Out of every Denis Johnson book I have read this one was my favorite.

A very unusual book about a young boy living in the Florida Keys after a nuclear war. The book also dealt with a ton of other topics including the bombing of Japan. I would not recommend it to other readers.

The last sad remnants of humanity cling to civilization in the Florida Keys. Not the most memorable of post-apocalyptic novels, but notable for having been written during the height of my own era of nuclear fears, the mid-1980s.

This is a different one. Written in a fascinating jumbled up language of broken English, Spanish, and more, set in a post apocalyptic Florida Keys, this is really just post-nuke slice of life. There’s very, very little in the way of plot and what plot there is kinda sucks. Fiskadoro is the titular character but the tale concerns plenty others, with him absent for large chunks. Beyond the boredom of the slice of life, the delving into a centarian grandma’s memories of escaping Vietnam as the communists took over is a massive “w h y?” for me. I guess it reinforces that idea of unending change, loss, moving forward…but it was much, much less interesting than post apocalypse community and culture (which was somewhat half baked—don’t expect a perfect picture or radical depth here.)

Best I can say is it gave me some feelings of the best parts of Fallout New Vegas, like the entire arc of Ulysses’s character, but compared to something like A Canticle for Leibowitz, this did very little for me.

Beautiful writing though. Whereas after reading Updike’s great prose I felt he couldn’t execute a whole good book, I do still think Johnson could.

Not his best work, but certainly worth reading if you liked Jesus' Son.

Like a dream you are struggling to remember.

I’ll read this book again eventually. It was tough and deliberate. Certain moments awed me. Much confused me. I need to slow down and contemplate this book next time I read it.

Meet Fiskadoro, mr. Cheung and grandmother Wright, 60 years after a nuclear holocaust which left all of the US except Florida and Cuba a dead zone.

Twicetown, formerly Key West, is the little town where all the action is taking place. Twicetown because it was struck by two nuclear missiles that sit unexploded on its territory.

I had some trouble with this book. The mixed – english and spanish – and broken language of most of the characters was not really my thing. I suppose that DJ wanted to show the detoriation of society, that apart from the physical deformations due to radiation also people’s minds were seriously affected.

We’re told the stories of the three main characters mentioned above. Fiskadoro who suffers a traumatic experience at the hands of the swamp people, mr. Cheung who hangs on to the few memories he has from the old world and grandmother Wright who relives the fall of Saigon.

But in the end they’re all listing to cubaradio whilst waiting for the Cubans who will certainly rescue them at the end of the quarantine. If it ends that is.

There is no doubt that Denis Johnson was a brilliant, poetic writer but this didn’t always pan out because his subject matter was so diverse, partly due to a checkered past. He grew up not only a military brat but the son of a liaison officer between the USIA and the CIA, hence “Tree of Smoke”. He also spent his 20’s in a drug and alcohol haze, hence “Angels” and “Jesus’s Son”. Another brilliant and beautiful novel was “Train Dreams.” This was his attempt at a post-apocalyptic novel, something which obviously isn’t from experience, and it was a bit uneven for me (although any post-apocalyptic novel that begins with clarinet lessons already has something going for it!) Of course, the problem with this subject is that there have been a lot and although unfair, it’s hard to read one without comparing it to another.
The story takes place on an island that resembles Cuba after an apparent nuclear event. On the island are several enclaves of different ethnicities and backgrounds who trade and share with another. There are various storylines mostly involving the music professor, his student and the student’s family members. An entire culture has evolved there, with new rituals and customs, messiahs, marijuana, plus terrible stories about the mainland around Miami. It is a very interesting mix and this is done well but aa lot of this is a mix between superstition, myth, legend and fact but it was hard for me to separate them at times. In other hands, this might be called “magical realism” but it can equally be called “reinventing the past” since there are few people who can recall what exactly happened and it becomes a matter for them of combining all of the above to form a narrative.
For me, I may have had problems with the book because I’ve read too many post-apocalyptic stories and may not have been in the mood for something where it was hard to separate the parts and say what was really happening and what was just some poetic riff; I just couldn’t pin this book down. I’d certainly recommend it for the writing, less so for the storylines themselves, as well mixed and developed as they are. (By the way, “Fiskadoro” is an invented word which combines Portuguese and Spanish words for fisherman and harpooner, if I remember. I know, it’s so OBVIOUS…!!!)

One of the joys of reading genre fiction, be it road novels, westerns or coming-of-age stories, is the specter of memorable works you’ve read previously in those same genres. And so “Into the Wild” reminded me of “The Dharma Bums,” “Lonesove Dove” reminded me of “The Ox-Bow Incident,” and any bildungsroman reminds me of “A Separate Peace.”

It’s my personal book baggage, something we all carry.

I believe it was Kurt Vonnegut who advised (and I’m paraphrasing), “Be careful what you read, because that’s what you’ll write.” He might just as well have said, “Be careful what you read, because that’s what you’ll remember when you’re reading future books.”

I just completed Denis Johnson’s post-apocalyptic novel, “Fiskadoro,” first published in 1985; and rather predictably it reminded me of “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, the post-apocalyptic literary phenomenon that won The Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Mind you, I’m not bemoaning this development. It just got me wondering, “If I hadn’t read McCarthy’s book, what other novels (or perhaps movies) would have been haunting the pages of Johnson’s book?”

(Note: Johnson won the National Book Award in 2007 for “Tree of Smoke.”)

Unlike “The Road” and its dark, ash-laden imagery, “Fiskadoro” is set in sun-splashed Key West, Florida – a place that’s been renamed Twicetown, after the two nuclear bombs that landed on the area but didn’t explode. Twicetown still experiences radiation, so it’s quarantined.

Like most novels in this genre, background details are scant, e.g., What year is this exactly? Who initiated the nuclear war? Who’s the ruling authority keeping them quarantined? Why don’t people flee the poverty and disease of Twicetown and make their ways to Cuba or Miami?

Figuring out the back story is not only a primary challenge to the reader, it sublimely mirrors the concerns of the characters, who are largely in the dark themselves.

Fiskadoro, the title character, is the 12-year-old son of local fishermen. His family, like many others, makes its living on the sea, and everything revolves around their daily catch.

“The boats were in. When he entered the shadows of coconut and date palms and felt the silence along the corrugated huts, he knew they’d come in and that everyone, even the dogs and cats, would be down at the water. He heard their cries.”

The family lives in a humble seaside hut decorated with old car parts: bench seats for living room sofas; turn signals for lamps; car batteries for radio and light power. There’s no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. Children walk around naked, old women go topless, and the men spend their days on the sea, their nights drinking moonshine or smoking marijuana. No one can remember the time before the war --and no one knows why.

Fiskadoro meets Mr. Cheung, one of the people who rebels against this lack of knowledge. Cheung and others have organized a musical band called the Miami Symphony Orchestra, and Fiskadoro, whose ancestors bequeathed him a clarinet, goes to this middle-aged man to receive lessons. Cheung and others have also organized an intellectual group called The Society of Science, and they meet to discuss some of the few books that have survived the holocaust.

“Mr. Cheung did his best to be counted a part of civilization, with an understanding of civilization based on what had come down to him from the last century.”

He tries to become a vessel of knowledge.

“History, the force of time – he was aware he was obsessed in an unhealthy way with these thoughts – are washing over us like this rocknroll. Some of us are aligned with a slight force, a frail resistance that shapes things for the better – I really believe this: I stand against the forces of destruction, against the forces that took the machines away.”

And so he memorizes the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the names of the 50 states. There’s a sense, however, that his efforts are all for naught, as the narrator says, “Thinking about the past contributes nothing to the present endeavor, and in fact to concern ourselves too greatly with the past is a sin, because it distracts our minds from the real and current blessing showered down us in every heartbeat out of the compassion and mercy and bounty of Allah.”

In addition to Fiskadoro and Mr. Cheung, the book focuses on Mr. Cheung’s mother, an elderly woman who might be the oldest person in the world. A native of Vietnam, she remembers fleeing the city during the fall of Saigon, which provides the closest thing we get to a specific time orientation. It says she was a young woman then, perhaps about 20. So if she were that age in 1975, and she’s about 100 now, then the book is set sometime around 2050.

Twicetown inhabitants can pick up radio broadcasts from Cuba, but they see it only as a source of music, not of news. Belinda, Fiskadoro’s mother, says, “You know the radio he all lies. Cada palabra de la voz del radio es una mentira” – every word of the voice on the radio is a lie.”

What then is the truth? And who holds it? And who will live to see it manifest in the waters near Key West?

Cam Martin also writes for CBS Sports and Barnes & Noble Review. Email: [email protected]

Just, holy shit. What a novel. What writing.

This book is a surreal little visionary experience, and probably something of a forgotten Johnson classic. It might have been a little ahead of its time back in the decade it was written, but feels almost like a touchstone for the slow-burn collapse of truths and meaning going on around us today, spun out in fragment and repurposed symbols of once-high and once-coherent culture. It's a quiet, dreamlike gem of a novel, very different in tone to other high watermark Johnson, almost reverent in some aspects, but holding its own miasmic dreamlike atmosphere, weaving its strange dream in its own strange world, made up of a hundred little broken glass fragments of 20th Century culture, put back together again in a way that's not quite right. Allah, Bob Marley, and Jesus. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. Atomic bombs and the fall of Saigon. And somehow it all just fits.