Avrei potuto appartenere a una solitaria spiaggia, o essere l'agonia del mare quando si abbatte disperato su di essa.
(198)

Come dire: esiste sempre un altro punto di vista (da percorrere su pista ciclabile).

Mai, finora, avevo creduto o sospettato di avere un'anima, ma in quel momento seppi d'averla. ... Per comodita', decisi di chiamarla Joe. (32)

"Perche' si dovrebbe rubare un orologio quando si puo' rubare una bicicletta?".
...
"Che ne so'?" dissi.
"Chi ha mai sentito di uno che monta in sella a un orologio o che si porta a casa un sacco di torba sul manubrio di un cronometro?".
(76)

"Non credo che andro' mai in bicicletta" dissi.
"A piccole dosi fa bene, irrobisticce e mette in corpo un po' di ferro. E poi andare a piedi troppo lontano, troppo spesso e troppo in fretta non e' affatto raccomandabile. Il continuo scrocchiare dei piedi per terra immette nel corpo una certa quantita' di strada. Quando un uomo muore, si dice che ritorna alla terra, ma camminare molto riempie di terra assai prima (o seppellisce lungo la strada particelle del corpo) e avvicina l'incontro con la morte. ...
(111)
( )

Some really funny and delightfully odd bits, but the awkward and yakky midsection did not gel for me. ( )

This book is apparently quite well-known, but it was new to me - I was led to it by Brian Catling's list of favorite books in The Week of June 4th. Few things are better than finding a book as entertaining and peculiar as this one out of the blue. Although this surreal novel is overall quite disturbing, it is frequently as funny as anything I've read in a long while. When it was originally rejected, the reviewer at Longman's wrote, We realize the author's ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so. I find even this bit of associated history delightful. O'Nolan (O'Brien is a pen name) eventually claimed that the manuscript was lost, but it sat in open view on his sideboard for 26 years. It was, either ironically or appropriately, published a year after his death. That this book should lie in obscurity while Sartre's No Exit is so famous, confirms the greatness of the former by De Selby's second law.
Looking over my notes I see many great new words for me including, hereditament, oxters, and stoons. My one and only complaint is that the author did not recognize that, when executed, people are hanged not hung (this might be the work of a posthumous editor). ( )

I was recommended this book many years ago and it has probably taken me forty-five years to get around to reading it. In one way, that is a loss; in another, it is perhaps fortunate, because as a younger reader I might not have appreciated all the connections that a perusal of this text throw up. On one hand, it is a surreal masterpiece; on the other, a dark fable; on yet another, an exploration of the loquaciousness of the Irish mind. I do not yet know if O'Brien was recording the colloquial speech of Dublin in the 1930s, or if some of the terminology in the book was his own coinage, which professional Irish creative personalities have over time picked up and shared with us. Suffice it to say, I kept coming across words and phrases I recognised.

The language is certainly highly redolent and I found myself at times reading some of it out loud for the sheer joy of it.

Perhaps the strangest thing, though, was that whilst reading the book, I had a BBC radio news/current affairs programme on; and I became aware that the items I heard - an interview with a professor of political economy and migration statistics from the London School of Economics, followed by a piece on trying to get an AI to write topical jokes - seemed to acquire some of the oblique propensities of O'Brien's prose. Either the world was suddenly revealed to me in its true surreal nature, or the book itself was warping reality. Perhaps de Selby could enlighten me.... ( )

Published in 1967, O'Brien's weird novel was written in 1939-40 and published a year after his death. I found myself losing patience with it, struggling to understand what was going on in the macabre world that O'Brien portrays. As I approached the final couple of chapters I had a good idea of where the novel was going; I don't want to spoil it for other readers, but I wish someone had spoilt it for me. I might then have been able to appreciate more of the silliness that had gone on before; particularly the conversations in the police barracks. I am not going to re-read it in order to discover the pearls of wisdom that some other readers have found, it wasn't that intriguing for me.

It is difficult to pigeonhole the book although it often appears in the genre of science fiction. I would be more inclined to think of it as a horror story with plenty of black humour. It would certainly appeal to bicycle lovers and to readers who might be in-tune to O'Brien's sense of humour. Perhaps the notion that people become as one with their bicycles because of the continual displacement of atoms as they ride their bone-shakers on the rough roads make it appear as science fiction, after all O'Brien goes out of his way to explain through one of his characters how this happens, or perhaps the continual reference to the madder than most scientist de Selby clinches it for some people. I remain unconvinced

My own view is that the book has been overhyped as a rediscovered masterpiece of modernist literature, but I did in the end learn to like it better, the more I read of it, but not enough to give it more than three stars. ( )