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A review by gracer
How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
I’m going to suspend my usually critical approach, just be generous, and lavish five stars on this book. Because it’s beautiful. It is so quiet and peaceful and deep. (This is where I make a joke about fishing and rivers.) It talks about the hardships of life without ever once labeling them as hardships or dwelling on the misery of those moments. In fact Pavel never seems to outright say that they’re hard, or bad; it’s a really fine example of the “showing vs telling” approach. You feel the misery of the boy as you read about young Ota getting caught illegally fishing during the war, or the times of hunger or borderline desperation, of which there are many, but you aren’t really thinking about that so much as caught up in the experience. And, as it’s a short book, the misery passes in a few pages and there’s something uplifting, even joyful.
This strikes me, overall, as a really optimistic way of writing. Which is funny, because “optimistic” is not a word I associate much with Czechs and their memories.
I read this very slowly, as I read everything these days because I am suddenly exceptionally busy, but with this book I didn’t mind so much. It was like returning to a quiet peaceful place. Ota Pavel’s life story is an interesting one, and a sad one, too, If you decide to look at it that way. But in the note at the end he writes about trying to remember what had been beautiful in his life, and realizing it was the experiences he had of fishing. And then he went and wrote a beautiful book about it.
This strikes me, overall, as a really optimistic way of writing. Which is funny, because “optimistic” is not a word I associate much with Czechs and their memories.
I read this very slowly, as I read everything these days because I am suddenly exceptionally busy, but with this book I didn’t mind so much. It was like returning to a quiet peaceful place. Ota Pavel’s life story is an interesting one, and a sad one, too, If you decide to look at it that way. But in the note at the end he writes about trying to remember what had been beautiful in his life, and realizing it was the experiences he had of fishing. And then he went and wrote a beautiful book about it.