ChadGayle reviewed Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson
Review of 'Fiskadoro' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
[From an entry in one of my notebooks, penned in 1997.]
Fiskadoro is a post-apocalyptic tale set during the time of the “Quarantine.” It follows the lives of Fiskadoro (whose name means “harpooner” or “fisherman”), Mr. Cheung, and Mr. Cheung’s grandmother, Grandmother Wright. Each of these characters drifts in a sea of forgetfulness, searching for things lost in the past without really believing wholeheartedly in that past (or the coming future).
Fiskadoro lives in the “Army,” an encampment off of Key West which was once an army base but is now a collection of huts. His people fish in diesel boats they didn’t build and have limited fuel for—in fact, everything in their world is scavenged; everything is old, broken, and most machines are useless, except for radios that pick up broadcasts from Cuba and the sound systems that different people use to stage “sound shows” (concerts).
Names are confused, …
[From an entry in one of my notebooks, penned in 1997.]
Fiskadoro is a post-apocalyptic tale set during the time of the “Quarantine.” It follows the lives of Fiskadoro (whose name means “harpooner” or “fisherman”), Mr. Cheung, and Mr. Cheung’s grandmother, Grandmother Wright. Each of these characters drifts in a sea of forgetfulness, searching for things lost in the past without really believing wholeheartedly in that past (or the coming future).
Fiskadoro lives in the “Army,” an encampment off of Key West which was once an army base but is now a collection of huts. His people fish in diesel boats they didn’t build and have limited fuel for—in fact, everything in their world is scavenged; everything is old, broken, and most machines are useless, except for radios that pick up broadcasts from Cuba and the sound systems that different people use to stage “sound shows” (concerts).
Names are confused, and no one knows the true function of things left behind in this landscape. Pieces of automobiles become home furnishings; proper names are randomly taken up and dropped because of their sound instead of their inherent sense. Thus the world is like a candy store recently robbed of all of its candy—so that nothing but the sweet smell of the candy remains.
This is a book primarily concerned with memory and suffering, but it is also a sly comment on our own world too. Fiskadoro’s people are blind to the past because it is too painful to remember; we are blind to it because we are so caught up in the present. In both worlds, we make no progress, like seagulls hovering above the beach; everything is new, no matter how many times we see it, but there isn’t any way of building up to “something” else, of learning from our past, or of understanding how to deal with the suffering the past has left us with.
