Praise for Gould's Book of Fish:
"The first masterpiece of the twenty-first century?"
-Prospect (UK)
"The Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan's new novel, Gould's Book of Fish-a huge, phantasmagorical work that combines magical realism, Joycean language and Melvillian intonations to examine the legacy of colonialism through the story of a nineteenth-century forger… turns out to be as inventive and visionary in its reimagination of history as [Toni] Morrison's masterwork, Beloved."
-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Brilliant or crazed or both… A celebration of fevered imagination."
-Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
"Mesmerizing and compelling… profoundly serious and ambitious as well as being essentially a comic novel… The novel stays in the mind like a haunting poem…. A hysterical and historical indictment of racism, imperialism, fraud and stupidity, and yet above all else it is about the human ability to survive."
-Literary Review (London)
"By a majority, we chose the most controversially difficult and demanding of the four books that were before us, because we detected in it a touch of genius that, we believe, will give it enduring significance. It is an impossible book to describe or summarize. Some of the judges used adjectives like Dantean, Joycean, even grotesque. To mix some of the metaphors we coined to capture its quality: 'this is a baggy monster of a book that does literary cartwheels on a tightrope.'"
-Commonwealth Prize citation
"Remarkable… A meditation on colonialism-indeed, on history itself-couched in the story of an English guttersnipe… A serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, 'swimming in vast coldness, alone.'"
-The New Yorker
"Surely the slipperiest, most outrageous novel of the year… Flanagan dives into the waters of Swift and Conrad and… leaps beyond his country's history to the biggest questions that love and language can pose."
-Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor
"It ushers in a range of ideas that much contemporary writing grasps at but ends up simply nodding to…. There is so much to savor in this rolling, picaresque tale of grotesques and their progress: so much unfettered imagination, so much sly irony and comic anarchy. Passages burn with the intense pleasure of story-making, of the abandon that comes from a seething of ideas and their joyful mutation into words."
-Alex Clark, The Guardian (UK)
"Most good novels arise out of some quarrel with reality-an impossible romance, tragic loss, a social broadside or satirical anger. A few great ones raise an all out-war cry and sprawl with abandon across all the familiar categories of fictional invention. Gould's Book of Fish, the third novel from Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, is just such a great book."
-Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World
"Chock full of ideas, exuberant language, indelible images, and borrowings that echo the classics of world literature, from the fiction of Fielding, Sterne, and Dickens right through Joyce, Borges, and Thomas Pynchon… Throughout this challenging picaresque ramble Flanagan never loses sight of his larger themes: the contortions, distortions and out-and-out lies of history; man's inhumanity to man; the redemptive power of stories, and the power of love to salve us in an evil world."
-Brad Zellar, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"A darkly funny and brilliantly sad story about words, art, colonialism and the nature of mankind… in prose that dances and sizzles and bleeds."
-Karen Sandstrom, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
"[An] audacious, labyrinthine and gratifying third novel… [that] ricochets page-to-page at breakneck read with passion and compassion, from the rhapsodic to Rabelaisian and from dark to darkly humorous…. Gould's Book of Fish recalls Joyce with its free-fall word fervor and use of language, and suggests the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez…. Evocations of Ovid are strung throughout…. The depths of human corruptibility explored by Joseph Conrad are also integral, notably seen with heart and darkness doing battle within Gould himself."
-Gordon Hauptfleisch, San Diego Union-Tribune
"One of the novel's most ambitious talents, one whose every book… commands our attention."
-Caroline Fraser, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A] terrifying, exhilarating, and amazingly beautiful novel… Perhaps Flanagan… has, through this remarkable achievement, given us at least a partial answer to the question of the relative value of human existence."
-E. William Smethurst, Jr., Chicago Tribune
"[Flanagan's] crowning achievement so far… A crazed tour de force."
-Corey Mesler, Memphis Commercial Appeal
"I have never read a modern, just-published book this good. Reading Gould's Book of Fish… when it is mint-new, you are in a select company, along with people who read Joyce, Camus, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald when they first appeared…. A screamingly funny book [that] rivals Wodehouse at his best… Gould's Book of Fish is not just literature, not just art. Gould's Book of Fish is a glorious and gobsmacking investment, and I am a prophet in these matters."
-Michael Browning, Palm Beach Post
"A novelist to be reckoned with… An astonishing book."
-Chris Wright, The Boston Phoenix
"Beautifully conceived… The constantly shifting chronology and narrators make the reader think he's awoken to a Thomas de Quincey opium dream (or a western version of the Aboriginal Dreamtime)."
-Chris Watson, Santa Cruz Sentinel
"Similar to the microcosm created by Joseph Heller in Catch-22… Flanagan offers a captivating version of Tasmania, a tale of ugliness, love, brutality, and humor, through a found text, manipulated history, and fish."
-Benjamin Austen, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"A novel in which both art and artifice slip their bonds…. A phantasmagorical tale… of ingenious invention and lavish scope… [that] affirms the wonder of fiction. And life."
-Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
"One part Rabelais, one part García Márquez, one part Ned Kelly."
-James Campbell, The New York Times Book Review
"Ferocious in its anger, grotesque, sexy, funny, violent, startlingly beautiful… A book whose uniqueness mirrors its principle theme-the dangers of classification. I urge you to read it."
-Robert MacFarlane, The Observer (London)
"[Flanagan's] writing has the unmistakeable shimmer of literary star quality…. A bewitching novel."
-John Dugdale, New Statesman (UK)
"Open it, plunge in and begin to swim through marvelous waters. This is fiction bursting from a fecund imagination colored by Rabelais, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, Melville, Hemingway, and Dostoyevsky. All these grand voices swim along just under the surface, but it's Flanagan's exuberant voice that hits the air. And what a voice it is…. Billy Gould is as saintly as Billy Budd and as cravenly split as any of Dostoyevsky's characters…. The book… alerts your comic sense as does Rabelais, and reverberates in your imagination with the force of Wuthering Heights."
-Helen Elliott, The Weekend Australian
"A phosphorescing talisman with a dual capacity to enchant and unhinge… At no point in its [four hundred] ripe, poetic, comma-filled, philosophically dense pages is it ever clear if Flanagan composed the text or received it in a moment of mystical dictation…. Is it a masterpiece? Halfway through my second read, I know so."
-Bruce James, Good Reading (Australia)
ALSO BY RICHARD FLANAGAN
Death of a River Guide
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
For Rosie, Jean and Eliza,
swimming in ever widening rings of wonder
My mother is a fish.
William Faulkner
