“So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary

“So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?”

Seagull on a chimney (I know, I know, it's serious), Hobart, March 2021.

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan

Where to start with this odd beast? We start with a caution that our (initial) narrator cannot be trusted. From here, we enter into his reconstruction of a text that our untrustworthy narrator warns is one of another unreliable narrator. Master Gould (sic) is most insistent in his testimony that the reader cannot trust his account.

In this remarkable and peculiar novel, Flanagan explores the nature of memory, history and the very grand stories that individuals and nations console themselves. What is 'true' much depends upon who is asking and what is it they wish to hear. In this, the history of Van Diemen's Land presents exceptional fodder.

More succinctly, it is a tale of a bullshitter. The narrator is a bullshitter in love with bullshitting. In that, he understands that bullshit is all that we can ever have. From here, the reader begins a rollicking, funny, filthy, dark and disturbing trip that impresses, entertains, confounds, challenges and irritates. Best of all, he makes one think.

Is this not the point of art?

Significant works of art challenge us, and to this end, this is not an easy book to read. Rich with allusions to just about every philosopher and author imaginable, with Voltaire and Hegel ever-present. Throw in ahistorical references to Marx, Satre, Joyce, Faulker and innumerable others that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. At first, I found it irritating, but once I relaxed into the rollicking pace, I started to enjoy myself.

As a born and bred (and not at all proud) Tasmanian, I may have read this quite differently to others. I am more cynical, critical and sensitive to inaccuracies. I know the pubs in which Flanagan takes us. I am a keen snorkeler and bushwalker, so I see the fish and the landscape that dominate the text every day. I am fascinated, repelled and scornful of history and have explored it through every lens you can find.

My verdict? Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish is the real deal. It gets Tasmania in a way that others do not. In its absurdities, inanities, and abnormalities. In its lies upon delusions upon fantasies and imagined sense of itself, I could not agree more wholeheartedly.

Bullshit upon bullshit upon blood and shit and piss and a whole lot of dead fish, animals and people. That's the Tasmania that I know and ~~love~~ tolerate!

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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