The Fisherman's Son - Hardcover

Koepf, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767902440 ISBN 13: 9780767902441

Publisher: Broadway, 1998

Synopsis

Drifting in a life raft off the northern California coast after a horrifying shipwreck, Neil Kruger retreats from his fear by recalling scenes from his childhood as the son of a commercial fisherman out of Half Moon Bay. With his emergency rations fast running out, he finds solace in his vivid memories: his powerful attachment to his father, a man who could predict the weather by looking at the stars; his painful estrangement from his mother, who worked at the local cannery to keep the family fed; his fascination with the hard lives and large hearts of a host of fellow fishermen.

In those early years, economic necessity forced Neil's parents to send him out on the ocean, and as he grows into the fisherman's life we learn the real cost of his father's struggle with the sea. There are battles with sea lions who steal his catch, the ever-present threat of storms, the heartwrenching drowning of one of his father's closest friends, and the horror of a hospital ship shattered by a fog-bound accident. As the story builds to its powerful, inexorable climax, we come to witness the terrible consequences the sea can exact upon those who depend upon it for a meager living.

The Fisherman's Son is at once an intimate story of a troubled family and an evocative memorial to the fast-disappearing world of commercial fishermen. In muscular, poetic prose, and with a powerful sense of the authentic on every page, Michael Köepf has created a triumphant novel about our lifelines to childhood and the pull of the sea.

About this title

Review

This elegiac sea story is one of those rare narratives likely to pleasure lovers of adventure and lovers of language alike. With beguilingly modest lyricism, and great attention to detail, Michael Koepf, a commercial fisherman for 19 years, conjures up a world he knows inside and out. Consider, for example, this riff on fishing lures: "Neil's favorites were the hootchi-kootchies attached on short leaders behind large blades of curved metal called 'flashers.' The 'hootchies' hid sharp hooks under colorful plastic hula skirts that resembled tiny octopi and squid. The flashers made circles in the water, and the hootchi-kootchies danced behind them. Neil wondered whether these lures looked like real food to the fish, or did they resemble banners in an underwater carnival, enticing the fish to one last deadly ride?" Every fisherman will recognize the rightness of this description, though few would think to say it quite this way.

In the novel's present, Neil Kruger is taking his own last deadly ride. In the wake of a drug-and-illegal-immigrant landing gone seriously wrong, he's adrift on a life raft. As his hope of rescue waxes and wanes, Neil remembers his father and the whole tightly knit community of salmon fishermen in California's Half Moon Bay in the late 1950s through the 1970s. He remembers his own apprenticeship in the seagoing, fish-killing arts. He evokes the moods, the colors, the smells, the shifting energies and voices of the sea, the fish that run below the boat and fill its pit, the gulls that shriek and feast on entrails, the fundamental loneliness and great loyalty of the "huntsmen" who struggle to survive in a world that increasingly disdains their independence and discounts the product of their routinely death-defying labors. He recalls the stories his father's comrades told each other to pass the time when the Half Moon Bay boats managed to rendezvous for an evening of whiskey and cribbage far out to sea, stories that extend the past back to the earliest decades of the century, told in voices that ring absolutely true. What at first seem like random snapshots ultimately sequence themselves into a convincing narrative. Although the book has been compared to The English Patient, Koepf's style and his structure are simpler and less self-consciously literary than Ondaatje's. There are pages of seafaring action here to make your heart beat faster, moments of loss and betrayal to make it heavy, and, finally, a portrait of time, place, and people so lovingly rendered that you end up grateful to Mr. Koepf for making it. --Joyce Thompson

From the Publisher

"a gritty novel with a hard-hitting intensity....Brilliantly written and mesmerizingly evocative, K--epf's extraordinary novel is a tribute to tough men and their long-suffering, and sometimes not-so-long-suffering, families."
--Brian Fagan, Los Angeles Times

"The Fisherman's Son is a fine novel of the sea, absorbing in its description of men who live by, on, and, in a sense, for the sea: exalted by its beauty, hypnotized by its power, and, if they are unlucky or unwise, destroyed by its cruelty."
--Larry McMurtry

"Once we had a great tradition in American Literature of writing elegantly about work--Twain, Steinbeck, Dos Passos. With The Fisherman's Son Michael K--epf reclaims the lost art with a novel that will make you remember what we're about, where we came from, and why we love our fathers. It doesn't get any better than this."
--James Crumley, author of The Good Last Kiss

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0767902440
• ISBN 13: 9780767902441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304