens who act kindly to him. And finally the book follows his father into life after the war.

Throughout the book, the ability of the author to depict people - an attribute the narrator ascribes both to the narrator's father and to a famous painter known to the father - makes this "simple" memoir into a memorable study of human behavior. This is human behavior of the roguish, flawed but fundamentally kind nature.

Fishermen may enjoy this book but the book is of human nature, portrayed in conjunction with fishing, not a book of fishing. Well worth the short time it takes to read this book.