Is it a little cheeky to review Gone Fishing by Thomas Mailaender on a book blog? Probably. But I needed to make a record of the thing that had me breathless with laughter.

Mailaender is a Paris-based artist, whose medium is predominantly photography. In 2010 he produced the Gone Fishing project, a series of fictional letters from ‘Thomas’ to his long-suffering partner, ‘Marion’, who is pregnant. Unable to face the stress and responsibility of impending fatherhood, Thomas decided to go on a long fishing trip with a couple of mates. Each of his letters to Marion and the baby is accompanied by a photo of Thomas and his latest catch.

It begins with Thomas alongside a dead shark –

I’m not in Marseille like I told you. I’m in New Guinea fishing with Greg and Jerome. Sorry, but I needed to think about all this far from you and the baby. Soon I’ll be a father… It keeps turning around in my head and this little escapade is doing me a lot of good (I even caught a shark) and I think that now I feel ready for us to have a little girl together. I’ll be as promised in Paris Thursday evening. I hope you’ll find the strength to pardon me… If this might console you, I have a horrible sunburn on my neck and I’m suffering like a martyr.

Days later, he still hasn’t returned. I’m guessing that it’s only Marion who is suffering. He writes –

I don’t think that this will change anything or help you forgive me, but I also caught a beautiful carp.

And then –

I was talking to Greg at noon and I told him how important you both are in my life and I think the discussion did me a lot of good; and to prove it, half an hour later I caught this superb 2.5kg sea bream. I can tell you I had to fight like a devil to get it. The poor beast struggled for over three quarters of an hour and the whole time I thought of you.

Marion must have been incandescent with rage by this point. In another letter –

No news from you or the baby girl for almost two weeks now. I’m starting to feel something’s really wrong. I can imagine the state of mind you both must be in but, please, don’t get too worked up. I’d like you to understand why I’m doing this, because it’s also partly for all three of us (I’m sure that one day you’ll change your mind and maybe even thank me).
Today we visited a farm run by an adorable couple … The owners were set on showing me this young doe they took in after it had been most certainly abandoned by its mother.
The young animal had refused to eat ever since and they didn’t know what to do. I offered to try something (you know how good I am with animals) and it worked straight away…

There are 20 letters and accompanying panels in the series. Thomas’s repeated references to Marion and the baby’s welfare, immediately followed by reporting his holiday fun is so hilariously tone deaf (and blatantly inconsiderate) that I was reading through tears of laughter.

The work is fictional but the dedication at the end of the book – ‘To Marion, Rose and Bettina’ suggests that it’s informed by Mailaender’s own experience of fatherhood, which clearly ended much more happily than that of fictional Thomas and Marion’s.

Gone Fishing is an art piece, with only 500 copies produced (mine is stamped 461, so I guess there aren’t too many left…). I saw two panels on my last trip to MONA, and laughed so much that I immediately tracked down the full work – I really had to know if Thomas ever made it back to Paris. (Side note: When I at MONA, a few people wandered over to see what I was laughing at. And then moved off fairly quickly. They either didn’t see the humour or thought I was completely weird, or both).

Gone Fishing is exactly my sense of humour.

5/5