Fiskadoro

"Wildly ambitious ... the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, 'The Waste Land,' Fahrenheit 451 and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. Its strange, hallucinatory vision of America and modern history is never less than compelling.”—The New York TimesThe nuclear holocaust has been and gone, and now everything is different. In Twicetown, once Key West, two missiles sit unexploded, objects of awe and indifference. Mr Cheung teaches the boy Fiskadoro to play the clarinet; Grandmother Wright, the oldest person in the world, endlessly relives the fall of Saigon; Cassius Clay Sugar Ray trades in radioactive artefacts. Boats go out to comb the sea for fish, and the sea keeps some of the men. Tossing fitfully in nightmares of forgotten wars, lazing in the tropical heat, the flotsam and jetsam of a lost civilization pursue their lives through a world of fractured memories. And they wait - for the Cubans to come, for the Quarantine to be lifted, for the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus to return and build their kingdoms. Deeply moving and provocative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of these survivors and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture."A mythical story ... a coming-of-nuclear-age tale, the making of a new man from the ashes of the old world ... a key to the conundrum at the center of the world."—The Philadelphia Inquirer"A marvelous book, beautifully written and constantly entertaining ... With it Johnson firmly establishes his place as one of our very best contemporary writers. He is a wonderful storyteller, and if at times Fiskadoro seems a mixture of Samuel Beckett, Philip K. Dick and Road Warrior, that is only to his credit.”—The Washington Post"Haunting ... an eerie and powerful visionary novel."—The Boston Globe"Johnson, a poet and the author of an earlier novel, Angels, is a compelling storyteller who makes his nightmare scenario rich and sensuous, frightening and then grimly hopeful.” —People“A remarkable novel.”—Newsweek“A startlingly original book ... It affects one like a feverish dream whose symbols and images demand interpretation ... Fiskadoro has an allusive grandeur and depth ... and its intensity is heightened by Mr. Johnson’s ability to release language like a full-throated, many-voiced choir.”—The New York Times Book Review"A daring, daunting jig-saw puzzle of a novel." —Kirkus Reviews“A fully realized fantasy of the future [that] has important lessons for contemporary life.”—The San Francisco Chronicle"An ambitious book, both in its methods and in its subject—the end of the world ...[Johnson] revives the frightening sense of mystery that is blunted by reliable experience and predictable turns of phrase.”—The New Yorker“A risky, ambitious, exhilarating book propelled by the kind of mad excess energy we detect in writers like Melville and D.H. Lawrence. The post-nuclear world it explores is rendered in intense and memorable detail ... evidence, everywhere we look, of a truly creative imagination excitedly inventing, describing, characterizing, plotting. It’s a remarkable performance.”—The Christian Science Monitor“Extraordinarily beautiful and inventive ... You must read Fiskadoro for its beauty, power and originality, for its cornering of life’s mysteries into words on a page.”—Newsday