Product Description

Insightful, funny and revealing, From the Far Side of the River is a welcome new book by gifted writer Paul Quarrington—who offers up his insights on fish, marriage, middle age and much more.

In this downstream journey, Paul Quarrington braves lake, river and ocean waters in a never-ending quest for his elusive quarry. Along the way the author also finds himself deep in ruminations about fish, family, friendship and life in general—not necessarily in that order.

Resembling the pools of a stream, each of the short pieces in From the Far Side of the River has its own character and inhabitants, both human and piscatorial. Whether fishing thoughtfully for pickerel in northern Ontario or aggressively tracking bonefish in the balmy Bahamas, the author’s casts are as likely to call up thoughts of his marriage, his dead father or one of the existential questions of midlife as they are to yield a fish, big or small. But whatever the nature of his trials and triumphs, Quarrington presents them with his characteristic wit and wry humour. Whether you are a dedicated fisher or an armchair angler, you’ll find him an irresistible companion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1270033 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 184 pages

Amazon.ca
With Paul Quarrington setting the hook, there's generally something fishy going on, and this latest collection of observations and meditations on the angling arts is no exception. Just look at the subtitle: "Chest-Deep in Little Fish and Big Ideas." Quarrington weighs in on both with self-effacing wit, but his essays go well below the surface, which makes him a superb companion on the waters. While he's funny, he can also be profound, and it's certainly enjoyable to join him in pursuit of steelhead, rainbows, catfish, bonefish, and adventure at the exclusive Tsunami Lodge. But it's also starkly provocative to be in his presence as he confronts the darkness of 9/11, the death of his father, and the difficulties of his marriage, beautifully wrapped together in "Fishing Through Disaster." On the Bow River in Calgary he finds a sense pf clarity: "When standing in a river, it's impossible not to contemplate the cycle, the Great Wheel of Life, just as a human being must contemplate his or her own insignificance when standing underneath a panoply of stars. There's some comfort in knowing that we all are part of a greater thing, that we swim for a while in the river and then leave it to others to complete the journey to the source. And do you know what kind of comfort it is? Cold, of course, frigid. I envied the fish their ability to accept it."

That's the kind of writing that makes From the Far Side of the River a fuller, richer volume than Fishing with My Old Guy and Fishing for Brookies, Browns, and Bows, the two delightful books that precede it. Still, there's plenty of room here for the Old Guy to return, and his presence makes certain that, even at his heaviest, Quarrington remaims afloat. --Jeff Silverman

Books in Canada
My late father-in-law was an avid (read: fanatical) fly-fisherman (salmon); his most frequent query in my direction-a query which persisted for years after we had first met-was “Do you fish?” It seemed less a question than a proposal, posited offer, conceivable induction into an elite, privileged club. A club that required waking up at ungodly hours in godforsaken places and placing oneself (suitably suited, armored in rubber) in goddamned cold water for the “pleasure” of battling coquettish and/or hostile tiny-brained slabs of flesh into submission.
Or maybe I just misunderstood the question. Paul Quarrington, in From the Far Side of the River, is an affable guide to, and unraveler of, the ritualistic quirks, the tangled, snarled idiosyncrasies of fishing and fishermen. An instance: the fetishistic minutiae of gear is addressed in two pieces (“Equipped to the Gills”; “The Lore of the Lure”) in which Quarrington’s deft, comedic touch is in frothing evidence.

“Fishing-tackle sections have a sameness, whether they occupy the whole of the sales floor or a shadowed corner in a huge hangar of hardware goods. The lures and packages of hooks are pegged up on holed half-walls. Beside and beneath them are strange devices, mystifying constructions of tin and lead. It is hard to accept at first that these strange things are appurtenances of angling. My advice: ignore everything but the wall. If they can't hang it up, you don't want it. Eschew the big stuff that needs to be stored in cribs. Your object is to catch as many fish as possible, and while a big fish may snap at a little bait, looking for a snack, a small fish very rarely attacks something large.”

A large part of the appeal of Quarrington’s voice is attributable to his blunt admission of the profound enigma central to fishing: namely, the almost pathologically perverse unpredictability of the prey, and the ultimate futility of any attempt to break down or classify the component elements of their pursuit into quantifiable and/or repeatable angles of attack.
In the book’s strongest piece, “The Feminization of Fishing”, Quarrington, with gleeful vitriol, deconstructs not only the intricacies of the power dynamics of the client/guide relationship, but also captures the barely sublimated schoolyard viciousness of macho posturing, its pack-mentality puerility masquerading as competitive virility. Fishing in the Bahamas for the “elusive” bonefish (a lovely, ghostly name), Quarrington finds his so-called pal Jake ganging up with their obliquely, then nakedly, abusive guide, the ultimately pathetic Maitland Lowe (a.k.a. Bonefish Dundee). An escalatingly intolerable scenario which culminates in a flaccid fizzle of a confrontation.

“Bonefish Dundee considered what I’d said. And then, alarmingly, his face fell. It swayed and collapsed like a suspension bridge in a Category 5 hurricane. Maitland Lowe looked at me miserably and said, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Somewhat torpedoed by its fuzzy-wuzzy closure, the piece is nevertheless notable for the velocity of its raw vehemence, the sheer whipped misery of its honesty. (Quarrington possesses a precisely calibrated down-home tone which, on occasion, shears hazardously close to an affected, aw-shucks ingratiatingness, a borderline cutesiness mercifully sidelined by a thick whack of cheery self-loathing.)
Quarrington flounders somewhat in “Fishing Through Disaster”, an admirable attempt to merge the disparate (mono)filaments of Sept. 11, Quarrington’s separation from his wife, his father’s sudden death, and fishing into a melancholic rumination on the fleetingness of life, the role chance plays in it, and our collective special grasping at significance. Quarrington even goes so far as to assume-anthropomorphically-the persona of the fish, and, conversely, his role in hastening its demise. In trying to contextualize the monstrousness of the events of Sept. 11th and the inevitability of death, period, within the trope of fishing, Quarrington falters not so much as a result of any deficiency within the conflation itself, but, rather, in that he doesn’t push the envelope vigorously enough, underplaying and sublimating the specific, personal rawness of parental death and marital failure in favour of the more universal, ghastly pyrotechnics in NYC. (Quarrington’s shaggy-dog shamble around the shambles of his marriage have a teasing non-specificity to them.)
Fishing constitutes a form of secular religion, an asceticism, an adherence to rigid, solid codes baffling to the layman; it requires stolid qualities of bullheaded intransigence, Beckettian patience. (Quarrington strikes an intriguing note in approaching fishing as more process than means to an end, more a series of balked, anxiety-fraught increments superficially perceivable as stasis.) Quarrington’s book is a pastiche, a fishy collage of fishing tales-it’s wry, it’s spry; fishing as big, goofy overarching metaphor for life. In prose fluid as a flung fly.
Richard Harvor (Books in Canada)

Review
"Surviving a fishless fishing trip with your humour intact is my definition of grace under pressure; writing about such a trip, my definition of literary courage. Quarrington...brings to the endeavor the freshest, funniest voice fishing literature has been blessed with in years." (W.D. Wetherell, author of "Upland Stream" 20040401)

"If Quarrington is half as entertaining around a campfire as he is in this book, then he represents the Platonic ideal of the fishing buddy." (Kirkus Reviews )