Fishing with Tardelli

A Memoir of Family in Time Lost

By: Neil Besner

Narrated by: Neil Besner

Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

A literary meditation on memory, time, love, and loss

Fishing with Tardelli contemplates the relations among four parents—mother, father, stepfather, and a Brazilian fishing companion—and the author. Over marriages and remarriages, fathers and mothers become stepfathers and stepmothers, and brothers gain and lose stepbrothers and half-brothers, sisters and half-sisters across two continents. The various homes become part of Besner’s internal geography; memory, dream, story, fable become permeable layers folded over bald facts baldly stated.

Beginning with an older man’s recollections of himself as a young teenager fishing with Tardelli in the bay in Rio de Janeiro, the memoir reflects on time lost and time regained. The narration ranges across the mid-’40s in Montreal, where two couples marry, divorce, and remarry in a new configuration; proceeds to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-’50s, when one of these newly formed families emigrates; and returns to Montreal in the late ’60s and early ’70s. After a 50-year interlude, Besner returns from Western Canada to the pandemic moment in Toronto.

©2022 Neil Besner (P)2022 ECW Press

Critic reviews

“Neil Besner’s memoir Fishing With Tardelli is a meditation on family, memory, and time ‘lost.’ It recovers that ‘lost’ time brilliantly in sharply chiselled vignettes rendered in dazzling, evocative prose. The memoir evokes the darting movement of memory itself in swift, glittering leaps of association that light up the writer’s life, his quirky family, and Tardelli, the mythic Brazilian fisherman whose presence still hovers over Besner’s life. This is an extraordinary book, loving, honest, wise.” — Guy Vanderhaeghe

“In this haunting memoir, by turns lyrical, celebratory, and anguished, Neil Besner navigates the rivers and tributaries of what can and what cannot be said in his attempt to recover time and fathom the unknowable — of family, of growing up, of the strangeness of the world.” — Brian Henderson, author of Nerve Language, Sharawadji, Unidentified Poetic Object, and Unfinishing

“A sinuous search through time that circles the author’s greatest affections — mothers, the sea, literature, language, women. And always the search returns to his first love, Tardelli, the man who taught the boy how to fish and how to live. Beautiful.” — David Bergen, author of Out of Mind