Unbelievably beautiful writing, as one expects from Johnson. This was a first reading, and I can't quite parse a few things to make it really come alive for me, but the general gist seems to be that every breath counts and that not everything can be explained, certainly not by our past, from which we are incapable of learning anything of practical value. (But, damn, it would be nice if we could...) Ultimately, I don't think everything can be explained in this book either, some things can just be appreciated for being as they are, but a second read would inevitably help to realize the narrative web Johnson creates through masterfully subtle links. Somewhere in there, I imagine Johnson planted a few nuggets of insight into the human condition as social animals with a profound inability to communicate.

This is a strange, rich dish.

Having read the whole thing afraid that I wouldn't come away with any meaningful idea of what it was about, I was pleased to find I wasn't left totally in the dark. But this is obviously a book for which re-reading or active study would prove beneficial.

Denis Johnson, no stranger to impressiveness, impresses here. Imagine a story involving life after a great apocalypse, pseudo-islander-Spanglish patois, genital self-mutilation, the phrase "You hanging you tits out now.", clarinet lessons, cancer, fishing, a sort of utilitarian neo-Islam, mud helmets, Bob Marley, marijuana, the Vietnam War, drowning, fire, eating of live two-headed snakes, potato brandy and characters called Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, Harvard Sanchez, Flying Man, A.T. Cheung, and Mrs. Castanette (who named herself, because she plays the castenets.) Now imagine somehow compressing all of that into a clear, tight narrative style. Mr. Johnson succeeds in that where no one else, I imagine, would even try.

One can't help but to suspect heavy drug use being involved in the conception of this book. But however outlandish the ideas, characters, and images, Denis Johnson, as soberly and beautifully as ever, constructs a few hundred pages of eye-widening,tightly coiled prose that stand up in every way to the standards of the rest of his work.

I don't care what you say.

This is an adventurous, and I suspect experimental, novel from Denis Johnson, published in 1985 and set at some time around 2050.
Nuclear destruction has come and gone and left a few grimly primitive communities just about surviving on the Florida Keys. One such community is the focus of the piece, one that is in quarantine.
There are no machines, language is a slang hybrid and Spanish and English, pirates threaten fishing boats, and a form of cancer is common, and is pretty much a death sentence.

One survivor, Cheung, an ex-member of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, hangs on to the vestiges of civilisation and its culture, he has a small library of books now seen as being sacred, he maintains a bunch of musicians, though they have no instruments.
A 13 year old boy, Fiskadoro, arrives at his shack one day, with a clarinet, asking to be taught how to play.

This is a complex fantasy, packed with as many philosophical interpretations as the reader may choose to look for.
It’s best enjoyed by not looking too deeply for them as Johnson’s mind wanders, as to do so is ultimately disappointing. Rather, see it as a daring piece of writing, with some impressive parts that Johnson is renowned for in much of his earlier work.

It has relevance for today also.
Simply summarised, it’s an America with the American Dream taken away. There’s not a lot left.
He said himself of it..

That book is America made bleak. If you take away the TVs, what’ve you got?

Rambling, plotless, hard to follow