Fish in Exile

So Catholic and Ethos keep bringing the dead fish to the sea. This ecology of grief in love consumes their relationship, and this ecology reinvents it.Here, domestic grief becomes epic tragedy, draped in the costumes of the Greeks. Make no mistake. This is a story about now as much about the myths in ancient sorrow and beauty in ancient seas reinvented in each of us. Each daughter is her own Demeter and Persephone. Each mother is her own Persephone and Demeter. It is as much about the earth in your own backyard. The earth in one’s own heart. So pulverizing, our inner and outer world, in its relationship with eternity and thus so lovely in its eternity. Perhaps cruel. But beautiful always unutterably beautiful.How can Catholic bring her little girl and boy back? Can she do it by bringing fish from the sea into her home? Did her little girl mistake the sea for a beautiful dress?I believe here we are reading Vi Khi Nao’s dream of love. And of love in broken paradises. Nao is working through her own pain. Her own fate. Her own blows. The paradises that our life grants us by the very existence of our minds. And the pain our mind knows. By what we see and hear in our fractured and exalted states and cannot unsee once it’s heard. How love must save us from utter annihilation. And how it cannot. How at least we think this way when being honest with how we think about love in life. If not save then sweeten the meat. For even in our longing not to eat, to perish, a part of us wants so badly to be cooked for. For sugar for the night of intense knowing. Paradise is not just a word for art or dreamed of lost potential. Perhaps nothing in Vi Khi Nao is a word for anything but rather the raw elements of living and loss itself so physical is her language so kinetic her imagery. Here is a love story trying to outrun grief. It is a grenade. The sea is right on your heels.(I keep forgetting this is a book. This is a book and is not reality, yes?)

I read this in one sitting and that hasn't happened to me (with a book) in a long, looong timeI couldn't put this down and it's not even a book written for thrills, with actions scenes and such. It was a quiet portrayal of grief with delightfully grandiose moments - like a Greek tragedy, only better. I couldn't make myself stop reading. I hate that I finished it because now I'm left in the ether, desperately looking for other books like this one. So far, I've found none.Seriously, I'm tempted to read this novel again and I finished it yesterday at four in the morning. In short: Fish in Exile was magnificently enthralling.

Vi Khi Nao offers a poignant tale of loss, sex, relationships and family in her latest novel. Much of the novel is written in an elevated poetic style that slowly, and effectively, transitions into a more traditional prose style, later transitioning back into the poetic structure as the novel nears its end. As an artistic piece, Fish in Exile is an excellent example of Vi Khi Nao’s control over form in non-traditional, experimental verse/prose. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed her unapologetic use of language, as some dialogue was implanted with untranslated verse and dialogue from a variety of languages. For me, stepping back from a story, if only for a brief moment to research and understand the references made within the novel, created an enjoyable reading experience. The characters remained simultaneously bizarre and believable throughout, and I found myself fully committed to each of their stories. The humor, while remaining dark and poignant, is expelled in energetic bursts of prose but remains somewhat downplayed within the larger story. The novel offers a deeply cathartic ending that, as a reader, is satisfying. It is one of the few novels that I found nearly impossible to put down and read excitedly over the course of a few hours. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in new, exciting, and thoughtful fiction.

Fish in ExileI am very grateful to be sharing my time with the characters who inhabit Nao’s Fish In Exile and to get a chance to journey with them and the author into a deep inquiry about existence. It’s a delicate moment in my life and in history and I desperately need to be hearing from authors who are willing to expose the underpinnings of grief and ask us to inquire deeply into questions surrounding the nature of reality, death, love and exile. I recognized a strange synergy between my own life and what happens to the gorgeous survivors Ethos and Catholic, heroines of this book. Time and space is tossed around, fueled by tragedy and intricate weavings of wisdom are born. It feels weird calling it a book because Fish in Exile is more like an exquisite experience . In reading this piece, I experienced how time, space, and myth are continuous. It looks like so far in the world there is an immutable truth: you cannot trick death into giving back life if she feels to take it. I haven’t even touched on the language in this book. It is glorious. It’s like eating the most delicious thing that you never even knew existed. Nao gave me, the reader, the respect that I am prepared to understand quite complex concepts and notions. She also knows we deserve beauty and delicious language with which to bath ourselves in these wisdoms. By presenting it in this way, we are lead to a corporeal knowing that includes and goes far beyond the mind. This book also happens to be is extremely sexy. Why not honor one of the forces of creation? It’s fun! All in all, this book is an inspiration and one of the best books I’ve ever read. It also made me cry several times which probably goes without saying. Bravo Vi Khi Nao! I can’t wait for the next one and many more.

This is just an incredible novel. It manages to be both deeply moving but also stylistically elegant, with its poetic prose and mythical references. A powerful story about a couple struggling to cope with the deaths of their children, it's a very human story, very real, very affecting. I highly recommend this. It is quite unlike anything else I've read this year. Just so good.

After reading Fish in Exile I had a dream about turquoise and tangerine. In the story, the ocean is a place of loss and dreams and saviours and wishes, but in my dream and ever since then, the ocean is not a deep forbidding indigo with diminishing light, but a blast of turquoise exhilaration, even if it is full of garbage and plastic fish. Fish in Exile chews on trauma, a piece of fatty steak that is hard to swallow, but if the book wants to leave the table it’s gotta break it down. Trauma makes the characters sexy, makes them funny, incestuous, improper, and thick. Poetry breaks open the simple story and takes it far so when you finish you’re not left with the residue of their pain, but with an understanding of how you can try to deal with your demons.