Product Description

Dazzlingly weaves Irish fairy tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses and the history of the Dutch golden age into the form of a magical alphabet. Carson triumphs over the distinction between fact and fiction in the pleasure of telling his stories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #520043 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Somewhere between Borges and Rabelais, lies Ciaran Carson's Fishing for Amber, an intricate and conversely dense prose work from one of Ulster's finest poets. Twenty six interlinking sections, each entitled alphabetically--"Antipodes, Berenice, Clepsydra, et cetera, revolve in myriad associations around the story of amber. Through the history and uses of this "Golden Gem of the Ages", Carson revisits Greek myth, Irish folktales, autobiography and the centre of the amber trade--Holland, "a wondrous place, a made-up land", which he first discovered through his father's stories of the Little Dutch Boy, permutated by Belfast colour. "Now I think of stone and water: Mourne stone and Mourne water, Mourne granite setts transported by the medium of water to the Lowlands ... The Mourne granite men smoked meerschaum pipes from Holland."

Meanings are exchanged like commodities. As Carson flies into Amsterdam, he sees more than the eye can see, imagining skaters on frozen canals: "burghers, doctors, ministers; solitary beings performing infinity signs ... knots and nodes of influence; ballad-mongers, dudelsackers, gypsy violinists ... and painters at their easels and palettes, depicting all the aforementioned scenes." Amber was used in varnishes for maps and paintings, for beads in rosaries and as amulets to ward off St Antony's Fire and the narrative delves into vivid descriptions of Dutch Masters, visits St Anthony in Upper Egypt and circles round to the author's wedding on the shores of Lough Neagh, where locals fished for amber. The "riotous, promiscuous abandon" in the works of Jan Steen provides a perfect vehicle for his delight in erudite profusion.

he prose simply teems with detail and the joy in the multifariousness of things and the bizarre links that can be drawn between them. At times the encyclopaedic scope becomes a little indigestible and each chapter should be savoured slowly over time.

In drawing parallels between Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope, Carson celebrates their influence on the way we see composition and the effects of light. He is at his best when he brings poetry to his love of painting. "As light falls on the surface of a Vermeer wall, it moves continuously in diffuse harmonies of colour, shifting through the spectrum, swaying, bulging, exaggerating its own bumps and blemishes, making scumbled cloudscapes of them. There are delta rivulets and hieroglyphs of colour." --Cherry Smyth

Customer Reviews

clever but laboured
I was disappointed with this book, having enjoyed much of Carson's poetry and his introduction to Irish traditional music. At his best, Carson writes with a sense of spontaneity which echoes the music he evidently loves so much. This book, however, seems studied and self-consciously literary, its surprises coming from the odd facts and connections with which it's ornamented rather than from the quality or energy of the writing. A successful piece of library-work, but otherwise very thin. A pity.

Life is a story
In this remarkable book, which bears the subtitle 'a long story', Carson approaches the outside world as a story, and he helps us read our lives. The book has 26 chapters, 26 stories, one for every letter of the alphabet. If the world seems unintelligible now, every means to get a grip on it is legitimate. By stressing the importance of stories, Carson gives us a way to deal with life and the fractured world. By placing life into a narrative framework, he gives us a tool to deal with it...

Carson is a poet, and one can tell from the attention with which he writes. Carson's love of language, both spoken and written, is obvious from the care with which he chooses his words. His style is very digressive as he moves from one story to the next, thus establishing links between the different parts in his novel and unifying all the different chapters into one linguistic construction, giving us an alphabet to approach the world with...
Carson sings the praise of stories, and sees them as ideal means to shape the protean world into a flexible yet all-encompassing structure. He retells ancient myths (which also explained natural phenomena to the people) and brings the magic of stories back into our lives. This is a book to savour, carefully written by a master writer...

There is no one like him.
I can't think of any other writer like Ciaran Carson, he is in a class of his own. This book is like an Aladdin's Cave and is a spellbinding mixture of fact and fantasy. He educates, delights and entertains. It is impossible to categories this book, just as it is with his companion volume "Shamrock Tea", it is not a novel or a work of non fiction but it is a delightful entertainment and thoroughly recommended.I can't wait for the next instalment.