Fiskadoro (Denis Johnson)

July 2, 2006

Fiskadoro, Denis Johnson’s second novel, is a post-apocalyptic fever dream set in the Florida Keys, where a large group of people have survived thanks to two missiles that fell to earth as duds. Only the Cuban government– known solely as ghostly voices on the few surviving radios– is suspected to have survived, Christians and Muslims have grown together into a shared religion, the US government is nearly wholly forgotten, the war and the “time of the cold” on their way to becoming myth.

Fiskadoro is a young teenager who has discovered a clarinet and enlisted Mr. Cheung, the director of the Miami Orchestra (which exists now mostly in Cheung’s head), to teach him how to play. Mr. Cheung lives with his grandmother, one of the oldest surviving people in this small world. Chenug’s grandmother exists in a haze of memories through which the reality of the present moments only sometimes intrude.

This is not a novel of politics or technology or society gone awry. The social system that has evolved here is realistic, at once primitive in its newness and sophisticated in its resurrection of the old. The physical landscape is littered with remnants of the past (much of the furniture is made of old seats from cars) and highly valuable (and exceedingly rare) books; more importantly the mental and emotional landscape of those who survived is complicated by memories real and increasingly falsified and mythical.

Johnson’s creation is unlike any other post-apocalyptic vision I have ever read. Imagine sci-fi as written by Samuel Beckett using Johnson’s gorgeous prose and you are partway there. The story is basically told through the three unreliable narrators: Fiskadoro, who has experience nothing of the time before the war, Cheung, who is stuck futilely trying to reconcile this new existence with the old, and Grandmother Wright, who is largely lost in her own past as a child refugee from the Vietnam war. Each of their viewpoints presents their own problems, leaving us to understand what has happened and the events of the novel in much the same way the characters themselves experience their own existence and history.

Tags: denis johnson, novel, reading log