Most helpful customer reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
captivating, colorful, fascinating, Jun 20 2004
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A rich, enigmatic work, April 17 2004
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.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Madness And Fish, Down Under, Mar 27 2004
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
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