“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
“Neil Besner’s poignant and brilliantly observed memoir tells the extraordinary story of a young man growing up with love and loyalties split between two cities, Montreal and Rio de Janeiro, and two families, his birth mother and stepfather in Brazil, and his birth father and stepmother in Canada. That story is enriched by an overarching surrogate father, the earthy Brazilian fisherman Tardelli. Written with malice toward none and charity for all, Fishing With Tardelli will linger in your memory.” — Thomas Travisano, author of Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
“Returning again and again to the simple joy of boyhood days spent catching bluefish with handline in the bay outside of Rio, Neil Besner’s memoir immerses us in the nature of time, memory, family, and the dark waters of loss. Besner leads us through scenes from his two homes, Canada and Brazil, in a search for meaning and connection. A truly great read.” — Catherine Hunter, author of After Light and St. Boniface Elegies