At Swim-Two-Birds (John F. Byrne Irish Literature Series) | 
 enlarge | Author: Flann O'brien
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Rating:  42 reviews
Sales Rank: 22025
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Dalkey Archive ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 156478181X
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9781564781819
ASIN: 156478181X
Publication Date: August 1998
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
In a 1938 letter to a literary agent, Flann O'Brien described his first novel as "a very queer affair, unbearably queer perhaps." The book in question was At Swim-Two-Birds--and if we take queer to mean diabolically eccentric, then truer words were never spoken. The author, whose real name was Brian O'Nolan, had successfully stirred Gaelic legend, pulp fiction, and grimy Dublin realism into a hilarious cocktail. His mastery of modernist collage would have been an ample accomplishment itself. But O'Brien was also blessed with the writer's equivalent of perfect pitch, and in At Swim-Two-Birds he squeezes the maximum beauty and banality out of the English language. All he lacks is a tragic register, but he makes up for this deficit with a sense of comedy so acute that even James Joyce couldn't resist blurbing his fellow Dubliner's creation: "A really funny book." 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
Product Description
Along with one or two books by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds is the most famous (and infamous) of Irish novels published in the twentieth century. Or to put it as Dylan Thomas did: "It establishes Mr. O'Brien in the forefront of contemporary writing. . . . This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl!" The story of an Irish college student whohalf to amuse himself and half to avoid workwrites an irreverent novel about the figures of Irish myth and legend in which characters come to life and riot against their author, At Swim is a wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture which had a major influence on writers coming after O'Brien, including Anthony Burgess, Gilbert Sorrentino, and William H. Gass (who has written an introduction for this edition). O'Brien opened up a whole new world of possibilities for fiction as subsequent novelists have played with his zany ideas, chief among them being the idea that characters in fiction have earned the right to be "recycled"after all, they've proven their reliability as characters!not put out to pasture once their stories are finished.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 37 more reviews...
 Doubting Thomas November 22, 2008
Dylan Thomas is alleged to have said: " Just the book to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl" (quoted inside the jacket of my 1967 edition). I have no idea what he was talking about; he was probably just suffering a fit a jealousy. This is simply one of those indispensable works of art: funny, tragic, cosmi-comic.
 at swim-two-birds July 27, 2008
good book. read it after i read gilbert sorrentino's piece on it from "Something Said".
 Absolutely woeful July 4, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Nabokov said, of the praise lavished on a book he hated, that it amounted to, "an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair."
I can think of no other way to describe the discrepancy between the highfalutin praise given this book and my experience of actually reading it.
At Swim-Two-Birds is probably the dullest, most slipshod, most irritating novel that I have ever read; a scattershot gallimaufry of bad jokes, turgid nonsense, purple prose, and long, long-winded creatures of Irish legend carousing like the phantasmagoria of a tedious nightmare, or like an overlong piece of impromptu theatre, attempting ribald hilarity, but failing--each amateur actor jostling for centre-stage with a histrionic imbecility, and each crude gag falling flat on its face. Its defenders will say that this is all parody. Perhaps. But the primary victim of O'Brien's writing is the helpless reader.
Two years before his death a purblind James Joyce read this book with a magnifying glass. He called it a funny book. James Joyce is my favourite writer. I do not know how to explain his remarks. Perhaps his magnifying glass was defective. Perhaps it's all an elaborate Irish in-joke. Perhaps he was throwing a dog a bone. (O'Brien went on to waggishly slag Joyce off in anonymous newspaper columns anyway).
"Feed yourself up with that tack once," says one of O'Brien's characters (who? about what? this reader could not possibly care less), "and you won't want more for a long time."
That much is true, faith.
The funniest book you will ever read... April 30, 2008
This is not like any book you will ever read. There is no plot per se. It is the kind of book that you will absolutely love, and laugh out loud all the way through, or absolutely hate. It was written in 1939, and does not seem to have aged at all, it might have been written last year. It follows the exploits of a lazy student who never goes to college. Instead, he spends his time drinking with his friends. He starts to write a book about an Irish novelist who only writes Westerns. The novelist then falls in love with his own description of a woman in his book. It is written in a very stiff almost pompous style which makes it even funnier. If you are reading this don't try to follow it, or remember who anyone is, just enjoy the turns of phrase and the outrageous, surrealist exploits of the characters therein: 12 fosterlings playing handball against Fionn Mac Cumhaill's bottom, whose face was the width of Ulster. It is a heady experience. It's like a mad drunken night out in Dublin where literally anything could happen!
 A Smug Comic Spirit March 30, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Brian O'Nolan, born in Strabane in 1911, wrote under a number of pen-names - although Flann O'Brien is probably the best known. He studied at University College Dublin and spent nearly twenty years working in the Irish Civil Service. He also spent thirty years writing a column - The Cruiskeen Lawn - for the Irish Times under the name Myles na gCopaleen. "At Swim-Two-Birds" is his first novel, and was published in 1939.
The book's narrator is a university student who lives with his uncle in Dublin. His bedroom is permanently locked, whether he is in or out - an arrangement that allows him to occasionally take a day off and stay in bed, with his uncle thinking he's gone to college. (Well, when I say take a day off, he actually spends winter and early spring in his bedroom). While our hero doesn't have a very high opinion of his uncle - at various times, he describes his aged relative as rat-brained, cunning, concerned that he should be well thought of and abounding in pretence - his aged relative is a Holder of the Guinness Clerkship (Third Class) quite correctly thinks he doesn't study enough. Although he claims to reads James Joyce and Aldous Huxley, he appears to be more interested in backing the horses, and subscribes to a very dodgy tipster based in Newmarket. On the few occasions our narrator leaves his bedroom, there's a fair chance he wind up in the pub drinking porter with Kelly - a fellow student, though later a soldier. One such session leads to a three day hangover and - thanks to an impressive bout of vomiting - a very smelly suit.
In his spare time, our narrator is writing a book. One of the main characters is an author by the name of Dermot Trellis. Trellis lives at the Red Swan Hotel on Lower Leeson Street and, like our narrator, is rather fond of his bedroom - having spent the last twenty years in bed. Trellis, who considers evil to be the most contagious of all diseases, is writing a book on sin. The story will feature one villain after another - the most depraved of which is called Furriskey - and a woman of exceptional virtue, by the name of Sheila Lamont. Naturally, after a great deal of drinking, debauchery, high living and colourful language, Ms Lamont is eventually corrupted, ravished and killed. When Trellis starts working on his story, he decides all the characters from his book should also move into the Red Swan - to prevent any unauthorised boozing, he wants them locked up and asleep before he goes to bed himself. (It's a rather strange world our narrator has created : not only does Trellis have the cast from his book living with him, but - in Trellis' world - children need not be born young. For example, Furriskey was born at the age of twenty-five and a heavy smoker from the moment of his arrival. Furthermore, the Wild West exists in Ireland, and the Circle N is considered one of Dublin's more venerable old ranches). Although Furriskey, Sheila Lamont (with whom Trellis, inevitably, falls in love) and the Pooka Fergus McPhellimey (a magical Irish devil) are Trellis originals, several of the characters to feature in his book have been `borrowed' from other sources. Several cowboys were created by William Tracy, an author of Western romances set in Ireland, while the legendary Finn MacCool also features. Meanwhile, the cellar is apparently full of leprechauns.
Given the book's reputation, I came to it with high hopes - even more so, given how I had enjoyed "The Third Policeman". Unfortunately, I was badly disappointed. I've seen it blurbed as "a brilliant impressionistic jumble of ideas, mythology and nonsense", while others have referred to it as O'Brien's masterpiece. These assessments put a very positive spin on what I found. The book's narrator seems to have quite an opinion of himself, and I found myself occasionally wondering just how much of O'Brien there was in the character. He describes one of the stories featuring Finn MacCool as a "humourous or quasi humourous incursion into ancient mythology" - naturally, none of the sections that featured Finn were remotely funny. In fact, it appeared to me that these sections were rather high-handed attempts to mock Lady Gregory, and possibly even WB Yeats. Sections of the book are convoluted, over-long and tedious - even when he comes up with something that could have been funny, O'Brien generally kills the humour by labouring the point. One of the few things that did raise an unintentional smile was a conversation between Furriskey and Shanahan : "But the man in the street, where does he come in ? By God he doesn't come in at all, as far as I can see...Feed yourself up with that tack once, and you won't want more for a long time." With that, O'Brien has given a perfectly valid assessment of "At Swim Two Birds". Probably a good book for an Irish Literature course - but not necessarily one you'd read for pleasure.
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