The Complete Novels of Flann O'Brien
The Complete Novels of Flann O'Brien
- ISBN 13:
9780307267498
- ISBN 10:
0307267490
- Format: Hardcover
- Copyright: 01/08/2008
- Publisher: Everyman's Library
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Summary
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Flann O'Brien, along with Joyce and Beckett, is part of the holy trinity of modern Irish literature. His five novelscollected here in one volumeare a monument to his inspired lunacy and gleefully demented genius. O'Brien's masterpiece,At Swim-Two-Birds,is an exuberant literary send-up and one of the funniest novels of the twentieth century. The novel's narrator is writing a novel about another man writing a novel, in a Celtic knot of interlocking stories. The riotous cast of characters includes figures "stolen" from Gaelic legends, along with assorted students, fairies, ordinary Dubliners, and cowboys, some of whom try to break free of their author's control and destroy him. The narrator ofThe Third Policeman, who has forgotten his name, is a student of philosophy who has committed murder and wanders into a surreal hell where he encounters such oddities as the ghost of his victim, three policeman who experiment with space and time, and his own soul (who is named "Joe"). The Poor Mouth, a bleakly hilarious portrait of peasants in a village dominated by pigs, potatoes, and endless rain, is a giddy parody aimed at those who would romanticize Gaelic culture. A naive young orphan narrates the deadpan farceThe Hard Life,andThe Dalkey Archiveis an outrageous satiric fantasy featuring a mad scientist who uses relativity to age his whiskey, a policeman who believes men can turn into bicycles, and an elderly, bar-tending James Joyce. With a new Introduction by Keith Donohue