A Bestiary: An Autobiography (Irish Literature Series) [Hardcover]

Aidan Higgins (Author)

Book Description

Series: Irish Literature Series | Publication Date: July 1, 2004

"A bloody marvelous book."—Harold Pinter

Originally published as three separate volumes—Donkey's Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog—A Bestiary relates the life and times of one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. As in his fiction, Higgins's writing exquisitely captures sights, smells, and emotions, detailing his life from childhood in County Kildare before his family's economic decline, to his mother's slow, agonizing death; from his travels in England and South Africa, to his two years spent living with a schoolmistress after the end of his first marriage. In writing his memoirs Higgins exposes the sources for many of his best novels, from Scenes from a Receding Past to Langrishe, Go Down, giving the reader a rare look into the "story behind the story." But A Bestiary is more than a factual expose—this collection of memoirs is constructed in a novelistic way, creating a work of literary art out of a life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Higgins is an Irish novelist, highly regarded in the 1960s, whose work had, until recently, been entirely out of print in the U.S. The first American publication of his three memoirs, an omnibus edition published in England between 1995 and 2000, launches a major restoration effort, which includes the concurrent reissue of Higgins's most famous novel, Langrishe, Go Down—the story of four sisters who, he reveals at the end of his first memoir, Donkey's Years, were based on himself and his three brothers, with the setting barely changed from their family home in County Kildare. In recreating his past, Higgins freely admits he's retrieved material from other works as well, though the tone is more often experimental than novelistic. The prose gets even more disjunctive in the second volume, Dog Days, which returns to his first adolescent love affair, then advances to the breakup of his marriage. Higgins's sexual misadventures become more explicit in The Whole Hog, which revisits the time periods of both preceding volumes from different angles. This overlapping is occasionally repetitive, but Higgins keeps things fresh by finding new aspects to share in intensely descriptive prose. The overall effect is less like a memoir than a glimpse at a novelist's notes as he transforms the raw material of his experiences into fictional set pieces.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Higgins may be County Cork's most prolific living literary aesthete, perhaps most familiar to Americans as the author of Langrishe, Go Down and the recent short-story collection Flotsam and Jetsam. The selection, a collection of the author's three previously published memoirs (Donkey's Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog--hence the animal title of his present work), has the same profligate texture as his fiction and may well expand his cult following on this side of the pond. Shying away from the linear coherence of most memoirs, Higgins instead presents the experiences of his exploratory life in brief vignettes of sensation, leaving readers to figure out the master narrative. Although much is devoted to impressions of his childhood in Ireland, his travels--England, South Africa, divided Berlin, Mexico, the Mediterranean--figure heavily in the mix and provide backstory to his fiction. Off-the-cuff literary references abound. It's a modernist adventure to the bone and not for the prudish; some of his most fascinating moments are darkly erotic. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564783588
• ISBN-13: 978-1564783585
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,328,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.