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At SwimTwoBirds Irish Literature Flann O'Brien MR William H Gass PhD Books

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At SwimTwoBirds Irish Literature Flann O'Brien MR William H Gass PhD Books

Mind-bending, totally original. Some of the best lyrical prose I have ever read. In my opinion Flann O'Brien ranks up there with Joyce and Nabokov as the world's best writers. The poetic flow of this book is beyond amazing. And that's just the writing: the plot is a work of staggering originality. A story within a story and on and on until the reader doesn't care because he/she is so swept up in the fun and joy of what is going on at that exact moment on that very page. I could go on but I'm not the best reviewer on earth and can't write on O'Brien's level so I'll bow out with what I've written and stand by it until the end.


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At SwimTwoBirds Irish Literature Flann O'Brien MR William H Gass PhD Books Reviews

Very interesting reading
Strong foreshadows of Ignatius J Reilly here, this is a work of comic genius and I loved it. It's not always easy but it is certainly worth it. Buy it!
Great version if you like loads and loads of typographical errors. If you don't, skip this version of this awesome work. Whoever copy-read this version should hang their heads in shame.
Published in 1939, the same year that James Joyce published Finnegan's Wake, this novel was lauded in its day by Joyce himself, Samuel Beckett, and Graham Greene. A wild concoction involving a completely disjointed narrative, multiple points of view, farce, satire, and parody, this "novel" offers any student of Irish literature unlimited subject matter--and equally unlimited laughs. In this unique experiment with point of view, author Brian O'Nolan has used a pseudonym, Flann O'Brien, to tell the story of the novelist/student N, who tells his own story at the same time that he is writing a book about an invented novelist (Trellis), who is himself developing another story, while Tracy, still another author, tells a cowboy story and appears in the previous narratives.
Believing that characters should be born fully adult, one of the writers tries to keep them all together--in this case, at the Red Swan Hotel--so that he can keep track of them and keep them sober while he plans the narrative and writes and rewrites the beginning and ending of the novel. But even when the primary writer stops writing to go out with his friends, the characters of the other (invented) fictional writers continue to live on in the narrative and comment on writing. Before long, the reader is treated to essays on the nature of books vs. plays, polemics about the evils of drink, parodies of folk tales and ballads, a breathless wild west tale starring an Irish cowboy, the legends of Ireland, catalogues of sins, tales of magic and the supernatural, almanacs of folk wisdom and the cures for physical ills, and even the account of a trial--and that's just for starters.
Totally unique, O'Brien's creation defies the conventions, both of its day and of the present, and even the most jaded reader will be astonished at the unexpected twists the narrative takes. Steeped in the traditions of the Irish story-teller, O'Brien keeps those traditions alive by creating multiple narrators to tell multiple stories simultaneously, while also skewering the very traditions of which he--and they--are a part. Mary Whipple
This is a book quite unlike any other. It may be the first metafictional romp, and it's a very Irish one at that. I enjoyed it, but it's not to everyone's taste, I'm sure. It's extremely quirky, humorous and the design and plot of the narrative is labyrinthine and surprising. All serious students of the novel ought to give this singular book a whirl. Those looking for a conventional tale, run for the hills!
This is supposedly O'Brien's masterpiece, but I'll take The Third Policeman over it any day. It's hard to follow if you don't know Gaelic, perhaps something is lost in translation. There are clearly snatches of brilliance in it, but for me, it didn't hang together well as a coherent story. Still worth reading, though, if you have any interest in Irish or avant-garde literature.
This was a most intriguing book. I read reviews where people mentioned reading it multiple times and for the longest time I couldn't understand why. It's not that the book was terrible. There are quite a few story lines from the beginning... But it isn't 'til later on that everything starts to come together. By the end I found myself wanting to re-read it as well. I'll just say this, it's a book that you need to be patient with in the beginning, it's worth it.
Mind-bending, totally original. Some of the best lyrical prose I have ever read. In my opinion Flann O'Brien ranks up there with Joyce and Nabokov as the world's best writers. The poetic flow of this book is beyond amazing. And that's just the writing the plot is a work of staggering originality. A story within a story and on and on until the reader doesn't care because he/she is so swept up in the fun and joy of what is going on at that exact moment on that very page. I could go on but I'm not the best reviewer on earth and can't write on O'Brien's level so I'll bow out with what I've written and stand by it until the end.