Customer Reviews

The Best of Myles (Irish Literature Series)

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4 star:		(1)
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A friend lent me his copy (an Irish edition) of this book five or more years ago, and I've been searching for my own copy ever since. I'm delighted to find it's been reprinted and I just placed my order.

I envy anyone who has not yet read this book of collected columns and essays -- the outrageous details of the Ventriloquists' War, the intricacies of the Catechism of Cliche, and the wisdom of the Brother all await your delighted discovery.

Have a blast.

Absolutely hilarious collection of newspaper columns from the Irish Times. The sequence on how the uncultured rich may hire book handlers to maul their books (including forged inscriptions such as "From your devoted friend and admirer, K. Marx") is worth the price by itself. And when you realize that several dialogues seemingly in Irish are actually in English, using Irish spelling....

I laughed till I cried. If you like Ireland, humor, or simply good writing, you'll love it!

Just an another serio-comic genius writing an everyday newspaper column. Apart from being hilarious, some of these columns can also be read as dramatic monologues - as smart and unwittingly revealing of character as any Browning did.

This is just as good as it gets.

Brian O'Nolan - wrote a column in the Irish Times for many years. His best work was written during the second world war and thus did not gain the audience it deserved.

A few of the columns in the anthology require a familiarity with Irish culture, history, language - but most are very accessible. My favourites are the Keats and Chapman tales, in which the author creates improbable stories featuring the pseudonymous protagonists to support the most excruciating puns.

Some of O'Brien's (real name Brian O'Nolan, aka Flann O'Brien) other works are quite difficult e.g. At Swim Two Birds or the Third Policeman - this anthology is an excellent introduction to his work.

Highly recommended.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Ian

Flann O'Brian is absolutely one of the greatest practitioners of language. This collection of his work, "The Best Of Myles", is some of the finest writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. Gaelic, English, French, German, and Latin, are 5 languages he writes fluently. He is the personification of all that is famous of Irish Wit. There appear to be few topics he did not comment upon or release a withering appraisal with pinpoint precision.

Mr. O'Brian wrote for a daily newspaper until his death in 1966. The volume and quality of the written material he produced is amazing. This 400-page book is one of five that are available and that I intend to read. There is virtually nothing about his personal history in this volume, so hopefully there is a biography in print documenting the time he spent learning and practicing his craft. The only downside to this book is that some is in Gaelic with no translation, and there are many articles that will seem to exist in isolation if the reader does not have some knowledge of Irish History. Even if these commentaries were removed, the balance of the work would still be a remarkable literary performance.

Some of the best pieces were his comments on the affectation in so many facets of daily life. And his specific attacks on, "bores", and all the pretensions of the world of modern art, and those who would pretend to posses knowledge of which they are bereft. He creates institutes and foundations and companies dedicated to servicing frauds and exposing the truth. Much is for pure fun, but like all humor contains truth. He offers the services of a company that will come to the home of any illiterate with a library, and his people will either rummage through your books for a pittance, or for a more substantial sum, will dog-ear pages, write brilliant marginalia, and leave tickets and programs to various cultural events as though they were misplaced bookmarks. And for those who have the funds, books will receive forged inscriptions from their authors, and letters of thanks to the book's owner for their help with a particularly difficult passage.

This book came at the end of 2001 for me. I hate lists of the best of the year; however nothing I have read this year surpasses this book, absolutely nothing!

Good humour is something everybody likes and I yearn for. For quite a long time I thought that there could hardly be anything better, or at least as good as Ephraim Kishon's short satires or Douglas Adams' space phantasmagories. It was hard even to imagine something like that because I was sure my stomach would disintegrate after something like that. And than I ran into Flann O'Brien's The Best of Myles. Indeed, that was the first time for me to get familiar with him and certainly the best possible. His columns are far than hillarious, obviously because he plays with things we consider as common, everyday problems, and maybe not even problems. All the wild thoughts one could get in moments of being very bored O'Brien would write down and bring to their final reductio ad absurdum. He wouldn't wait to be stopped, he would just carry on scribbling complete nonsense, dipping even into some other languages like Latin or Gaelic in a wild rage of an admirable inspiration.
Yes, one more thing that admire him for. He would deal with Gaelic and even write in it, he would mock with politics and politicians, with history and society and even so, he managed to stay completely non-political. At least he left his columns that way. The Best of Myles is best to read before his longer and more ambitious works like The Third Policeman or At Swim-Two-Birds. And also after them.

this compilation contains, without qualification, THE funniest writing of the twentieth century, so it seems churlish to list complaints. Some of these are unavoidably the nature of the material - Myles na Gopaleen wrote a regular column for an Irish newspaper for a quarter of a century, so the very local concerns discussed in some of the pieces render them impenetrable to all but Irish historians.

The biggest problem is with the editing, or lack thereof. There are no explanatory notes offering historical, social or political context; there are no translatoins of the many German, Latin, Irish etc. interpellations. One could argue that this leaves us in the same position as those first newspaper readers, but Myles' predominantly middle-class audience could boast a sound classical education and a greater familiarity with the allusions so liberally scattered here than we do today.

Finally, the decision not to print the pieces chronologically (none of them are dated), but by subject, distorts the work, handicaps its versatility and can lead to repetition and tedium.

That 'the Best of Myles' remains one of the last century's few genuinely important books is entirely due to the indestructible persona(e) of Myles himself, hypercultured, alcoholic, visionary verbal contortionist with pretensions to aristocratic heritage. His phlegmatic invective at local problems such as sewage systems and the civil service are less valuable than his assault on language as it had (has?) degenerated into cliche and received opinion in the culturally sterile Ireland of the 1940s and 50s; and in his post-modern project of demolishing hierarchies of linguistic and artistic endeavour. Reading Myles has a bracing effect - he forces you out of habitual mental laziness; forces you to think HARDER.

I'm giving this book 5 stars even though much of it is confusing and/or just not that funny to me. The five stars, however, are richly deserved for the hilarious segments on "Buchhandlung": a proposed business venture in which books bought by the unlettered rich can be made to look well-used, with price points ranging from:

"Popular Handling--Each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloakroom docket, or other comparable article inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark"

all the way up to "Le Traitement Superbe" encompassing, among other things,

"Not less than six volumes to be inscribed with forged messages of affection and gratitude from the author of each work, e.g.,...'From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx.' 'Dear A. B.,--Your invaluable suggestions and assistance, not to mention your kindness, in entirely re-writing chapter 3, entitles you, surely, to this first copy of "Tess". From your old friend T. Hardy'"

I carried this bit of humor around on xerox for years, foisting it on anyone who would read it. It's well worth the price of the volume.

The Best of Myles

Marvelous, Flann O'Brien (whose real name was Brian O'Nolan aka Myles na Gopaleen) was a marvelous writer. The depth of his literary imagery is breathtaking, although perhaps this is better on display in his novel "At Swim-Two-Birds". Raised in Ireland in a Gaelic speaking home, but entirely conversant in English and other languages we, the readers, are the beneficiaries. An appropriate quotation from the book at this point might be, "while the average English speaker gets along with 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000.....the 400/4,000 is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it." A writer's mind conditioned in this way can be very formidable indeed. This book consists of a collection of humorous columns on a vast array of subjects which was first published in the Irish Times. A people {the Irish} and their culture have a worthy raconteur here....and hilarious, too. Loved the book! GEDTEACH

Before there was Monty Python, there was Myles. He was by far the crankiest, most learned and original comic genius of 20th-century English prose; there's simply nothing else like him. (Well, maybe there are 3 or 4 moments in "Duck Soup" that are like him.) And when you realize that this is the same guy who, under a different name, wrote "At Swim-Two-Birds" (one of the five or so funny novels for whose sake the Lord does not destroy the Earth)-- well, it's time to just surrender and enjoy.

Plus, the current Dalkey Archive edition (the publisher's name is itself a Myles reference) is handsomely made... good-quality paper and so on, don't you know. It makes a difference.

Mise, le mas, ....