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****CONTAINS SPOILERS***
Plot Summary: Historical fiction account of how William Buelow Gould came to create a book of 12 drawings of fish. Gould's life of petty crime leads him to imprisonment on a penal colony on Van Diemen's Land, Tasmania. There, ****CONTAINS SPOILERS***
Plot Summary: Historical fiction account of how William Buelow Gould came to create a book of 12 drawings of fish. Gould's life of petty crime leads him to imprisonment on a penal colony on Van Diemen's Land, Tasmania. There, he ends up working for an academic science poseur who tasks Gould with drawing fish so he can send them to a more renowned academic science poseur in Europe. Gould unexpectedly develops a profound attachment to drawing fish, which he relates to personally and to the events he witnesses. This persists even after the "surgeon" he works for is eaten by his own pet pig and Gould is framed for the murder.
Wouldn't say there's a plot really, but a series of often-absurd events including: - the death of one of the prisoners, the "machine breaker," when he accidentally falls while being punished on an instrument called the "cockchafer;" - Gould's relationship with an indigenous woman called Twopenny Sal (Gould realizes late in their relationship that despite his infatuation he never knew her real name); - his horror at being lost to history when he realizes that the logs of the penal colony are full of fiction written by a clerk who attacks Gould and ends up dying and floating around in Gould's coastal jail cell as it is flooded daily; - the rise and fall of the gold-mask-wearing crazy Commandant of the penal colony who makes a lot of questionable and emotional management choices; and eventually the explosive fire that consumes the penal colony.
In the end, Gould narrowly avoids execution for the murders of the "surgeon" and the clerk and takes to the ocean to live as a fish.
Liked: - Interesting to read after reading Richard Flanagan's Narrow Road to the Deep North. Some common subject matter but very different style. Deep Road is devastating while Gould's Book is, more often than not, elating. - Really funny and really sad. Generally great at creating tension between those two and specializes in bringing contradictions to their culmination in a revelatory-feeling way. - In particular liked the slide into surrealism that's more and more accentuated through the book, in keeping with the theme of the facts of history getting inevitably lost or distorted and the question of how much that matters.
Disliked: - Definitely a bit pretentious. - Outstays its welcome a little bit, with almost too high-frequency climactic moments of absurdity intermixed with beauty. - By the end I was wishing there was more of a plot arc to propel things.
Favorite Part: This is morbid but I enjoyed the shock of realizing that Gould's cell-mate, King, is really the bloated dead body of the clerk Jorgen Jorgensen. Makes you rethink a lot....more
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