The Fisherman's Son
A Novel
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Drifting in a life raft off the northern California coast after a horrifying shipwreck, Neil Kruger retreats from his fear by recalling scenes from his childhood. He finds solace in memories of his father, a taciturn man who introduced him to the fisherman's life; his mother, who worked at the local cannery to keep the family fed; and a host of local fishermen, whose battles with the sea become for Neil both a model and a tragic foreshadowing of his own fate.
At once a stunning evocation of a dying world and an intimate story of a troubled family, The Fisherman's Son is a triumphant and utterly authentic novel about our lifelines to childhood and the pull of the sea.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The sea is an abiding presence in the life of Neil Kruger, whom we first meet as he is adrift on a raft somewhere in the Pacific, despairing of rescue and buffeted by a host of memories about the events that brought him to this perilous juncture. This strong coming-of-age novel from the author of Save the Whale evokes the mystical bond between men and the sea. As a boy, Neil is caught in a tug-of-war between his parents: his mother hates and fears the sea, but his father is determined to make a living as a commercial fisherman out of Half Moon Bay on the Northern California coast. Neil is forced to join his father's crew at age 12, when he is introduced to the backbreaking labor and monotony of the fisherman's life, punctuated by moments of fellowship, sudden danger and frightening premonitions: the sight of a dead woman's body floating "face down... as if she was embracing the sea she gazed upon below" continues to haunt the boy. In a style so stripped and plain it is sometimes pedestrian but sometimes vividly cinematic, Koepf conveys a child's confusion about the adult world and his burgeoning awareness of the shortcomings of parents and the dictates of the Catholic church. As his parents' marriage deteriorates and his father's spirit is broken by the near impossibility of turning a profit, Neil understands the older man's essential nobility and finds himself, too, committed to the sea. Koepf outlines his story in a series of vignettes that grow in cumulative power. The sea is the strongest character in the narrative: eternal, beautiful and bountiful; treacherous and deadly.
