Fiskadoro

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.

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).

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.

This book is about humanity, and coming of age. I thought the language was beautiful. Like a symphony that is both sad and wonderful.