I have just finished this strange book Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan- a genre of convict fiction- ( chain gang fiction). Unreliable narrator, beautiful pages with different coloured inks and shimmery fish, truth and lies and native holocaust and imprisonment. Strange and lyric all at once. However, there was something that didn't work for me, too aware of itself ( worrying when it was an agent I know that mentioned my novel was like it...) - or was it trying to use the Tristam Shandy's to hold a mirror up to Australia that made it too self-conscious? At times it lured me in and then spat me out, like Jonah and the whale...I think for me, a curiosity - a specimen of intrigue - but lacking the vitality of being filled with something living?
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