Fishing for Amber

by Ciaran Carson

Fishing for Amber dazzles with its weave of narratives and the sheer pleasure taken in unwinding the three narrative ribald telling of tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses, dark and disturbing Irish fairy stories, and fantastic tales of 17th-century Dutch painting. The universal theme is that of transmutation and the power of art—of light captured on canvas, experience immortalized in narrative. Stories branch infinitely into other stories, each connecting, and each fishing for the truth. The central image of amber, of light or creatures captured in it, transformed by it, is sustained throughout the book. Ciaran Carson lives in Belfast. He has been awarded the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize and the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, as well as the Yorkshire Post Prize for The Star Factory.

Genres: Ireland, Poetry, Novels, Fiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.

He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.

Reviews

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a display of eclectic erudition and wide-ranging scholarship, one could do worse than this very weird book. The literary conceit is that every chapter is titled after a letter in the alphabet, and so it takes on the feel of a kind of esoteric, kabbalistic magic book of secrets, something that might have been at home in the library of Ficino or some other Renaissance figure. The writing is very fine, as one might expect from a poet of Carson calibre, and there are passages of genuine incantatory power, especially when Carson reels off long lists of items pertinent to the subject being described. One learns a lot from reading this book, a lot about Dutch art and history, Greek mythology, Irish folklore and storytelling technique, about genius and fraud, and yes, about amber--but in the end, what is this book about? I am not sure, but I think the best hint comes toward the end of the volume when Carson permits himself some musings about the nature of perception, memory, and biography. Perhaps the book is about our own efforts to bring sense and structure to the scattered and disparate stuff that passes through us in the form of experience, a sense and structure we know from within to be as contrived and singular as any work of art.

[Zeba Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, erudite, joyous, packed with glorious tales and moments of serendipity, a celebration of reading and story telling.

[Tania · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was both intrigued and confused while reading this one. The Dutch connections kept me wanting to keep on reading the meandering prose.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn between 3 and 4 stars for this book. I really wanted to give it 4, but for some reason just couldn't. It seemed like it never quite reached the book that it COULD have been. I appreciate Carson's breadth of knowledge and his skills of weaving together the different stories, but I feel like it could have been a better book. The thin plot that held the stories together was just too thin (though I'm sure it was supposed to be thin, I still think it was too thin) - just a way to tell the other stories.

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's a book I came predisposed to like, read with some enjoyment, and yet many times put down the book – totally bored. Carson's learning and research shows, as does his flair and interest in layered, Shaharazad storytelling, but the hook here – his father's memory, essentially – is far too weak to motivate an interest proper in the conflated labyrinth of tale-tellers, paintings, herbology, mythology, and other thematized odds and ends.