Flann O'Brien (1911–1966)

Silly, surreal and sinister, it's long since past time that I got around to reading it. I was always a big fan of At Swim Two Birds and The Best Of Myles, so it's a mystery why it took me this long. Anyway, a work of genius, published after its' author's death and every bit as influential on modern literature and culture as, say, contemporaries and admirers Joyce and Beckett. The story of a murderer who finds himself confronted with his victim, apparently alive, and who visits a police show more station and the people and the things he discovers there, by turns inane and extraordinary, amazingly sublime and deeply creepy. Extremely funny, with satirical interpretations of physics and logic and philosophy as well as the celebrated footnotes concerning the celebrated De Selby, but ultimately rather chilling and nightmarish, it ranks as one of the great works of 20th Century literature, let alone perhaps the greatest work of 20th Century fantasy.

This edition comes with some additional material, including a potted biography of Brian Nolan and some pieces on the text itself. Appropriately enough, the short piece on De Selby reads almost exactly like a De Selbian footnote.

*Reread this for a panel at WorldCon, er, tomorrow, as it happens, and the prospect of attending a convention every day for five days does have sinister hellish-going-round overtones, thank you very much for suggesting that thought, brain, taken by surprise once again by just how damn weird it is while at the same time being thoroughly prosaic. Became slightly fixated on the idea that there were footnotes to the footnotes that were too small to be observed by the human eye, and those footnotes had more footnotes all the way down to the subatomic infinity. Also, since I have just read Cronin's biography giving social context to the book, still wondering abut the book's appearance on the TV show and how a book written on a island with a small population concentrated on a coastal spot with an inland full of incomprehensible strangers, opressive, paraniod, haunted by holy secrets, and that eeveryone with any sense is trying to get away from could possibly be relevant to Lost. show less

İrlanda kültürü hakkında alabildiğine komik bir parodi olarak da okunan Ağaca Tüneyen Sweeny, pinti amcasıyla birlikte Dublin’de yaşayan miskin ve derbeder bir üniversite öğrencisinin öyküsünü anlatıyor. Dublin sokaklarında aylaklık eden, fırsat buldukça kafa çeken, ahbaplarıyla felsefi ve edebi konularda sohbet etmeyi seven bu genç, vaktinin çoğunu yatağında okumakla ya da romanını yazmakla geçirir. Yazmakta olduğu romanda, kendisi gibi yatağına show more düşkün, tuhaf mı tuhaf bir yazar olan başkarakter Trellis de bir roman yazmaktadır. Trellis’in yarattığı ve diğer yazarlardan ödünç aldığı kurgu karakterler zaman içinde kontrolden çıkıp başkaldırarak kötü yazarlığının bedelini ona fena ödetirler...

Flann O’Brien’ın çılgın zekâsı ile İrlandalılara özgü hiciv ve espri anlayışının adeta dizginlerinden boşanmışçasına dans ettiği; grotesk, kara mizah, mitoloji ve en saf haliyle saçmalığın baş döndürücü bir şekilde harmanlandığı Ağaca Tüneyen Sweeny, tüm bunların yanı sıra, Joyce’un Ulysses’te yaptığı gibi benzersiz bir Dublin betimlemesi sunuyor.

Hakiki bir mizah duygusuna sahip, gerçek bir yazar.
James Joyce

An indolent college student creates a chaotic fictional world in this classic of Irish literature: "A marvel of imagination, language, and humor" (The New Republic).

In this comic masterpiece, our unnamed narrator—a student at University College, Dublin, who spends more time drinking and working on his novel than attending classes—creates a character, a pub owner named Trellis, who himself is devoted mainly to writing and sleeping. Soon Trellis is collaborating with an author of cowboy romances, and from there unspools a brilliantly unpredictable adventure that James Joyce himself called "a really funny book."

"'Tis the odd joke of modern Irish literature—of the three novelists in its holy trinity, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien, the easiest and most accessible of the lot is O'Brien. . . . Flann O'Brien was too much his own man, Ireland's man, to speak in any but his own tongue." —The Washington Post

"As with Scott Fitzgerald, there is a brilliant ease in [O'Brien's] prose, a poignant grace glimmering off every page." —John Updike

"One of the best books of our century." —Graham Greene

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing. Hilariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, opening up new possibilities for what can be done in fiction. It is a true masterpiece of Irish literature. show less

"... the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest."[return][return]I don't know why it's taken me so long to read Flann O'Brien. Perhaps his work has been a Schrödinger's Book, for me: as long as his books were unread, in their sealed box, they could be both the Greatest Surreal Irish Humor Ever Written and an incredibly lame disappointment. I could go along, complacently, in both states show more simultaneously. [return][return]BUT ... realities must be faced. The cat is scratching furiously at the inside of the box, and meowing plaintively ( ... The book is ... scratching furiously ... Sorry, the analogy kind of got away from me there ...), and my first Flann O'Brien has been read, and I am delighted to say that it is a TREAT. [return][return]OK, yes, it's like a Monty Python sketch, on acid, and inflated to the length of a 200 page book. And yes, O'Brien sometimes was inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. (The four page footnotes, in 8pt font should be a bit of a giveaway ...) but it is very, very funny.[return][return]So many, many excellent excellent reviews here, entering fully into the spirit of the thing, that I don't feel that I have much that I can add. Some very enlightening reviews, too. (Learning that Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien was so disappointed by the reaction to his novel, when he hawked the manuscript around in the late 30s/early 40s, that he claimed to have lost it, and it was only rediscovered and published after his death, is so meta I want to die of happiness.) [return][return]I just hope that, somewhere, he knows that what he's written was just the pancake.[return][return]One thought that I'd like to share: the fingerprints of The Third Policeman are on every example of Irish humor that I can think of. Father Ted? (With priests instead of policemen ... ) Derry Girls? (Girls swapped for boys. And James is a bicycle ...) Any of the works of Martin McDonagh, including the glorious In Bruges? Having read The Third Policeman, a LOT of things in that movie suddenly made a lot more sense to me ... [return][return]"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed," I murmured, "to those who seek the higher places." show less

Before this book there was nothing like it. After this book nothing like it could be done again, not as well and not the same way. This book took narrative, plot, character, theme, story, poetry and held them up and subjected them to a long and pitiless examination, then threw them down and subjected them to degradations and tortures not dissimilar to those inflicted on the author, Trellis, holding back from destruction only at the end in a moment of conscience and mercy. O'Brien pierces the show more drunken pretensions and tedious intellectual self-aggrandisement of the middle-class Dublin drunk but cannot in the end deny his affection for it. A brilliant, daring, anarchic novel of wit and intelligence and linguistic dexterity. There is nothing else out there like it at all all. You might even say it's yer only man. show less