This is a hilarious satire which parodies the typical Gaeltacht memoirs published in Ireland after 1922. These books were a mandatory part of the Irish school curriculum and those who went to high school in Ireland in the '80s will forever remember [b:Peig: The Autobiograpy of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island|1998679|Peig The Autobiograpy of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island|Peig Sayers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447275760l/1998679._SY75_.jpg|671229]. The hardship of life in these remote regions was real, but the Irish have their own unique way of describing it. Tragedy doesn't seem all that bad, because in the end "Shur it'll all be grand". Flann O' Brien takes this to a whole new level in this extremely amusing parody.

Anois caithfidh mé an leagan Gaeilge, [b:An Béal Bocht|1638992|An Béal Bocht|Myles na gCopaleen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356154219l/1638992._SY75_.jpg|969563] le [a:Myles na gCopaleen|757952|Myles na gCopaleen|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png], a léamh. Fuair mé sa phoist é inné agus tá mé ag súil leis é a chur i gcomparáid leis an aistriúchán Béarla.

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‘The Poor Mouth’ is a scathing yet amusing satire squarely aimed at the narratives and custodians of Gaelic Ireland, complete with endless rain, countless meals of potatoes and house shares with sheep and pigs. The protagonist, Bonaparte O’Coonassa, lives in the fictitious village of Corkadoragha where he ambles through a poverty stricken yet mildly philosophical and content life. This is a short, enjoyable read that immerses you in a beautiful, simple yet ridiculous tale which pulsates with Irishness. Without having read O’Brien’s other works yet, I’ve gleaned that this is only moderately surreal in comparison but it was still evidence of skilful writing and a risk-taking, experimental style that made for an engaging read. I’ll definitely be reading his others! ( )

A Strong and Unsteady Book, Better Than a Well-Constructed One

There are many ways to encounter this book. Some people found it in its original Irish, and many more in its 1973 translation. Here are some coordinates of my own, written in a pastiche of O'Brien's prose:

1. I read it finally, probably thirty years after I first heard of it. Those thirty years correspond fairly well to my marriage, to Margaret MacNamidhe, who comprises 100% of the Irish portion of our marriage.
2. At the beginning of that period I attempted one summer's worth of Irish classes in a Gaeltacht. They sometimes involved driving a night, down extremely narrow winding deserted country roads, in pelting rain. I abandoned those lessons in a state of awed bewilderment.
3. Also in that period I read English versions of two books that absolutely have to be read before "The Poor Mouth," because otherwise a reader will entirely fail to laugh at the appointed times. They are: Tomás Ó Criomhthain's "The Islandman," in which, among other things, a man plasters a wound caused by a seal bite with meat taken from the seal, and, among other things, the athor says "our like will not be seen again," which is repeated incessantly in "The Poor Mouth"; and Peig Sayers's "Peig," in which everyone dies, as most people do in "The Poor Mouth." The darkness of O'Brien's satire absolutely cannot be appreciated without an experience of the humorless, portentous Catholic suffering expounded in "The Islandman" and "Peig."
4. The reason I read "The Islandman" and "Peig" was because I was trying to gain a better understanding of my wife's formation, something that I now realize was absolutely hopeless, mainly because she disliked those books because they were Irish, because they were required, and, I think, because they were humorless, whereas O'Brien disliked them because their suffering was very close to his but their self-awareness was a galaxy apart.
5. It is one of the most rermarkable facts of cultural development in any nation that "The Islandman" was written only 12 years before "The Poor Mouth." I would have guessed centuries.
6. This year I finally found time to read "The Poor Mouth" as part of an attempt to read all of O'Brien's work. This time my motive isn't marital harmony or cultural curiosity but an interest in novels that are irrational. "The Third Policeman" is crazy in many ways, and "The Dalkey Archive" crazier in some other ways, and "Cruiskeen Lawn" (his newspaper columns) extremely funny and bitter... so I still have no clear sense of who he is, or how often his imagination became as spectaculary disarranged as it does in "The Third Policeman" or "The Dalkey Archive."

This is by way of saying anyone who sits down to read this without thinking of its various contexts will miss it almost entirely, which will not at all decrease its brilliance.

And may I note that this is book is not a satire in the normal sense of that word, which supposes an author in control of his viewpoint and his pen. "The Poor Mouth" more often rudderless than it is Swiftian. It has funny stretches and short stories, and some bitter satire about Gaels and people like Tomás Ó Criomhthain. But it veers, at the end, suddenly into maudlin bathos and tragedy, and it seldom manages a steady keel between the Scylla of sniping social commentary and the Charybdis of bottomless suffering. So let's do it the favor of not calling it a satire: it's much more interesting than that.

As the most insular and self-consciously Irish novel he ever wrote, this one won't ever gain the fame of his others, for understandable reasons, but it's very funny all the same. Originally published in Gaelic as An Béal Bocht, it's the story of Bonaparte O'Coonasa, a wretch of an Irishman who lives a life of uninterrupted poverty, misery, and filth in the remote village of Corkadoragha with his mother, an elderly companion named the Old-Grey-Fellow, and an assortment of pigs.

The humor in the book comes from everywhere: the dialogue, which is a maximally overwrought rendering of "faith and begorrah!" stereotypes; the plot, which is an endless succession of pigs, potatoes, whiskey, rain, and mud, with an occasional adventure thrown in; and the broader theme of an absurdly obsessive focus on Irishness, its true nature, and how Irish it is to be constantly talking and thinking about Irishness:

"If we're truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question of the Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. There is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelic topics. He who speaks Gaelic but fails to discuss the language question is not truly Gaelic in his heart; such conduct is of no benefit to Gaelicism because he only jeers at Gaelic and reviles the Gaels. There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly true Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language."

O'Brien is parodying the navel-gazing tendency of the post-Independence Irish government to force its citizens to celebrate their Irishness by reading lots of material about how poor, rural, and uneducated they were (an American equivalent might be if everyone were required to read endless numbers of sub-Laura Ingalls Wilder-quality novels about starving farmers or something). O'Brien takes the sheer depressing awfulness of this peasant existence to the extreme, bringing out the inherent hilarity of this kind of national glorification:

"Eight more died on that same day from excess of dancing and scarcity of food. The Dublin gentlemen said that no Gaelic dance was as Gaelic as the Long Dance, that it was Gaelic according to its length and truly Gaelic whenever it was truly long. Whatever the length of time needed for the longest Long Dance, it is certain that it was trivial in comparison with the task we had in Corkadoragha on that day. The dance continued until the dancers drove their lives out through the soles of their feet and eight died during the course of the feis. Due to both the fatigue caused by the revels and the truly Gaelic famine that was ours always, they could not be succoured when they fell on the rocky dancing floor and, upon my soul, short was their tarrying on this particular area because they wended their way to eternity without more ado."

If you don't think books about starving peasants can be funny then you won't like this one, but I personally couldn't put it down. The Irish author Mark O'Connell wrote a good review of this book for The Millions that adds a bit more context, but it's funny enough even if you don't know much about the quirks of Irish culture that prompted this hilarious satire. ( )

Although this wasn't a very difficult book to read, I still kind of struggled with it. I did catch the humour, but found the description of poverty nevertheless disturbing.
The style of writing was not one I liked, without really being able to pinpoint what my problem with it is. Hence my score of 6 out of 10.

One off my oldest & one more book off the 1001-list read: that's good :-) ( )