[.ca] Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish (ISBN 0802139590)

From Amazon.com:
Gould's Book of Fish, an extraordinary work of fact-based fiction by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan (Death of a River Guide) is a journey through the fringe madness of Down Under colonialism. Set during the 1830s in a hellish island prison colony off the Tasmanian coast, the novel plucks a real-life thief and prisoner, English forger William Buelow Gould, from the pages of history to act as protagonist-narrator. Through Gould's unique capacity to blend hyperbole, hyperrealism, and self-effacing honesty, the reader acquires a shockingly clear picture of daily torment on the island. Yet more remarkable is Gould's portrait of bizarre ambitions among prison authorities to further principles of art and science amidst so much misery. Key to such plans is Gould's talent as a painter and illustrator. The compound's surgeon, nursing hopes of publishing a definitive guide to the island's fish, leans heavily on Gould's ability to record the taxonomy of various species. Though Gould accommodates his masters, the manuscript, in his hands, becomes testimony to their perverse dreams of civilization and his own quick-witted survival instincts. Throughout, Flanagan never loses the well-imagined voice of Gould's candor or the character's dense descriptive powers, talents that translate into a thrilling text that reads like a blend of Melville and Burgess. --Tom Keogh

captivating, colorful, fascinating:
I bought this book in hardcover based solely on its appearance. The cover is beautiful, the illustrations inside are wonderful, and the differently colored chapters intrigued me. Once I actually started reading this, I was -- pardon the pun -- hooked. It's a self-proclaimed novel but I chose to read it as historical fiction. Maybe 1 percent of it is based on fact, or maybe only the names were changed. It's such a complete story (including the illustrations and text color), you could believe this really happened. It's thrilling and funny and fantastical and gets your heart pounding and imagining running. I LOVED it, and I hoped you do too.

Universal Questions:
Great book. Has become one of my all time favorites, surpassing A Prayer for Owen Meany, Jitterbug Perfume and Life of Pie. Although it drags in places, you would be foolish to put it down. Nuggets, and even boulders, of brilliance can be found scattered throughout the book. More than just a history of Sarah Island and the surrounding area during its penal colony past, it is really a means for Flanagan to ask the big questions. To see the inescapable connection between fish and men, the past and the present, the good and the bad.

Magnificent:
Never have I put down a book upon completion and wondered out loud if there was any truth at all to what transpired between its covers. Having finished Flanagan's marvellously cryptic tale, I felt as though I had been tricked in the best possible of ways. Every solid point in the story on which I felt I could grab and create some sort of foundation of rational explanation was, by the end of the story, as slippery and intangible as one of Gould's beautiful fish. I was left breathless, a fish out of water, at once scared of the new reality Flanagan exposes -- one in which my previous conceptions of time, memory, life and death are flipped on their heads -- and exhilarated by the vast, mysterious landscape the author lays before me. No book has made me feel the way "Gould's Book of Fish" did, and still does. Absolutely magnificent.

Madness And Fish, Down Under:
This book was recommended to me by an esteemed colleage as an example of "fine literary fiction." So of course I got hold of it at once. Most unusual novel. As best I can determine, the novel centers around the tormented life of William Buelow Gould, possibly an actual person, who spent much of his adult life as a prisoner in the notorious Sarah Island penal colony in Tasmania in the early nineteenth century. While enduring the most degrading existence imaginable, and undergoing heinous tortures, Gould somehow manages to become a skilled water-colorist. He is commissioned by prison officalry to paint the island's fish (along with other insane, grandiose projects), and what results is a collection of twelve fine watercolors of local fish, interspersed with Gould's disjointed memoirs. So much for the plot. Actually plot is irrelevant, for the author seemingly sets out to create maximum confusion, multiple levels of reality, dreamlike sequences that escalate from the merely insane to the cataclysmic. The author asks us to follow him through this maelstrom of ideas and to ask ourselves, what is reality? Is reality something we create with our thoughts? Author Flanagan is obviously brilliant, clever, and exceedingly erudite. Unfortunately, he does not make things easy for his readers. I found the book very slow going. Although there are moments of high entertainment and ribald humor, there are far too many pages of rambling and circular discourse. There is also far too much description of bodily fluids (and gases), horrible tortures, and painful death. This is a remarkable book, but not for everyone. If you like to puzzle your way through symbols, allusions, imagery and metaphor, well, this one might be for you. For my money it was over-rated. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber

A rich, enigmatic work:
Several weeks after having read this book-twice-my head is still spinning in wonder and delight. Richard Flanagan has clearly had a lot of fun in challenging his readers with an arsenal of literary tricks-frame stories, shifting narrators, magical realism, time shifts, allusions, self-referentiality-all the while making them seem more invention than artifice. His greatest feat, though, is in the creation of one of the most memorable characters in all of modern literature: William Buelow Gould with all his aliases. Gould is the perfect vehicle not only for conveying the novel's dark humor or bearing witness to its countless acts of misanthropy, but also in proving that love and story telling are redemptive powers. When I reread the novel, I read sections from The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes at the same time. It made me appreciate even more the inventiveness of Flanagan as he reworks the historical records of Tasmania both in development of his plot and in support of his theme of history as bunk. While the novel is set in a Tasmanian prison colony during the first third of the nineteenth century, it is, nevertheless, very contemporary in the "truths" it presents. As to literary predecessors, think Catch-22, Tristram Shandy, As I Lay Dying, Heart of Darkness, and Metamorphoses.