Fish in Exile

by Vi Khi Nao

The loss of a child takes mythological, magical casts—distortions that allow us to see the contours of grief more clearly.

How do you grieve the death of a child? With fishtanks and jellyfish burials, Persephone’s pomegranate seeds, and affairs with the neighbors. Fish in Exile spins unimaginable loss through classical and magical tumblers, distorting our view so that we can see the contours of a parent’s grief all the more clearly.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2016

About the author

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her forthcoming novel, The Italian Letters, is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, The Six Tones of Water with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nao received the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.
https://www.vikhinao.com


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Reviews

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mother and father in mourning for their children respond to the tragedy in very different ways.

This is a book where I'm grateful the English language has this construction available to me: "I am glad to have read it." Meaning, it was work, but worth it, and I'm glad it's over.

The challenge to write about grief is a worthy challenge, and the author here had something to say, and said it uniquely. While it did not propel me closer to understanding what such a grief would feel like, it did make for an interesting journey, for the ways the author tried to explore the topic. For me in the end the novel remained an exercise in verbal approximations, rather than in human feeling. But the choices were always interesting ones.

I recommend reading Fish in Exile in tandem with Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. The books have similar themes, and in some ways make similar choices, but the voices of each novel are very different from the other.

[Patrick Cottrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stunning in all senses of the word, especially in the sense that I am rendered rather speechless. Exquisite, brutal, haunting.

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

emo like duras is emo. grieving, brave, and deracinating, i found FISH IN EXILE unafraid to wear emotion on its sleeve. and yet sui generis; made with a charged, defamiliarized language... making the old (classic) story somehow all her own (the persephone retell a favorite bit), the book has a little of karapanou or lispector in its ability to poetically sear to the heart of the matter -- but clears its own ground. loved it.

[Hoda Marmar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weird in a bad way and quite overrated. I hated the writing style, the sometimes disturbing imagery, and the Freudian complexes bull throughout. Not my cup of tea. Couldn't keep reading and had to give up on it.

[Jeff T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Conversation With Vi Khi Nao About Exile

On November 3, 2016, I sent this message to my friend Vi, whose book Fish in Exile is helping me breathe:

Sent Nov 3, 2016 11:04:08 AM Vi Khi Nao
Vi, I just love yr book. Do you know that my blog, going way back to the live journal days (and now tumblr) is called internal exile?

This opened a conversation in which Vi generously asked me about my writing and thinking. I believe her ability to draw out language for what people have in mind, and her curiosity and compassion for what people are thinking and how thought is linguistic, is crucial to her poetics. It is one of the things that makes her such a breathtaking (and breathgiving!) writer.

I want to share some of our conversation, which picked back up today, November 12, 2016. Vi asked me to share it on my blog and on Amazon. I hope that if you find her book at Amazon or Goodreads you will order it from Coffee House Press or find a copy at your local bookstore, or I hope you can make it to a not-so-local bookstore to find it.

Our conversation continues:

Sent Nov 3, 2016 11:06:33 AM Vi Khi Nao
... exile is writing space. position from/in which to write. feel that strongly in yr book.

Received Nov 3, 2016 12:14:06 PM Vi Khi Nao
Ah. I am glad you love the book, Jeff. Tell me more about internal exile and why you feel connected to it with my book?

Sent Nov 3, 2016 12:19:22 PM Vi Khi Nao
Internal exile became meaningful to me during the bush II regime when i read about the idea that people are in exile in their own countries because of a profound disconnect with cultural and political realities. Over time that became a way for me to think also about the simultaneous sense of alienation and connection i have when i write and read. There is a community of writers and thinkers but i feel more connected to them when i write and read then i do in person. Then there’s the complicated position of the non-conventional writer in the culture at large. They legitimize literature as art but are also marginalized for their abstractions and resistance to commodification. ... That sense of living in exile where you are (still?) in the place from which you have been exiled is palpable in your book.

…
Time passes, a racist sexist anti-gay authoritarian billionaire is apparently selected by the electoral college to be the next president of the USA.
…

Received Nov 12, 2016 8:49:59 AM Vi Khi Nao
Dear Jeff - How are you ?

Sent Nov 12, 2016 10:55:48 AM Vi Khi Nao
Hi Vi! Having a hard time with this bad reality. How about you?

Received Nov 12, 2016 10:56:50 AM Vi Khi Nao
Very sad….so sad, Jeff.

Received Nov 12, 2016 10:57:04 AM Vi Khi Nao
How is C?

Sent Nov 12, 2016 11:01:45 AM Vi Khi Nao
She’s frustrated, sad, in pain. But we’re both trying to take some measure of solace in people on the street, who are generally being decent. But like one gross older white man having a tantrum at the food coop last night, and the other white man defending him, is a reminder of this gnarly male fragility going on.

Received Nov 12, 2016 11:02:42 AM Vi Khi Nao
What an image, Jeff !!

Received Nov 12, 2016 11:03:09 AM Vi Khi Nao
Adult tantrum is important

Received Nov 12, 2016 11:03:42 AM Vi Khi Nao
What do you do to cope ?

Sent Nov 12, 2016 11:05:32 AM Vi Khi Nao
i prefer yoko ono’s eloquent tantrum (did you hear the audio response she posted to her twitter?) to some dude complaining that he can’t have what he wants right now (in this case he wanted to shop after the store was closed, so he started yelling at people).

Sent Nov 12, 2016 11:05:42 AM Vi Khi Nao
trying to read and look people in the eyes.

Sent Nov 12, 2016 11:06:07 AM Vi Khi Nao
frustrated that i feel busy with work. being busy with work is part of our problem.

Received Nov 12, 2016 11:06:35 AM Vi Khi Nao
No. I have not seen Yoko Ono’s tantrum.

Received Nov 12, 2016 11:06:59 AM Vi Khi Nao
Ah. I see. Why is it busyness part of our problem?

Sent Nov 12, 2016 11:07:24 AM Vi Khi Nao
https://twitter.com/yokoono/status/79...

Received Nov 12, 2016 11:08:12 AM Vi Khi Nao
Oh my god.

Sent Nov 12, 2016 11:08:54 AM Vi Khi Nao
Need to make money and produce goods/services supersedes more vital exchange of warmth, compassion, ideas.

Received Nov 12, 2016 11:09:37 AM Vi Khi Nao
That. Yes.

If you want to read a full version of this piece, go to http://raygonne.tumblr.com/post/15308...

Better yet, read Fish in Exile.

[Rambling Raconteur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vi Khi Nao uses unconventional techniques in her debut novel, Fish in Exile, to explore a universal theme of grief in horrifying psychological detail. Our grieving narrators are a pair of bereveaved parents whose streams of consciousness booke their family and friends' perspectives in the center. Character names such as Ethos and Callisto draw a clear through line with Greek myth and its tradition of tragedy, as characters question their existence and any general existence that can involve this sense of loss. The fractured relationships are balanced with almost surreal moments involving fish and taking pet fish for walks. Certain conversations are written as a sort of play script, and these moment seem to cut deeper and deeper as the book progresses through shattering revelations to a final epiphany.

I was reminded of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Henrik Ibsen's Wild Duck, and the pain the resides in works like the novels and stories of Ariana Harwics, Qiu Miaojin, and Naja Marie Aidt and the tragedies of Euripides. In some ways, Fish in Exile inverts the theme of loss that Faulkner explored in As I Lay Dyring with devastating effect. The adaptation of Krasznahorkai's Satantango was even referenced at one point.

Video dicussion (with readings): https://youtu.be/XpWlAT75l6I

[Sydney Haas · Rating 4 out of 5]

“How come all your pictures are hung backward?” “They’re in time-out.” “What did they do wrong?” “They captured too much.” OW

also:

"I looked at her face. I have stared at her for so long. At the uncertain road ahead of us. She asked me to participate in the future. I replied: I’m in exile, can’t you see? She didn’t understand. We have gazed far into the distance before."

[Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has to be the best contemporary novel I've read in quite some time

[manasa k · Rating 4 out of 5]

very beautiful and miserable book. asks a LOT from the reader but if you lean into the structure and think of the characters as both actors and greek chorus in a classic tragedy it all comes together. in the middle of some pretty lengthy prose there are to the point sentences about grief that are like being run over with a bulldozer. manages to find new ways to use mythological tropes (pomegranates oedipal complex and the like) which i think is an extremely hard thing to pull off. reading this and watching the most ridiculous movie ive seen in a while within three hours of each other was WHIPLASH but fun

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ohhh this is some next level Murakami shit. I hate pretentious books that use fancy words just for the sake of using fancy words that no one understands and random sentences that make zero sense but it's okay because it's ART.
ie. "Two naked infants face each other like gladiators. Their hearts have been removed from their chests and placed on their thighs. Their right ventricles are sliced, but left open to the air. They look like the curling, rubber rims of two balloons. The children grab hold of each other's hearts and begin to drink from them. They throw their heads back like old men downing straight bourbon whisky. Ethos and Abby are tossing Cara Cara oranges against the wall to loosen the juice. I serve roasted bone marrow with parsley. Colin grabs one bone from the plate and begins to blow into the marrow. The bone burns his lips. He cries hard, like a mythological Norwegian werewolf. Colin takes a nap with his face pressed against my chest."

WHAT THE FUCK.

and then at the end-
"My children are pushing me out of their conjoined womb and their infantile fatherland, pushing me to the edges of their cervices. My children are giving birth to me, legs spread. And they cry. They cry fiercely."

NOPE. NOOOOOPE. I'M OUT!

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's be honest: our media has turned the idea of losing a child into a trope that screenwriters use to make characters seem interesting without having to actually make them do anything.

Enter Vi Khi Nao, who wrote this incredible short novel full of squeamishly oceanic, aqueous imagery where she really digs into the sheer numbness of loosing your kids. The bizarre little things you notice while everything within your heart and mind is scorched into non-feeling.

Fish in Exile is sad, and freaky and at times just delivers one hay-maker of a sentence after another. There are passages that slam into you like something out of biblical verse. There are deranged, totally fucked conversations about greek mythology, aquariums, Adam and Eve...whatever. It's a book about how unspeakable loss re-programs your reality.

This gets my highest recommendation, I seldom read things this powerful that are this unapologetically bizare

[nestle • whatnestleread · Rating 4 out of 5]

feels like a dream, beautiful, strange, and a little disorienting. it’s a story about grief, but instead of a straightforward narrative, it drifts through moments, following a couple, Ethos and Catholic, as they try to exist after loss. the writing is lyrical and surreal, packed with oceanic imagery, jellyfish, and weather that mirror their emotions. there’s a lot of food described too, which somehow makes the sadness hit even harder. at times, the novel feels hard to grasp, but that’s kind of the point.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can love this for the language and the unsettling imagery and still hate it for what I see as its pretentiousness. I say pretentious because it uses all the tropes that get a text like this to be hailed as genius, instead of accepted as something that could have been written by that proverbial group of monkeys with typewriters. Greek/Roman/Christian mythology, sexual references, bricolage, surreal descriptions, grief as device to annihilate criticism of the work itself... Intriguing but ultimately derivative. A word I rarely use, but will here. This has all been done before. Anne Carson. Samuel Beckett. Homer. De Sade. Angela Carter.
I applaud Nao's mastery of words and the quasi-poetic style of this book (Yes, I know she writes poetry too...) but I found the heart and soul of the tale lost in the overwrought attempts at uniqueness.

I paste in some reviews for fun. If you're feeling adventurous, try to think how each one of them could be describing any number of randomly accessed pieces of literature, or possibly even your personal journal...

“Highlights the patriarchy’s utter inability to fully understand or appreciate motherhood, the biological imperatives that form the foundation of parenthood, and the acceptance of the notion that grief can never really be extinguished, only embraced as part of the human experience.”

“A magical and fresh perspective on grief, this beautiful book is like nothing you've ever read before.”

“Through mythic tangents and arrest, Nao pulls us through dismemberment, dissociation, and devotion with colossal sentences.”

“The language ranges from frank gallows humor to unexpectedly devastating, as if you’re at a party exchanging sarcastic witticisms with a stranger and then she suddenly hits you over the head with a brick.”

“Occupying a myriad of spaces and spanning genres and mediums, Nao’s work is a multi-faceted examination of the intersecting spaces of the religious, the corporeal, the industrial, and the pastoral.”

[Jay Slayton-Joslin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsure how I feel having finished this. I usually don't love experimental styles as I feel they sometimes takeaway from the quality of writing -- but here it didn't feel like a substitute at all. The writing was just really good. Perhaps the tangents and everything are to reflect the character's minds -- I think the loss and weirdness shine through here.

I can imagine this being one of the things that I can say I didn't love it, but will probably keep coming back to because I think about it so much. Similar to how I felt about The Power of The Dog. Moved the stars around on this rating a lot already, feel I probably will in the future, too. I'm not sure what it is, but it's definitely something.

[Alycia · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Fish in Exile' is a novel that takes risks and the payoff is an intricate, adorned, almost 'new' kind of language. It is allegorical, with nested meanings and parallel stories. it intertwines sharp, felt grief with mythology, and this is heightened to the point where Ethos and Catholic feel misplaced in the narratives surrounding them. It is a novel that lives comfortably in strangeness - it's weird, alluring, and surprising all at once. I did find the middle a bit harder to get through, but loved the beginning and (especially) the end.

[dănuț · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If I shattered the glass, would I stop seeing my past in sounds, in images, in faint shapes? Would my pain blow apart into a million pieces, pulverized into sand? Perhaps glass and memories are only painful as fragments or shards. Perhaps if they become diminutive and dusty like sand, they grow very tender and soft and granular and almost loveable. Then pain could slip through me and possibly out of me."

[ra · Rating 5 out of 5]

groundbreaking. i think this could almost be read like if anne carson had done her own version of grief is the thing with feathers, but this book as itself is so powerful and so expertly written that even that comparison makes me feel like i've fallen short of describing it. just thoroughly amazing 💘

[Skye Tarshis · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were a few loose threads in this book and the beginning dragged a little, but from page 43 onward the ideas were well-executed and poignant. Fish in Exile is beyond sadness and I loved that about it. I’ll be thinking about this for a while with mixed feelings

[Ish · Rating 1 out of 5]

hard to get into a novel when nearly all its metaphors and allusions go over my head. 😪 very weird, not absorbing, hard to shake off the sense that its pretentious and for a niche audience.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thoughts kept drifting during the first half which felt like too many pretty words not saying a whole lot but focused in the second half, which was a haunting exploration of grief.

3.5

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

i have no idea what happened but it hurts bad 4.5

[Crystal Staley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange yet poignant look at grief. Beautifully written.

[Linnea · Rating 1 out of 5]

What the actual fuck

[Cassidy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weeeird.

[carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

the poetic wounds of modern, mythological homer… defamiliarized language… the most beautiful, beautiful prose… intelligent in every way

[Kristin Avenis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a maze filled with mythologies and metamorphism. It was a hard and arduous read but a truly fulfilling one. This book replicates grief in such a way that mirrors the real life experience of having to re-live re-think and re-read every moment of your reality.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite

[Brianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update: Fish In Exile became my favorite book, bar none, of all time. Some seven, almost eight years after reading it for the first time, eight years of more death and loss and grief, I decided to revisit it to see how it held up. This was a terrifying prospect - so few things do hold up these days, or at the very least, evoke the same emotional response years down the line with your life at a different trajectory than it was the first time.

I lack the proper words except to say this: it held up. The same chills, the same crying, the same heavy breathing by the end. The same feeling of unnamable understanding of what it means to break open after trying to escape grief and pain for years at a time.

Still my favorite book of all time. I suspect in another 8 years, I'll probably say the same.
____________________________________

I remember reading one of the blurbs on the back of the book and seeing this flowery, hyper-literary praise for Vi Khi Nao's very peculiar writing style. Someone called it "clitoral." I remember staring at the back of the book and thinking "what in the blue hell does that even mean" but frankly, here at the end, I'm inclined to agree. There is something concupiscent about this entire book, which is especially jarring when you consider that it's about grief.

I was surprised to be entering the story through the male narrator - the father in this case - but rest assured, perspective will bounce around, not too much but enough to give you a 360 view of how everyone is coping (or more pointedly, not coping) with a horrific familial tragedy. Greek Myth is invoked often - though this is not a mythological story but a modern fiction piece - but in such a way that you may not realize it's even happening at first. And to get to the inevitable discussion about the prose... there were several times when I had to re-read passages two, three, sometimes four times to truly grasp what was being said or even just to ruminate on the way the author said it. As a result it took me a long time to finish this one, not only for the re-reading but because I so often had to stop what I was doing to really chew on what was happening in the story.

It really is blisteringly, startlingly unique - I have never read another author like her.

This might be my favorite piece of fiction that I've read in years, but I'm going to need to read it again at least once to be sure. Once I've had some time. This is definitely a book you want to mull over on your own for a while when it reaches its heart-splitting, glorious, screaming conclusion.

I loved it. I really can't overstate that. I loved it.

[J $ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genuinely unlike anything I've ever read before. The way grief and apathy are characterized here is all at once chilling, depressing, and absurd, enhanced infinitely by Nao's rhythmic, poetic prose and her refreshingly nuanced perspective. A book like this deserves a far less cliched review than what I have to offer, but it is nonetheless easily one of the best books I've read this year.

Edit: I've thought a little bit more on this one and I'm dropping it down to 4 stars. Nao's writing can undoubtedly be a bit... pretentious, at times, and nearly amateur at others (specifically the entire second chapter). Your tolerance for such things will depend on your tolerance for ~art~ and experimentation. That said, I stand by this book's characterization of depression and still find it moving upon reexamination.

[Ezekiel Tyrus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you reading a book about a couple experiencing grief-induced insanity? Yes but it's more than that. It's surreal. It's David Lynch. It's Georges Bataille. This book reminds me of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress and while I LOVE Markson, I think she surpasses him in her ability to tell a coherent story and create living, breathing characters. Ethos and Catholic Romulus are the grief-stricken parents who've lost twins. Ethos, the emasculated husband is the principal of William Blake Elementary. The book is an achievement. The first novel I've ever read on a kindle and I was tapping the highlight button repeatedly to catch lines I loved. "Sometimes when I chew as slowly as I chew, I can tell if the salt is tears or anchovy paste." "Outside, God is dragging his evening gown of masculinity across the sky." "When my eyes flutter open, my wife is still sedated in her formless monologue of a dream." "...And homicide couldn't possibly exist if criminals did laundry by hand. ..." (The whole paragraph where that sentence comes from is rather amazing.) "What is a lie but a procrastination of truth?" And so many other great lines I highlighted. The couple later buy a pair of 'replacement fishes.' Giving them odd names, fitting them in tiny clothing, taking the fishes for walks in an elongated aquarium and in a scene later that's funny and heartbreaking, they hire an 11 year old boy to be a fish-sitter and fish-walker while Catholic and Ethos go to the beach to look for their dead children. This book is an achievement. It's beautifully-written, surreal, at times laugh out loud funny and tragic. It's complex and deeply profound, and truthfully one of the best books I've read in long time. Color me a fan. Though this is the first title I've read by Vi Khi Nao, I can say she's one of my favorite living authors and i will devour her other books and look forward to what her future literary career brings.