Customer Reviews

The Crock of Gold

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Pure free-poetry as only Stephens can do it, these pages have informed and nourished me--along with friends and lovers--for nearly fifty years: From the time when I first happily seduced my young wife by reading Chapter VI to her...to my having now become one of the Two Philosophers who continue its argument. I was overjoyed to find this edition back in print again, with its wood-block prints and original type plates still intact. Don't miss this one.

James Stephens is one of the writers who produced the works that have come to be called the "Celtic Revival". In the late Victorian era writers in Ireland, Scotland and Wales had their own rennaisance of the classical works of medieval celtic literature. In Ireland this revival took on an added dimension as it became associated through figures such as Yeates and Maude Gonne with the struggle for Irish Independence. Ultimately the rediscovery of classical celtic poetry and prose gave a language, a history and a nationalistic justification to the rebels.

William Butler Yeates, John Millington Synge, Oliver St.John Gogarty, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are all renowned worldwide for their contributions to international literature. Be it on stage or in prose, they brought a poetic flavour to their art, a free flowing and lilting verse that permeates all their work. This signature blank verse gives an ancient grandeur to the literature of the period, carrying echoes of the ancient celtic poets, and redolent of Chauser and Shakespeare.

James Stephens is less well known than his compatriots, but no lesser in quality. If anything his is the purest voice of the Celtic Revival. He is easily on a par with writers such as John Milton and Edmunde Spencer, who wrote similarly high works of art.

But the beauty of Stephens is that his subject is the folklore of daily Irish life. Happy and jolly tales of leperachauns and fairies, small events of great import, the philosophy of field and wood. It is at once grand and accessible. The tales have a childlike attraction and simplicity to them that is belied by the quality of the prose.

Whether reading for a bit of fantasy, a good laugh, or to study literature, you will not regret reading these tales.

The book is appealing on many levels. It has fantasy, mystery, myth and abundant humor. Most of the tales are mythical in nature. Some are fabricated tall tales. The writing is excellent, with rich detail expressed in terse language. A delight from cover to cover.

If you revel in pagan dementia, and are in for a solid laugh, James Stephens's Crock of Gold will have you rolling. The words are poetry. The thoughts are strangely intellectual. The characters are truly from another dimension. A masterpiece like no other. Long live the Philosopher and his musings...

"So saying, he returned his eyes to his nose, and his mind to his maxim, and lapsed to a profound reflection wherein nothing sat perched on insubstantiality, and the Spirit of Artifice goggled at the puzzle."

Try that one at home!

As other reviewers have said at length, The Crock of Gold is a fine read, no doubt. But it is at its best read aloud. If you can find the version read masterfully by (I think) Donal Donnelly, which was offered on cassette a few years ago, you are in for a treat. The language sings, and it is wonderful to hear the Gaelic names read aloud. Listening to this book is a rare pleasure.

The story contained in this book is excellent, but the book itself is junk. It appears that is was visually scanned from and older and more narrowly formatted print and then pasted into this print with little to no error checking. The worst result of this is that every word that was hyphenated across two lines in the original text appears broken and hyphenated even though it is now in the middle of a line (e.g. hyphen- ated). You will also see occasional misreads such as a number 1 in place of a lowercase "L".

Find another printing.

I bought this book for my collection because it was advertised as containig "twelve full color prints by Thomas Mackenzie".
Sadly, the Mackenzie prints are absent, they are, however, listed in the front of the book under "illustrations", complete with page numbers, just no wonderful Mackenzie prints.
This is the "River City Press 1978 reprint"

The soft back edi- tion of this book is full of misedit- ed copy (full of sep- arated text (annoying isn't it?). It also does not have the publication date or a full title page. I wrote a report using the date of 2006 because that was the only date I could find. Lastly, whole portions of text are missing from this edition. My advice, spend the extra money and get a different edition.

James Stephen's Crock of Gold is marvelous, but this instance, a maroon covered paperback with a multi-colored border, is marred by irresponsible use of Optical Character Recognition. Line-ending hyphenations in the original have been ignored, and now are preserved in mid-line, or worse, at line start.

I picked up The Crock of Gold to read on a whim, and little did I know what I was getting into. I've not read a novel this wonderful in years. I guarantee it's one I'm going to return to over and over, just to revel in its magic.

The plot is loose and whimsical. I don't really know how to describe it. Many strange things happen. A philosopher sparks a crisis when he inadvertently gives away the position of the leprechauns' gold. A young woman is seduced away from home by the god Pan, and the Celtic gods must be sought out to save her. Leprechauns' frame a murder and call in the (non-magical) police. Several people fall in love. Yep, there are fairies and kidnappings and journeys and parables, and none of it is logical, but it all manages to make sense anyway.

The main thing, though, is just that this is such a beautiful book. I read a lot, but nowhere, nowhere have I read prose this beautiful. There is something very edenic about the novel, some sense that Stephens is tapping into an original knowledge of beauty that we all share. The philosopher's journey from knowing about life toward knowing how to live is particularly meaningful. The ending, though abrupt, is startling.

I can't recommend this book too highly.