This is a work of post-apocalyptic fiction, but none of the people in it are fleeing zombies or bonding together to overcome terrible hardships or confronting their inner savage. They're all lazing on the beach, waiting for the daily fish catch to arrive, and forgetting. They're forgetting the past; they're forgetting the names of things; they're forgetting their own names. Even the bomb itself, according to Mr. Cheung, says "I will not remember." Mr. Cheung is the last link to the past in post-nuclear-war Key West, the manager of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, which has two musicians, and a member of the equally futile and silly Twicetown Society of Knowledge. Fiskadoro is his student until he undergoes a ritual that wipes clean his memory and leaves him stranded in a perpetual present, with no past or future and no names for anything. Mr. Cheung's grandmother, the oldest person in the world, is stranded too, perpetually reliving her escape from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, an ordeal that leaves her floating in the sea with a mind blank like a baby's, at the "bottom of everything." Nothing happens in Fiskadoro and that's the point. What happens after the end of the world, according to Denis Johnson, is the end of meaning.

A post-apocalyptic novel by Denis Johnson. I hoped it would be dark chocolate, like The Road. But it was more peanut butter and tequila.

Strange book, I'm not sure what it means.

This is a bit like Philip K Dick's Doctor Bloodmoney, but more successful overall. It's an oblique, zany after-the-bomb narrative featuring some memorable characters and interesting settings. Set in and around what used to be Key West (now named Twicetown for the two nuclear bombs that failed to detonate there), the story follows, for the most part, 14-year-old Fiskadoro and his clarinet teacher, Mr Cheung. The whole thing has an elegiac feel that works especially well here, especially in the context of Cheung's 100+ year-old grandmother, the last person alive to remember life before the holocaust.

A book that is abundant with beautiful prose from an author who is easily one of the best and most underrated writers ever. The plot is swampy at times but in a sense it is befitting of what I would best describe as a fever dream of a book. I'll also give Johnson huge points for writing a post apocalyptic novel that has more to do with lost culture and confusion than war and violence. The last twentyish pages regarding the grandmother and conclusion of the book was some of the best stuff I've ever read.

Given the average rating, I’m shocked to find that this DJ is tied with (or possibly better than) Jesus’ Son for me. A post apocalyptic book that is nothing like what you’d expect. The destruction of language, DJ’s spiritual prose, and the episodes of memory and interior life are astonishing. Chapter 3 is an early highlight but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love every page of this ambitious work.

Not trying to say this book should be for everyone but from the moment I picked up my copy in B&N, not even knowing about it, not having read any DJ yet, I was filled with a sense of “I need to read this.” And, though you could call it uneven or wildly unconventional or misguided or anticlimactic. The dreams this book gave me were wonderful and strange. The book has rewired my brain and makes me want to be a better person. A more spiritual person. If I wasn’t all in on Johnson before, I certainly am now.

Denis Johnson doesn't really care for you to understand what he's on about. He just keeps writing down his own stream of visions, sometimes lucidly, most of the time not so.
My teacher at school would have gave me back the sheets and said "well, very creative, now re-write it all with sense, pls".
Seriously, I respect the artistic freedom the author is deeply enjoying here, still I wonder how could the editor/publisher let such long parts of the book being that cryptic, confused and unsolved.
I can't even imagine the infinite frustration of the translator working on this ungrateful task.

Denis Johnson’s second novel, Fiskadoro, hit shelves in the mid-eighties. It’s a post-nuclear apocalyptic narrative, and the tale might have been especially fitting given the context of the times, the Reagan era of the Cold War.

The story is set in Florida, where the few survivors remain, many years after nuclear Armageddon. The historical memory of people who live on the outskirts of land contaminated by radiation is fuzzy at best, and the novel has a surreal, hallucinatory quality about it. While Cheung, the mentor of young Fiskadoro, and an account of Cheung's grandmother, Marie, carry knowledge of a pre-nuclear past, earth’s inhabitants are generally multi-ethnic tribes without an understanding beyond their immediate needs, swamp people who cling to myth and superstition. It’s a lawless world where signs of civilization have passed beyond the brink of extinction.

I enjoyed Fiskadoro for the most part, although the storyline is mostly patchwork, and characters tended to blend into one another at times without distinction. Nevertheless, Johnson effectively portrays an intriguing, post- apocalyptic world, and reading his carefully crafted lines and wonderful prose is certainly a pleasure.

If there is one thing I can't fault Johnson's Fiskadoro for then that would be its startling originality: A boy taking clarinet lessons in a quarantined community located on the Keys of a post-apocalyptic Florida awash with voodoo cults, whilst also being part of a weird ritual involving the subincision of his genitals.

As it turned out, this was definitely the most ambitious novel I've read by Denis Johnson so far.

Just a shame it didn't materialize in the ways I'd hoped it would.

Mostly because I thought this fictional world was really hard to penetrate, and because of it's problematic dialect - which is a distorted fusion of English, Spanish and local slang.
With it being an end of the world scenario: the atmosphere being one of death, it wouldn't surprise anyone to learn that it's pretty bleak - although nowhere near the same level as something like 'The Road'. It's 60 years after the nuclear destruction, which, as far as I know, was started by the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. So we're talking about some alternate future after World-War-Two.
A bad one obviously - as it's indicated that the Florida Keys and Cuba are the only inhabited places left on the planet.

There are multi-ethnic tribes that do still engage in basic human experiences - they like to fish, to joke, to drink, to have families, to listen to music, and to indulge in nights of passion. While the book takes it's title Fiskadoro from the boy of the same name, he actually only features in about half of the narrative. Also present here are Mr. Cheung (Fiskadoro's music teacher) the Chinese manager of a band called the Miami Symphony Orchestra; his grandmother, who has flashbacks to the old world and her escape from the fall of Saigon; a group of Israelites who construct a boat to await the coming of Jah; and a cult leader who goes by the name of Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. Of the three or four main characters they each represent a different search for wisdom. And it's the search for wisdom that is certainly another of the novel's key themes.

There is a spiritual/religious/hallucinatory thing going on here too. As Fiskadoro and Mr. Cheung's grandmother both delve to the bottom and brush with near death experiences, from which they bring back a better understanding of reality. Fiskadoro has a nightmarish experience at the hands of the nocturnal swamp people who have abducted him for the purpose of subincision. Through a state of delirium and a vision of annihilation, he emerges with a blank memory, but realizes he has gained deeper knowledge on hos return, and can now play the clarinet with ease.

An unflinching, surrealistic, and haunting coming-of-age/rite of passage story is about as best as I can describe this novel. There were parts of it I really admired, but equally other parts that left me dazed and confused. A pretty good book overall, but I wouldn't class it as one of my Johnson faves.

this book fuckin slaps.

Uneven. May not be his strongest work but there are patches of genius in there.

I thought about this for a long time. Well, a week. I still don't really know what to do with this book. Not in the unsatisfied way that By Night in Chile left me, but in a "huh, ok, so what" sort of way. Either something went way over my head or Johnson just really missed the mark with this one.

So, my response to this post-nuclear story set in Key West about people trying to hang on the threads of the culture they've lost while figuring out how to live in a new world is that I don't know what to do with it in a way that I think it will fade fast. HOWEVER the parts about the grandmother in Vietnam were very good, and if you happen upon the book, it's a pretty quick read and worthwhile just for those sections, if any.