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43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Where will you find, these days, as joyous a throat?", August 4, 2003
Published in 1939, the same year that James Joyce published Finnegan's Wake, this novel was lauded in its day by Joyce himself, Samuel Beckett, and Graham Greene. A wild concoction involving a completely disjointed narrative, multiple points of view, farce, satire, and parody, this "novel" offers any student of Irish literature unlimited subject matter--and equally unlimited laughs. In this unique experiment with point of view, author Brian O'Nolan has used a pseudonym, Flann O'Brien, to tell the story of the novelist/student N, who tells his own story at the same time that he is writing a book about an invented novelist (Trellis), who is himself developing another story, while Tracy, still another author, tells a cowboy story and appears in the previous narratives. Believing that characters should be born fully adult, one of the writers tries to keep them all together--in this case, at the Red Swan Hotel--so that he can keep track of them and keep them sober while he plans the narrative and writes and rewrites the beginning and ending of the novel. But even when the primary writer stops writing to go out with his friends, the characters of the other (invented) fictional writers continue to live on in the narrative and comment on writing. Before long, the reader is treated to essays on the nature of books vs. plays, polemics about the evils of drink, parodies of folk tales and ballads, a breathless wild west tale starring an Irish cowboy, the legends of Ireland, catalogues of sins, tales of magic and the supernatural, almanacs of folk wisdom and the cures for physical ills, and even the account of a trial--and that's just for starters. Totally unique, O'Brien's creation defies the conventions, both of its day and of the present, and even the most jaded reader will be astonished at the unexpected twists the narrative takes. Steeped in the traditions of the Irish story-teller, O'Brien keeps those traditions alive by creating multiple narrators to tell multiple stories simultaneously, while also skewering the very traditions of which he--and they--are a part. Mary Whipple
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Danger:Reading this book can seriously affect your passivity, August 17, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: At Swim-Two-Birds (Plume) (Paperback)
I first came across Flann O'Brien in the shape of his novel "The Poor Mouth". My University lecturer lent me the book suggesting that his treatment of the subject of the Irish Language might give me some insight on how to approach an essay on Joyce and Beckett's treatment of the same. Whilst it must be said I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, I could see little relationship between what I considered this O'Brien's coarse impudence, and the styles of the undisputed masters of Irish literature in English. My mistake was that I should have read "At Swim-Two-Birds" first. It is here, in his first novel, that O'Brien establishes his right to rank among the heavyweights; his intellectual highground from which he can descend mercilessly upon any batallion of false pride he damned well choses. Be warned. This is not a book for the lover of Jane Austen romance or a Dickens narrative. Rather, it demands parallels with the likes of Sterne for its sheer structural trickery - (imagine, if you will, the author who writes about an author who writes about an author whose characters revolt against his authorship, in taking over the narrative for themselves), -parallels with Beckett in the subversion of continuity and chronology of plot, and the frustrating of plot development with obsessive attention to mudane detail; parallels with Joyce in respect of the inclusion of historical classicism, here in the shape of the heroes of old Ireland, not least the mad king Sweeney whose inclusion in one of the fleeting strands of narrative rather tenuously povides the title for the novel itself. Even this torturous attempt at grasping some semblance of what "At Swim-Two-Birds" is about, does not even begin to scratch the surface of the richness of form, of content, of style contained within its too few pages. When you read this book, and you should if you love literature, take your time over every page; bask in its complications; marvel at its ingenuity; guffaw at its hilarity. Before you realise it, it'll be over, and you'll have read one of the most intriguing books ever written. Now what was it about, again?
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good book, but not his best, December 2, 1999
At Swim-Two-Birds is the first great cult book of the century. Well, maybe the second, after Ulysses. Or possibly the fifth, after Kafka's novels. Oh, never mind. The author, Brian O'Nolan (to give him his real name) wrote it in a fairly desultory manner, handing out bits to his friends and asking them what they thought; he would often change it on their suggestion, not always for the better (as comparisons with early drafts show). It gives the impression of being intricately structured without actually being so, as I found when I adapted it for the stage. In fact, it's structurally a mess, with a hastily tacked-on sentimental ending that was written after O'Nolan's father's unexpected death - the book is always threatening to get really dark, and then fudges it in the wind-up.. The humour is side-splitting the first time round, but it gives diminishing returns (believe me). Far better is his second novel in English, The Third Policeman, written without AS2B's pretensions to modernity and avant-gardism, and, paradoxically, much more genuinely avant-garde.
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