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Loading... At Swim-Two-Birdsby Flann O'Brien
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  IreneF | Nov 25, 2009 |  This book was confusing, maddening, clever, foolish, inventive, interesting, and boring all at the same time. The beginning was all over the place, and I only started "getting" it after I was 100 pages in. I'm pretty sure the book was smarter than I could handle. Either that or dumber. I'm just not sure! (  ) carmelitasita29 | Oct 22, 2009 | An amazing book, hard to believe that this book was originally published in 1939 in priest-ridden, censorious, holy Catholic Ireland. The book itself is totally original although some would argue that sections of it bear an uncomfortable resemblance to "Ulysses" by the old maestro himself. When asked about this, one of Ireland's leading interpreters of O'Brien's work - Eamonn Morrissey - was of the opinion that O'Brien and Joyce "drank from the same well". At times hilarious, this book willmake you laugh - and cry - from beginning to end. A forerunner of the impeccable "Third Policeman" this is O'Brien at his brilliant best, mixing fantasy, surrealism, absurdity and vulgarity as only he can. 3  fathach | Aug 10, 2009 | one of my favourites, for sure... and extremely clever, inventive and funny! if i could find a week inside each day i'd read this book every week! i love the cover of this edition too.. a detail from "the Sabines Theme" by Ceri Richards. daniilkharmsarms | May 30, 2009 | Flann O'Brien, hero. (  )1 |  IsawEloise | Apr 13, 2009 | 
 At Swim-Two-Birds has such a strong claim to be one of the founding texts of literary postmodernism. All the markers of that baggy but indispensable cultural category—the deconstruction of narrative, the replacement of nature by culture, an ahistoric sensibility in which tropes and genres from different eras can be mixed and matched promiscuously, the prominence of pastiche, the notion of language itself as the real author of the work—are openly declared in At Swim.
References to this work on external resources.
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O'Brien labored mightily to make At Swim-Two-Birds summary-proof. But here, anyway, are the bare bones: the narrator, a university student, is writing a novel, which keeps morphing from mock-heroics to middlebrow naturalism. Meanwhile, one of his characters, Dermot Trellis, is himself writing a Western--an Irish Western--whose cowpunching protagonists will eventually throw off their fictional shackles and attempt to murder their creator. (Talk about the death of the author!) There's enough structural shenanigans here to keep an entire industry of critics afloat. Still, what matters most is the pungency of O'Brien's prose. His dialogue is agreeably grungy, his parodies delicious, and the narrator speaks in the sort of Jesuitical dialect that we associate with Samuel Beckett:
That same afternoon I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan's licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being. In my thigh pocket I had eleven and eightpence in a weighty pendulum of mixed coins.Snippets, alas, do little justice to At Swim-Two-Birds, which relies heavily on cumulative chaos for its effect. Graham Greene, an early fan, compared its comic charge to "the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage." A half century after its initial appearance, O'Brien's masterpiece remains a gleeful read--a marvelous, inventive, and (last but not least) really funny book. --James Marcus
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:56 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English (3)
Much of the book is "about"--well, not really "about", but maybe what the author was thinking about--is the collision between Ireland's literary, heroic past and its grimy, mundane present. But here's the rub: the commonplace pre-War Dublin of the book is as unreal to me, as a 21st century Californian, as any invented city; and the threads of Irish literature glimmering through At Swim-Two-Birds are indecipherable to anyone who hasn't already sought them out. (Unless, perhaps, you grew up in Ireland. )
For example, early in the book, characters "borrowed" from another "author"--a writer of westerns--go cattle rustling cattle in Dublin. If you know that one of the earliest works of Irish literature is the Táin Bó Cúailnge, or "Cattle Raid of Cooley" you realize this is more than absurdist humor; but how many readers have heard of it?
A counterpoint between high and low fun runs through the text:
"The mind may be impaired by alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired. Personal experience appeared to me to be the only satisfactory means to the resolution of my doubts. Knowing it was my first one, I quietly fingered the butt of my glass before I raised it. Lightly I subjected myself to an inward interrogation... Who are my future cronies, where our mad carousals? What neat repast shall feast us light and choice of Attic taste with wine whence we may rise to hear the lute well touched or artful voice warble immortal notes or Tuscan air? What mad pursuit? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Here's to your health, said Kelly.
Good luck, I said. . . . You can't beat a good pint."
Much of the text is dialogue. The going is a little tough, because it lacks quotation marks. This has never bothered me before, but
to be cont'd (