FISKADORO. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. First edition. A tale of the future set in the Florida Keys where survivors of some sort of war or nuclear disaster that destroyed civilization "live in a primitive, pre-machine-age world. Yet if these people seem to have lost their historical memory -- they can neither recall the former world of 'ferris wheels, elevators, boxing matches, mining operations,' nor remember what brought about its end -- they nonetheless suffer from the same feelings of loss, alienation and impending doom that afflicted previous generations of Americans. They, too, live in a strangely disembodied dream state, unable to distinguish between what is real, imagined and remembered; and they, too, are waiting for the time when 'everything we have, all we are, will meet its end, will be overcome, taken up, washed away'" (Michiko Kakutani, NYT, 1 May 1985). "Postnuclear literature often springs from ambiguous impulses. We all understand the big fear that propels it; what is more difficult to acknowledge is the element of wish fulfillment often present in fantasies of a world that has been swept clean of everything we know, and can therefore return to a pastoral innocence. In FISKADORO which joins the growing ranks of novels set beyond the end of the world, the 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" (Eva Hoffman, NYT, 26 May 1985). Second novel by the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel ANGLES. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, Additions. A fine copy in fine dust jacket. (#169685).
Price: $75.00
First edition so stated on copyright page.