The story is set in the former state of Florida several decades after a global nuclear holocaust. An enclave of survivors, bereft of collective historical knowledge, attempt to reassemble human society and culture.[2][3]
Plot
The story opens 60 years after a global nuclear holocaust. Only tiny enclaves of humans survive, one these in "Twicetown", in the region of the Florida Keys. Separate enclaves exist in the Everglades and at an Army compound, each with their own subcultures. The archives that could serve to reveal human history have been destroyed in the holocaust, and the surviving generations struggle to understand their origins. The 100-year-old Grandmother Wright is the only survivor whose life spans both pre- and post-apocalyptic periods. With the Christ-like adolescent boy, Fiskadoro, she attempts to discover the key to understanding the nature of human existence. Her grandson, Mr. Cheung, embarks on his own futile search for wisdom. Only Fiskadoro achieves an epiphany that leads him to genuine enlightenment.[4][5][6]
[T]he poet and novelist Denis Johnson attempts something much more daring and provocative. He doesn't entirely avoid the millenarian impulse. But his startlingly original book is an examination of the cataclysmic imagination, a parable of apocalypse that is always present and precedes redemption in a cycle of death and birth, forgetting and remembering."[7]
Hoffman cautions: "[T]here is something in Fiskadoro that resists the reader's full submission, or suspension of disbelief."[8]
Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times offers fulsome praise for the novel: "...Johnson, author of the magical novel of a time after the nuclear holocaust—Fiskadoro—is remarkable and perfectly executed."[9]
Toward the end of the novel, these hallucinatory riffs become longer and longer, the prose increasingly windy...The reader is inclined, at moments, to say enough, but these moments are rare. Such is the power of the narrative that one can only finish Fiskadoro with admiration for Mr. Johnson's ambition—and a keen appreciation of his prodigal imagination.[10]
Kakutani reprises her praise for the novel in 2017: "Plots in Mr. Johnson's books tend to be tangled, melodramatic affairs—often highly indebted to famous works by Conrad, Graham Greene and Robert Stone—in his lesser books...his writing can devolve into portentous philosophizing, larded with New Age and Nietzschean intonations...But in his masterworks—[among them] Fiskadoro...Johnson's incandescent language channels his characters' desperation."[11]
Theme
"What I write about is really the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking: 'Why is it like this if there's supposed to be a God?'"—Denis Johnson, quoted in Michiko Kakutani in Poetic Visions of a Fallen World (2017)[12]
Literary critic Eva Hoffman, identifying Fiskadoro as "parable of apocalypse", writes:
Like all the reduced circumstances of Fiskadoro, this impoverished idiom is a way of posing certain fundamental questions. What, in a world stripped of accumulated cultural knowledge, are the minimal units of communication and meaning? What, in our naked helplessness, are the available modes of knowledge? And how, given the central fact of death, can we wake from the troubled sleep of denial?"[13]
Mr. Johnson's America, past or present, is uncannily resonant today. It's a troubled land, staggering from wretched excess and aching losses, a country where dreams have often slipped into out-and-out delusions, and people hunger for deliverance, if only in the person of a half-baked messiah. Reason is in short supply here, and grifters and con men peddling conspiracy thinking and fake news abound; families are often fragmented or nonexistent; and primal, Darwinian urges have replaced the rule of law. And yet amid the bewilderment and despair, there are lightning flashes of wonder and hope—glimpses of the possibility of redemption"[14]
Footnotes
↑ Hoffman 1985: "In Fiskadoro, which joins the growing ranks of novels set beyond the end of the world..."
↑ Kakutani 2017: "In Fiskadoro, set in the near future...an assortment of dreamers, con men and pirates inhabit an apocalyptic landscape...trying to hold on to fading memories of what the world used to be."
↑ Hoffman 1985: "...What, in a world stripped of accumulated cultural knowledge, are the minimal units of communication and meaning? What...are the available modes of knowledge? And how, given the central fact of death, can we wake from the troubled sleep of denial?"
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which the Earth's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, such as an impact event; destructive, such as nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, such as a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or any other scenario in which the outcome is apocalyptic, such as a zombie apocalypse, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.
Independence Day is a 1995 novel by Richard Ford and the sequel to Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter. This novel is the second in what is now a five-part series, the first being The Sportswriter. It was followed by The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank With You (2014) and Be Mine (2023). Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Fugitive Pieces is a novel by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels. The story is divided into two sections. The first centers around Jakob Beer, a Polish Holocaust survivor while the second involves a man named Ben, the son of two Holocaust survivors. It was first published in Canada in 1996 and was published in the United Kingdom the following year. Since the publication, the novel has won awards such as Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Guardian Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. For over two years the novel was on Canada's bestseller list, and it was translated into over 20 different languages.
Michael Anthony Hoffman II is an American author. He has been described as a conspiracy theorist and, by the Anti-Defamation League and other sources, as a Holocaust denier and antisemite.
Eva Hoffman is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer and academic.
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man is a novel by Joseph Heller, published posthumously in 2000. His final work, it depicts an elderly author as he tries to write a novel that is as successful as his earlier work, mirroring Heller's own career after the success of Catch-22.
Heroes and Villains is a 1969 post-apocalyptic novel by Angela Carter.
Greasy Lake is a collection of short stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle published in 1985 by Viking Press.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Foe is a 1986 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday as their adventures were already underway. Like Robinson Crusoe, it is a frame story, unfolded as Barton's narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe to help transform her tale into popular fiction. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, the novel was the subject of criticism in South Africa, where it was regarded as politically irrelevant on its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Robert Hilburn is an American pop music critic, author, and radio host. As critic and music editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1970 to 2005, his reviews, essays and profiles appeared in publications around the world. Hilburn has since written a memoir and best-selling biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon. He was a member of the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for more than twenty years, and lives in Los Angeles.
Santa Evita is a 1995 novel by Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez. It is the story of the corpse of Argentine political leader Eva Perón, the second wife of Argentine president Juan Perón. The book became a bestseller in Argentina and has been widely translated. It is estimated to have sold over 10 million copies worldwide, which makes it one of the best-selling books of all time.
Mendelssohn Is on the Roof is a novel by Jiří Weil written in 1959 and first translated into English by Marie Winn in 1991. The book took 15 years to write. It is an exploration of the many forms of corruption in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and embeds historical events, such as the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, among fictional stories concerning the Holocaust, Nazi careerism and the rise of Nazism.
Both Flesh and Not: Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by American author David Foster Wallace published posthumously in 2012. It is Wallace's third essay collection.
The Age of Miracles is the debut novel by the American writer Karen Thompson Walker. It was published in June 2012 by Random House in the United States and Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom. The book chronicles the fictional phenomenon of "slowing", in which one Earth day begins to stretch out and take longer and longer to complete. The novel received positive reviews and publishing deals totaling £1.12 million, and has been translated into a number of languages. The book was nominated as part of the Waterstones 11 literary award in 2012.
None to Accompany Me is a 1994 novel by South African Nobel Winner Nadine Gordimer. The novel follows the motifs and plot framework of a Bildungsroman, exploring the development of the main character, Vera Stark. The novel is set during the early 1990s in South Africa after the release of Nelson Mandela.
Moonglow is a 2016 novel by Michael Chabon. The book chronicles the life of Chabon's grandfather, a WW2 soldier, engineer and rocket enthusiast who marries a troubled Jewish survivor from France and lives a challenging, wandering life in postwar America. Chabon tells the story using a mixture of strict memoir and creative fiction writing. The narrator functions as a proxy for the author, Chabon.
Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, whose novel What Strange Paradise was the winner of the 2021 Giller Prize.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
