Name: Fiskadoro
Rating: 3.922222222222222 (9 reviews)

Denis Johnson

After the world has been virtually destroyed and the United States consists of only its southernmost reaches, it is the period of the Quarantine, the beginning of a new era for the youth Fiskadoro, Anthony Cheung, and Cheung's one-hundred-year-old grandmother.

Fiskadoro

'Daring and provocative... Startlingly original' New York Times The nuclear holocaust has been and gone, and now everything is different. In Twicetown, once Key West, two missiles sit unexploded, objects of awe and indifference. Mr Cheung teaches the boy Fiskadoro to play the clarinet; Grandmother Wright, the oldest person in the world, endlessly relives the fall of Saigon; Cassius Clay Sugar Ray trades in radioactive artefacts. Boats go out to comb the sea for fish, and the sea keeps some of the men. Tossing fitfully in nightmares of forgotten wars, lazing in the tropical heat, the flotsam and jetsam of a lost civilization pursue their lives through a world of fractured memories. And they wait - for the Cubans to come, for the Quarantine to be lifted, for the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus to return and build their kingdoms. From the author of Tree of Smoke, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Lee Schneider

Dark, spare, written with a punch, powerful ending.

Hailed by the New York Times as "wildly ambitious" and "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 Wasteland,' 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," Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all-too-possible tomorrow. Deeply moving and provacative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to breaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture.

Fiskadoro

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