Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

I wrote on the flyleaf that I read this book in December of 1986, and I remember Robert "Harpo" Gordon recommended it to me, and since then I've recommended it to many people-- but I didn't really remember any of it.  Re-reading it, I found it to be astonishing and mystifying, someplace between a long wild surreal poem, a dystopian narrative set in the Florida Keys, and a memoir of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War.

“It [fire] catches, then burns, then blazes; it rages and sings, it wanes, it shifts and flares, it burns a little longer and then weakens, whatever it is, and goes out.  But if you lay the small wood across it in the morning, it all begins again”  (125)

"The Sovereign Lord," Zeid say, shiny and orange across the fire, blasted by Fiskadoro's glass vision into a dozen of himself, "the Holy One, the Giver of Peace, the Keeper of Faith; the Guardian, the Mighty One, the All-powerful, the Most High; the Creator, the Originator, the Modeler; the Unbecome, the Unborn, the Unmade; the Dissolver of Space and of time, the Weaver of the Web of Appearances, the Inbreather and Outbreaker of Infinite Universes; the Formless, Non-existent, Imperishable, and Transcendent Fullness of the Emptiness; the Voidness; the Eternal God. (183)

"On that day we shall ask Hell: "'Are you full?'"
Fiskadoro said, "And Hell will answer: 'Are there any more?'" (183)