Gould's Book Of Fish - A Novel In Twelve Fish (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 2001; vuoden 2002 painos)

Overblown. Delectable. I love it. I will never read it again. Very fun in its concrete literature genre. Exhausting. A very good author. A subpar example of his work. All of the above. (Yep, I'm confused.) ( )

Dear reader, if you decide you want to read this book, I have one burning hot tip for you: don't read The Fatal Shore immediately before it. Friends and wife told me this book was dark, disturbing etc... which it certainly would have been had I *not* been reading FS at the same time. But I was. So many of the dark incidents in Flanagan's novel are taken almost verbatim from Hughes' history that I couldn't really take them seriously the second time round.

This points to a larger problem for Gould's, for me at least: the book is so obviously built from other books. The Fatal Shore is the most obvious, but also, for instance, Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick, the poems of Rilke, Buddhist texts (definitely) and, possibly, Blood Meridian. So my reading experience consisted almost entirely in train-spotting of a fairly uninteresting variety.

That said, I'm still an academic at heart, so:

* Like Ulysses, Gould's is overly structured. Each chapter has at the very least a governing fish, a governing character, a governing characters and, to some degree, a governing style. Do you find this kind of thing interesting? I do so decreasingly.

* Like Rilke and various Buddhist texts, there's a lot of stuff here about escaping from being human, searching for immediate experience and essentially just wanting to be a rock, because rocks don't do anything (or, at the very least, don't do anything wrong). (Also, there are *direct quotes from Rilke*. The anachronisms aren't crippling, but the tiresomeness of writing from the perspective of a non-literary type who is obsessed by Wordsworth and Rilke... well, just write from the perspective of a literary type if you want to do that).

* Like every other book you've ever read, Gould's involves a lot of stuff about how love will save us all blah blah blah. Odd that it never works, even in books. Almost as if love wasn't actually enough to save anyone, but that the thought that it were is enough to salve the consciences of wealthy Westerners.

* Like Moby Dick in the USA, Gould's is an allegory of Australian history. This is more my style. Less my style are the magical realist elements, but I accept that that is just subjective opinion. If you like magical realism, you'll probably like this--it's the Australian version: these aspects of Australian history (so the story goes) are unspoken, and (the book implies) can best be brought to the surface by allegorical/surrealist style. The fact that the book retells much of the story of the Fatal Shore kind of puts a dent in this, but for an Australian at least, it's fun to imagine that our history is important enough to require literary attention.

* Like every postmodern book you've ever read, there's lots of recursiveness here. I don't find that particularly interesting in this case--the novel stands without it, and it adds nothing other than the obligatory "oh, literature, it's so unreliable" garbage (really? because I thought literature was a scientific observation of sub-molecular reality!), but perhaps you will.

But I'm in quite a bind, because what I think is most valuable about the book is its willingness to deal with major intellectual and historical questions. The style is a bit tour-de-forcish, rather than being really enjoyable; the structure, as I said, is externally imposed and adds little. But the ideas are well worth thinking through.

I was worried, I confess, when we got the dull "oh, I'm just a character in a book, I have to destroy the book because words and art are just so constricting of my natural immediate experience" stuff. And I was very upset when this was somehow combined with the "love will save us all" stuff.

But then, so close to intellectual disaster, Flanagan saves his novel in the last few pages: Gould admits that these two positions are completely contradictory--that love is fundamentally human and cultural, not natural. And yet Gould *feels* them both. That's interesting.

So, I'm not sure this is the masterpiece so many people claim, but I am sure it was well worth reading, and I'm excited by Flanagan's ambition. From what I can tell, his recent award winner is, well, not so ambitious. ( )

William Bulow Gould - con-man, rogue and convict in Tasmania's brutal prison system of the 19th century. As the tiny world around him descends into madness, Gould saw the worst of the Van Diemen's Land convict system - a place where outcasts and dreamers were sent. He finds purpose and identity as a fraudulent artist, and slowly loses his mind over the course of his surreal and incredulous incarceration. A classic book of imaginative historical fiction from a Booker Prize winning author.

3.3 Enjoyable and surprising, this is one of those books that convince you the world is a stranger and more wonderful place than you imagined. The only real imperfect is that Peter Carey (and, to a lesser extent, Danielewski) has covered almost all this ground better. Worth it for the coda. ( )

This is a tragicomic, grotesque, fantasmagoric story of a convict in an early 19th century prison colony on Sarah Island in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania). It's an effective approach for showing the horror of the genocide of the native population, the rape of the land, and the lunacy of Rabelaisian-like British characters untethered from the (relative) sanity of their home society, without making readers want to kill themselves after reading it.

If I saw this description before reading the book, I'd never have picked it up, but I'm glad I did. What kept me reading was the genius of the writing. It's hard to pick one sample, but here's one that speaks to the nature of the book itself:

Because, you see, it sometimes seems so elusive, this book, a series of veils, each of which must be lifted and parted to reveal only another of its kind, to arrive finally at emptiness, a lack of words, at the sound of the sea, of the great Indian Ocean through which I see in my mind's eye Gould now advancing towards Sarah Island, now receding; that sound, that sight, slowly pulsing in and out, in and out.
. ( )