Find Your Way Home--Bestselling Sat Navs
Plan ahead and avoid traffic jams with one of our bestselling sat navs from top brands including TomTom and Garmin. We also stock a great range of up-to-date and fully-routable maps for your device, including popular destinations such as France, Portugal, North America and Scotland.
Theatre Of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Theatre Of Fish: Travels through Newfoundland and Labrador for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"* 'Terrific stuff... Hugely entertaining... As a descriptive writer, a master of the telling observation and the well-chosen epithet, [Gimlette] is in the highest class.' - Max Davidson, Daily Telegraph * 'An exhilarating [book], lit up by the vividness of the reporting, the sense of history it conveys, and the irresistible verve of Gimlette's prose. It told me a great deal I did not know and am glad to know, and entertained me greatly' - Sunday Telegraph * 'John Gimlette is a writer of vivid comical prose... Mingles ancestral history and humorous anecdote... Highly entertaining' - Spectator * 'A sprawling travelogue of fascinating anecdotes, flashes of brilliant wit' - Guardian * 'With his quiet respectability shining throughout, Gimlette's tale is not just a travel yarn or a family history, it tells a story in its own right too' - Sunday Express * 'The arrival of a new book by John Gimlette, barrister and author of the critically acclaimed At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, is a cause for celebration. Few modern writers knit such meticulous prose, boast such a keen eye for detail, or possess such mordant wit... Theatre of Fish is a superbly apt title for the results. As a kind of outpost on the edge of the Americas, Newfoundland's people seem to have an almost Dickensian quirkiness, perfect for Gimlette's approach. Yet perhaps most admirably, the book holds them up to the light without a hint of ridicule. As in Paraguay, the author appears genuinely drawn to its cast of lost souls, eccentrics and the bizarre. Similarly, much of the history he recounts is darkly unpleasant, and yet he manages to recount it without either losing his sense of humour or perspective. Intellectually, Theatre of Fish is a delight.' - Traveller"
The Sunday Telegraph
an exhilarating [book], lit up by the vividness of the reporting... and the irresistible verve of Gimlette's prose
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I might be slightly biased here, as I am a Gimlette fan (Gimletteer, is the right term?), but I'll be fair & say that although I enjoyed this book, including some truly laugh out moments of wry observation & historical fact/fiction, it was slightly more difficult to really feel I had travelled to Newfoundland & Labrador, as you felt in "Pig" & Paraguay.
Plenty of positives: Humour still in abundance, some fascinating figures (though I would've liked a bit more insight into some other living people - Jim Baird got loads of lines, but he didn't seem to me to really deserve that amount - some of the Labradorians did, I felt), a heck of a lot of historical anecdotes & knowledge, once again, easily readable & memorable. Also, kudos to John for not believing the nonsense about the Viking settlement - if you read Wikipedia it's complete tosh on the same settlement - you feel a one-up having read this.
Negatives? Not many, and not in any way to really detract from the book But...
I can't read French. Maybe my fault (yet I speak Spanish fluently), but I really do detest constant usage of French as if we SHOULD all know that. It's my pet bookwriting hate. It was smattered around, but there was still too much presuming.
Some of the Labrador places were repetitive. It's always good to explore ever nook & cranny, but it lurched towards same old, same old with many places.
More photos would've been good, particulary of the modern day. I just couldn't really get in my head visually images of some of the places visited.
HOWEVER...
Overall, the book was excellent - well written, readable, nice pace, humour, it introduced the wonderful Wilfred Grenfell to me & I have learnt a lot more about a place which, in truth, I never cared about, let alone knew about. That is now different, as is my opinion of Innus & Inuits. As far as I'm concerned, if an author can do that, then he/she has done well.
Not as good as "Pig" (but then John's actual living background is more personal there, than Newfoundland is), but still head & shoulders over much of the dirge that makes up current travel writing.
Plenty of positives: Humour still in abundance, some fascinating figures (though I would've liked a bit more insight into some other living people - Jim Baird got loads of lines, but he didn't seem to me to really deserve that amount - some of the Labradorians did, I felt), a heck of a lot of historical anecdotes & knowledge, once again, easily readable & memorable. Also, kudos to John for not believing the nonsense about the Viking settlement - if you read Wikipedia it's complete tosh on the same settlement - you feel a one-up having read this.
Negatives? Not many, and not in any way to really detract from the book But...
I can't read French. Maybe my fault (yet I speak Spanish fluently), but I really do detest constant usage of French as if we SHOULD all know that. It's my pet bookwriting hate. It was smattered around, but there was still too much presuming.
Some of the Labrador places were repetitive. It's always good to explore ever nook & cranny, but it lurched towards same old, same old with many places.
More photos would've been good, particulary of the modern day. I just couldn't really get in my head visually images of some of the places visited.
HOWEVER...
Overall, the book was excellent - well written, readable, nice pace, humour, it introduced the wonderful Wilfred Grenfell to me & I have learnt a lot more about a place which, in truth, I never cared about, let alone knew about. That is now different, as is my opinion of Innus & Inuits. As far as I'm concerned, if an author can do that, then he/she has done well.
Not as good as "Pig" (but then John's actual living background is more personal there, than Newfoundland is), but still head & shoulders over much of the dirge that makes up current travel writing.
Format:Paperback
I bought this in preparation for a month's holiday travelling around Newfoundland with my wife in 2007.
It really enriched our travel experience.
A total recommendation.
It really enriched our travel experience.
A total recommendation.
Format:Paperback
This is a nice book. However, I liked Gimlette's book on Paraguay (At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay) a little more, as he got warmer with that topic than with Newfoundland and Labrador (that's at least my impression - perhaps it is due to the climate, or the fish).
Gimlette switches between his travel impressions and the tale of his great-grandfather's experiences in Newfoundland and Labrador as a physician for the Grenfell mission in the 1890's. This is complemented by chapters on local history (which the author conveys as rather bleak) and its little wars and calamities. He is sympathetic on the locals (although he gives his caveat right at the beginning) and their peculiarities, and from now on I'll be careful to call anybody a newfie anymore.
Nevertheless, I don't know whether I would travel to NL if I hated trees. Perhaps it is sufficient to like fish.
Gimlette switches between his travel impressions and the tale of his great-grandfather's experiences in Newfoundland and Labrador as a physician for the Grenfell mission in the 1890's. This is complemented by chapters on local history (which the author conveys as rather bleak) and its little wars and calamities. He is sympathetic on the locals (although he gives his caveat right at the beginning) and their peculiarities, and from now on I'll be careful to call anybody a newfie anymore.
Nevertheless, I don't know whether I would travel to NL if I hated trees. Perhaps it is sufficient to like fish.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Third world on America's doorstep
While it may not contain the sheer insanity of Gimlette's earlier "At the tomb of the inflatable pig", the human interest in this work runs far deeper. Read more
Published on 3 July 2006 by lazgimp
"Piscium inexhaustia copia"
"Fish without end" is Newfoundland and Labrador's social, economic and political burden. For something no longer there, the weight seems strangely ponderous. Read more
Published on 16 Jan 2006 by Stephen A. Haines
After the Pig, the Fish STINKS!!!
When I first picked up "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig", I was blown away. I'd never even thought about Paraguay until I'd read that book and I'll still maintain that it's one... Read more
Published on 27 Jun 2005 by Miran Ali
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
