"Gould's Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way Moby-Dick is a
novel about whales, or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a
single day. . . . a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art
and history and nature; a surreal examination of the parlous
consequences of British colonialism and the ambivalent legacy of
the French Enlightenment; a fantastic tale . . . a novel that weds
the cacophonous digressions and philosophical asides of Tristram
Shandy to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez; a novel that
welds a Joycean love of language to a billowing, Melvillian vision
of the world." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Richard
Flanagan has created an astonishing masterpiece that challenges,
provokes and entertains at every turn... Chock full of ideas,
exuberant language, indelible images and borrowings that echo the
classics of world literature, from the fiction of Fielding, Sterne
and Dickens right through Joyce, Borges and Thomas Pynchon." --Brad
Zellar, Minneapolis Star-Tribune "A great book, by turns bawdy and
pensive, moving and abrasive, visionary and squalid, apocalyptic
and confessional. . . . Obviously this sort of thing requires and
ambitious imaginative reach and a convincing narrative voice,
qualities that Flanagan distills masterfully into Gould's account
of a searching and picaresque life hovering at the blurriest,
farthest reaches of the human shore." --Chris Lehman, The
Washington Post "What's memorable--even extraordinary--about this
book are Flanagan's aphoristic talent, his imagination and his
uncanny ability to channel the Rabelaisian voices of the great
picaresque writers--Fielding, Sterne, Smollet. . . . [Flanagan]
remains unique, one of the novel's most ambitious talents, one
whose every book . . . commands our attention." --Caroline Fraser,
Los Angeles Times Book Review "Remarkable. . . . A meditation on
colonialism--indeed, on history itself. . . . A serene, chilling
vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, 'swimming
in vast coldness, alone.'" --The New Yorker "A vivid sea tale, a
resonant story of conquest, a hallucinatory record of the bizarre,
and perhaps something like a sea anemone--luridly colored and
transfixingly strange." --Entertainment Weekly "[A] novel of
ingenious invention and lavish scope. . . . For all that Flanagan
questions everything from the truth of recorded history to the
upshot of the French Enlightenment, he affirms the wonder of
fiction. And life." --Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News "One
part Rabelais, one part García Marquez, one part Ned Kelly. . . .
Flanagan has terrific narrative energy." --James Campbell, New York
Times Book Review "Flanagan's vivid descriptions make for a
memorable, if challenging, read. It's a celebration of fevered
imagination. . . . The words triumph in Gould's Book of Fish."
--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today "Richard Flanagan's remarkable new
novel, Gould's Book of Fish, is a brilliantly rendered work of the
imagination that investigates the complex relationships among art,
ordinary human life and the natural world with great intelligence
and unquestionable panache. . . . The book is full of wild
hilarity, heartbreaking cruelty and suffering, and finally love,
both selfless and profane. . . . A work of significant genius."
--E. William Smethurst Jr., Chicago Tribune "A rollicking,
picaresque tale and ambitious colonial revision. . . . A
captivating version of Tasmania, a tale of ugliness, love,
brutality and humor, through a found text, manipulated history and
fish. The fish provide enough reason to pick up the novel; the
insights into Tasmania and the pleasures of Gould's narration make
one read on." --Benjamin Austen, Philadelphia Inquirer "Fantastic .
. . it commands full attention . . . Flanagan climbs right into
Gould's skin to tell a darkly funny and brilliantly sad story about
words, art, colonialism and the nature of mankind. . . . The novel
goes beyond nature to talk about the European plunder of native
lands and culture as well, addressing these things with heartfelt
sorrow and, at times, high humor." --Karen Sandstrom, The Plain
Dealer (Cleveland) "The slipperiest, most outrageous novel of the
year. . . . Flanagan's previous novel, Death of a River Guide, was
a gorgeous, mystical history of Tasmania that transpires during the
four minutes it takes its narrator to drown. Gould's Book of Fish
is just as wet, but it swims in deeper waters. It may not win him a
larger audience, but it will earn him a more passionate one." --Ron
Charles, The Christian Science Monitor "[Flanagan's] crowning
achievement so far. . . . Gould's Book of Fish is a book of
marvels, beautifully written and appropriately beautifully
produced, so that the physical artifact actually strengthens and
reinforces the tale. Flanagan's tale is a riotous one, a dazzling
combination of loveliness and grotesquerie, fancy and fact. It's
Tasmanian postmodern magic-realism." --Corey Mesler, Memphis
Commercial Appeal "Audacious, labyrinthine and gratifying. . . .
Gould's Book of Fish recalls Joyce with its free-fall word fervor
and use of language, and suggests the magic realism of Gabriel
García Márquez. More constant refrains, though, call to mind . . .
Ovid [and] Joseph Conrad." --Gordon Hauptfleish, San Diego
Union-Tribune "A work of pure brilliance. . . . Gould's Book of
Fish is a literary landmark." --Deloris Tarzan Ament, Seattle Times
"Gould's Book of Fish reads like an unwanted relation of Tom Jones,
set where the land was wild and its immigrants wilder." --Bruce
Barcott, Outside "A daring and inventive new work. . . . Combining
the linguistic trickery of Nabokov with Dickensian
characterizations, mixing genres and moods, Richard Flanagan has
created a magical amalgam, a self-conscious recasting of
19th-century storytelling that is a commentary on the nature of
history, of narrative, of creation itself. . . . A rare creature. .
. . Classify it as a masterpiece." --Julie Hale, Nashville Scene "A
grand meditation on art, science, brutality, and awe--one that
careens through a magical, surreal kaleidoscope of fantastical
happenings. By turns tragic, comedic, and exuberant, [Gould's Book
of Fish] plumbs the depths of the horrific and soars to the sublime
in its quest to understand the 'inexplicable wonder of a universe
only limited by one's own imagining of it.'" --Donna Marchetti,
Islands Magazine "Flamboyant, lushly styled, outrageous, dark,
funny, cynical, humane, gratuitously violent, Byzantine,
self-conscious, exuberant, grotesque, graceful, ghoulish,
frustrating, cocky, over-reaching, and chaotic are all valid
descriptors of the picaresque tall tale within a tall tale that is
Gould's Book of Fish. If some of those terms seem contradictory,
that is because Flanagan's third novel is at its heart, among other
things, such a willful--at times joyful--contradiction that its
pages at times seem barely capable of containing it. . . . Gould's
Book of Fish raises its author into the sparse pantheon of
contemporary fiction writers whose gift of language and unique
slant of mind make their every new literary effort a storehouse of
wonder that no serious reader can afford to ignore." --Carroll Dale
Short, Magill's Literary Annual "Flanagan has written a Tasmanian
version of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, a mesmerizing portrait of
human abjection--and sometimes elation--set in a 19th-century Down
Under penal colony. . . . Carefully crafted and allusive, this
blazing portrait of Australia's colonial past will surely spread
Flanagan's reputation among American readers." --Publishers Weekly
(starred review) "Flanagan may very well become Tasmania's man of
letters. . . . Flanagan's darkly humorous tale is impressive in its
ability to cross seamlessly the borders between the realistic and
fantastic and carries a wonderful sense of drama and satisfying
closure." --Library Journal "Ambitious. . . . The author's
fascination with the colorful, violent history of his native land
and the resilience of the hard, passionate people who live on its
barren soil is evident in a book whose bizarre characters are often
as ragged and dangerous as the terrain itself." --Kevin Greenberg,
Book "The book's most insistent themes--the horrors of 19th-century
Van Diemen's Land and their ironic application as a funhouse mirror
for contemporary society--are hammered brutally home. . . . There
are echoes of Joyce, Marx, Sartre and Kafka, as well as of several
18th-century writers. . . . Magical-realist colonial-protest novel,
Borgesian found-manuscript tale, anti-Enlightenment Foucauldian
fable, an Oulipo-style fiction built around Gould's paintings as
Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies is built around the Tarot
deck; shaggy dog story, parody, satire on modern Tasmania--the list
could go on. Gould's Book of Fish is an ambitious book. . . .
Flanagan somehow makes it work on the page--largely through the
mighty voice he has devised for Gould." --Christopher Tayler,
London Review of Books (UK) "A phosphorescing talisman with a dual
capacity to enchant and unhinge . . . Ultimately, Flanagan's vision
concerns neither art nor fish. It concerns the power of words to
make worlds, and the impotence of actions to destroy them. Is it a
masterpiece? Halfway through my second read, I know so." --Good
Reading (Sydney) "A Tasmanian version of Ovid's Metamorphosis . . .
An exuberant, splendidly written, hugely ambitious work . . . It is
a great story, finely told, a consummate use of fiction to carry,
without fuss or apparent effort, some of the darkest truths or
corruptions of our history." --Australian Book Review (Melbourne)
"An exotic thing, unlike any book previously published in
Australia, or perhaps the world . . . Flanagan has written a
demented Tasmanian fable, like a wild dream that overlaps the
nightmare of penal brutality with meditations on art and love,
tourism and politics, casinos and bush-rangers and bonfires and
breasts and fish." --The Age (Melbourne) "To describe Gould's Book
of Fish as the tale of a convict in Van Diemen's Land who paints
fish is about as accurate as saying Moby-Dick is a story about a
whale. Billy Gould is as saintly as Billy Budd and as cravenly
split as any of Dostoyevsky's characters. Billy is Everyman and his
tale, from his conception in a casual coupling by two nameless
people, his childhood in a poorhouse, his years as a London street
villain, and a convict in the harshest place on earth, is an
affirmation of life rather than a lament for it." --The Weekend
Australian "This vast, artful epic is the most audacious yet from
this wonderful Tasmanian novelist. Sculpted from a turbulent
national history, this vibrant story poses as the journal of a
penal island convict who relates brutal and hilarious tales of the
island's eccentric inhabitants and the atrocities they perpetrate.
Flanagan's narrative sweep, vivid imagination, and rugged poeticism
make him a world-class author." --Jamie Kornegay, Square Books,
Oxford, MS, Book Sense quote By a majority, we chose the most
controversially difficult and demanding of the four books that were
before us, because we detected in it a touch of genius that, we
believe, will give it enduring significance. It is an impossible
book to describe or summarize. Some of the judges used adjectives
like Dantean, Joycean, even grotesque. To mix some of the metaphors
we coined to capture its quality: 'this is a baggy monster of a
book that does literary cartwheels on a tightrope.' --Right
Reverend Bishop Holloway, chairman of the judges panel, the
Commonwealth Prize
Ask a Question About this Product More... |