Near perfect.

The survivors of a nuclear apocalypse start building a new life in the Key West area. The characters are charming. The dialogue is creative and fun to read. The author does a nice job of taking you into this small world. Perhaps the most engaging part of the tale is the background of Grandmother, who survived Vietnam and a couple days floating into nothingness, lost at sea. The novel is a slice of life, in a very small world, so it is not an epic.

This is an excerpt from the New York Times review of Fiskadoro:

It's the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, ''The Waste Land,'' ''Fahrenheit 451'' and ''Dog Soldiers,'' screened ''Star Wars'' and ''Apocalypse Now'' several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.

I should have known upon reading that, that this wasn't going to be my type of book. Set in a post-apocalyptic world that is vaguely described as due to atomic bombing, a group of survivors has created a new community in what used to be the Florida Keys. While there are characters, and some plot, a lot of it was, as NYT points out, rhetorical meanderings on memory and culture and death. Basically, not my cup of tea.

The title character is a boy (teenager?) named Fiskadoro, who starts the book out forging a relationship with Mr. Cheung, the manager of his own made-up orchestra. Fiskadoro wants to learn how to play his father's clarinet. Along the way he loses both his parents, is kidnapped by some sort of weird snake cult who erases all his memories and I think cuts his dick in two like a snake tongue and then returns him to his people to try to figure out how to live in this new world. We also follow Mr. Cheung's grandmother, the oldest living person on earth (maybe? I think?) and her fading memories of escaping war torn Vietnam as a girl.

Much like Dog Soldiers, which the NYT compares it too, it felt to me like it was trying too hard to be meaningful. It made me think of the type of guys who claim to love and understand Naked Lunch or aspire to be Jack Kerouac. I'm sure this book is right for them, but I just couldn't seem to care or engage.

No one pens an apocalypse like the late-great Denis Johnson. His kinda-terrifying 1985 armageddon looks like the Vietnam war—set in a nuclear-fallout Florida Keys with help from Melville & Bob Marley. We’re amid tribes of survivors, including Cuban fishermen, Black “Israelites” who pray to Allah & an epileptic clarinetist who’s memorized the Constitution & leads an orchestra without instruments. Johnson’s invented a hybrid-English dialect of Spanish, Jamaican patois, tech buzz & song lyrics. Not exactly accessible & sometimes grisly. But it has a hallucinatory power to wake the dead. “The first day of his father’s death was over.”

Listen, this is not a perfect book. I’m not really qualified to address the uncomfortable ways that this white guy writes about race in certain sections of this book. But I have to give it 5 stars because it’s just such a bold and wild piece of literature. It’s so full of world, of contradiction and uncertainty. Nothing is what you expect and everything is alive with possibility. And, at the same time, it’s a story. It doesn’t completely bleed out into a postmodern everything sandwich. There are characters and arcs and satisfying endings. I wish every book—even very different ones—was a little more like this one.

Denis Johnson's post-apocalyptic tale is fully imagined, a mythical and meandering portrait of the life fashioned by los desechados -- the discarded or rejected as a result of nuclear fallout. "Fiskadoro" peddles in deja vu, exploring the symbolism of naming in a society where names convey importance. Small communities crop up in the former Florida Keys, featuring a hybrid language, the abandonment of clothing, and the embracing of mystical belief.

While the title character struggles to come of age in an era of recurrent loss, Fiskadoro eventually takes a back seat to the driven Mr. Cheung and his mother, Grandmother Wright. As we follow their yearnings and recollections, we become lost in their quests for dignity in a world stripped of purpose, meaning, and attachment.

<4.5 stars>

It's sort of a mistake to characterize this as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, and genre fans may well be disappointed. In truth, it's more of a piece with Denis Johnson's other work, a story of marginalized people struggling to survive with limited means, jazzed up with Johnson's typicall dazzling prose. There's not a whole lot of narrative to be found here, so you may not feel terribly engaged at first, but stick with it--by the time you finish the book, you'll feel a deep affection for these bedraggled, soulful characters and their strange quarantined community in the Florida Keys. My only major complaint is that the flashback sections detailing Grandmother Wright's experiences in Vietnam drag on forever, feeling unnecessarily long. Otherwise, an odd, lovely little book.

Whenever I wasn't bogged down with readings from the syllabus during my late-'80s college years, I was bonkers for contemporary fiction, and just about anything with these Vintage covers got my attention. This was a really good, really ambitious novel; it wasn't too long after this that everyone was crazy for Denis Johnson. Anyone who's into post-apocalyptica would still dig it.

Parabola di apocalisse e redenzione, questo romanzo onirico, visionario, ambizioso, audace, surreale ma decisamente imperfetto -principalmente perché è un romanzo post-apocalittico che non parla mai dell'apocalisse né contestualizza la società in cui è ambientato-, è una gemma grezza di un giovane Denis Johnson ancora oscillante tra poesia e prosa.
È tutto un trip allucinato, temporale e saetta, di certo non inquadrato bene, senza cornice, senza chiodo, senza muro, tutto anima gravida e scosse elettriche.

Distopia o meglio ucronia sullo sfondo, e in primo piano il rito d'iniziazione di Fiskadoro quattordicenne tra stralci di reminescenze malinqudrate come i fantasmi di Dylan il gran poeta della pioggia scrosciante e Padre Nostro Bob Marley.

Ascoltami, ragazzo. Che io sia il tuo satana Overdoze affogato nel mezcal o Jah incrostato di fango, io Denis lo leggo cotto. Pieno di vino cattivo. Storpiato. Cogli occhi gonfi e rossi. Non lo devo capire. Voglio sentirlo come la botta della droga che scalda il corpo e inaridisce il cuore.

Denis è sempre una sfida, la chiave che sblocca sinapsi incastrate, l'olio che lubrifica ricordi schifosi. Vaghi nel nulla appiccicoso, disordinato e delirante, squarciato da echi di un Castaneda tribale post apocalittico ma anche nella notte della follia disperata, nella pioggia acida più fitta e corrosiva, vedi lampi di luce bianca e pura come un'ostia.

Il Fiskadoro risorto non vuole ricordare quello che sta perdendo. "In questo passato che rimpiango tanto, non ricordo che anche allora rimpiangevo il passato"

Ma senza le parole qual è il significato? Senza la memoria cos'è la conoscenza?
La fine arriva ciclica e la perdita di sé richiama la fame primordiale di un nuovo inizio nell'eterna ruota del samsara.

He was the most effortlessly graceful prose writer of the last 30 years.

While I liked it for its language and its atmosphere of place, there isn't really much else here. A disappointment after Tree of Smoke. And, on a related note, I found the sections in this novel about the grandmother's escape from Vietnam by far the most interesting parts.

This was a more difficult piece of Johnson's body of work, almost a short precursor / offshoot of Tree of Smoke. On a pure sentence by sentence level, he's a master. There were also sweeping sections of back story like the grandmother surviving in the open water of China that hurt to read. A little weird to read post apocalyptic fiction from the mid 1980s now, when it's its own mammoth genre. Atmospheric, raw, and powerful shit here, guys.