devastating, horrifying, majestic, i was rapt the whole time

In an instance of the eerie, uncanny ways of the world, I finished what was either my third or fourth reread of Fiskadoro last night, with no knowledge whatsoever that Denis Johnson had already left us. It is a gutting loss.

Every time I revisit this book, I await breathlessly its final pages, like a child watching a movie he knows the end to but anticipates—and experiences—as though for the first time, every time. Some of the best writing, anywhere, ever. And of every novel I've read in this life, Fiskadoro has, quite possibly, my favorite last line. (Well, last two lines, really, so Woolf still holds the title for closing Mrs. Dalloway so perfectly with, "For there she was.")

The novel ends:

"And in her state of waking, she jerked awake. And from that waking, she woke up."

Grateful to Denis Johnson for waking us up from our waking, and I'm going to start, tomorrow, taking on those books of his I haven't yet gotten around to reading. Because life is unforgivingly short.

Well written. Slightly confusing. Worth reading though. Dialogue was troublesome. I felt it could have achieved a greater climax. The story just kind of petered.

Weird and surreal. I don't think Johnson quite achieves what he was going for here - although I admit that at times I was unsure what that was. Well worth reading in any case.

Parts of this book were real good. Parts of it, I felt like I was swimming in the ocean and someone was just babbling at me.

Dans une Floride post apocalypse nucléaire, quelques groupes survivent les uns à côté des autres. Des personnages suivent leur destin. Un ado qui veut apprendre la musique. Son professeur, membre d'un orchestre improbable. Une centenaire rescapée de la guerre du Vietnam. C'est improbable et magnifique. Comme tout Denis Denis Johnson.

There is so much I love in Johnson’s writing, but
I found it very difficult to get into the rhythm of this book until close to the end. The description of Fiskdoro’s ceremony, and Marie’s flashbacks, particularly the helicopter crash, really drew me in.

Denis Johnson wrote the kind of prose that makes me feel like my brain is being retuned to pick up frequencies I didn’t even know were there

Nearly 20%, and it just held no lost interest for me.

I am notoriously terrible at watching movies - the combination of a contrived story, the dark, siting still, and the hours between 8 and 10 in the evening are the lyre of Orpheus. I usually fall asleep twenty minutes into a movie and wake up twenty minutes before its over and think nothing happened, piecing the two ends of thing together with dream logic. I walk away feeling GOD I hate movies, how can anyone like these stupid things before realizing that I missed all the important parts that make for a compelling story.

I feel like that happened to me with this book, thought I am pretty certain that I bookmarked my spot when I did occasionally fall asleep. This has all the right elements: an author I like, the post-apocalypse, and most importantly, the suggestion of a friend whose tastes I trust. He brought this up during a discussion about The Road --he did not care for and I consider to be one of the most powerful books I've ever read-- saying this was a much more dynamic, interesting and believable traipse through the years after end of the world, citing one particular detail I won't disclose here that made me go "NOOOO WAY DUDE I gotta read that!"

I think dream logic is the mortar with which this thing was put together, but it was not that delicious, heavily perfumed kind that Garcia-Marquez uses; this was the haphazard, loose threads of actual dreams. The garbled patois of the post-apocalyptic inhabitant of the Florida keys and the uneasy interplay of customs that even the characters didn't understand made a believable case for what it would be like for the shell-shocked next generation to rebuild some sort of society out of the scraps, there is little talk of the bomb or what goes down in the Quarantine - they are stumbling through the process of living like people always do.

And maybe that is what is missing here - you don't feel a philosophical resolution here, or at least I didn't. I felt like I was missing something throughout this whole thing, some thread tethering me to the cosmic had been missed. You want this out of apocalyptic literature; the idea that we have learned something about ourselves in the destruction of the world. The truth is, we probably wouldn't learn anything and we would go about the business of rebuilding the absurdity of society in the shadow of the radioactive nightmare, dragging in fishing nets, being scared of other ethnic groups, practicing our weird little religions, wondering what those old silent grandma's are thinking up there on the porch. In that sense, this is likely a more realistic portrait of life after it all goes to shit than in the bleak, magnificent fable of The Road, but that is the kind of thing I tend to sleep right through.

storm day meant i got to read this basically in one sitting. not my favourite Johnson but still pretty compelling. my most firmly held belief is that the advent of the atomic bomb heralded the official end of the Enlightenment and now it seems i can add Johnson to the list of luminaries who might agree

Excellent book by the always adventurous denis johnson. R.I.P.