Gould's Book of Fish

Flanagan, Richard

ISBN 10: 0802139590 / ISBN 13: 9780802139597

Published by Grove Press, New York, 2002

About this Item

Slight rippling to front endpaper. ; Simply signed by Richard Flanagan on the title page. Full number line. ; 416 pages; Signed by Author.

Seller Inventory # 37606

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Gould's Book of Fish
• Publisher: Grove Press, New York
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802139590
• ISBN 13: 9780802139597
• Binding: Softcover
• Edition: 1st Grove Press Edition; First Printing.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the Commonwealth Prize

New York Times Book Review—Notable Fiction 2002

Entertainment Weekly—Best Fiction of 2002

Los Angeles Times Book Review—Best of the Best 2002

Washington Post Book World—Raves 2002

Chicago Tribune—Favorite Books of 2002

Christian Science Monitor—Best Books 2002

Publishers Weekly—Best Books of 2002

The Cleveland Plain Dealer—Year’s Best Books

Minneapolis Star Tribune—Standout Books of 2002

Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled.

Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.

Reviews

This remarkable novel is a meditation on colonialism—indeed, on history itself—couched in the story of an English guttersnipe, William Gould, who is sent to a penal colony in Tasmania in the eighteen-twenties. The book starts like Defoe, with wenching and bar fights. Then, to address the horrors of the colony, it shifts toward magic realism; the local surgeon sends the heads of black men, pickled in brine, back to the Royal Society, in London, to prove that Negroes are not descended from Adam. (In this vein, Flanagan also supplies one of the most profound sex scenes in recent literature.) Finally, however, the book resembles only itself, a serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, "swimming in vast coldness, alone."
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