Various Lives of Keats and Chapman and the Brother [Paperback]

Flann O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 2003

First published as a column in THE IRISH TIMES, the hilarious escapades of Keats and Chapman (based on the Romantic poet and the translator of Homer respectively) that comprise this volume illuminate the extraordinary talent of the Irish modernist Flann O'Brien. Labelled by the author 'studies in literary pathology', the vignettes - each concluding in a terrible, bathetic pun - are the work of a extraordinarily funny mind exploring the limits of the shaggy dog story. Many have attempted their own Keats and Chapman story, but, in O'Brien's own words, 'Nearly all the stories that reach me from the outside are, for one reason or another, pretty bad - bad in the sense that they are too good...'

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Flann O'Brien is the pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan who was born in Co. Tyrone in 1911. He lived in Dublin with his wife until his death in 1966. A graduate of University College, his career as a writer extended from his student days, through his years in the Civil Service and the years following his resignation. His novels include AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, THE DALKEY ARCHIVE, THE HARD LIFE, THE THIRD POLICEMAN and THE POOR MOUTH.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Townhouse (November 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1903650607
• ISBN-13: 978-1903650608
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,775,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Flann O'Brien, whose real name was Brian O'Nolan, also wrote under the pen name of Myles na Gopaleen. He was born in 1911 in County Tyrone. A resident of Dublin, he graduated from University College after a brilliant career as a student (editing a magazine called Blather) and joined the Civil Service, in which he eventually attained a senior position.

He wrote throughout his life, which ended in Dublin on April 1, 1966. His other novels include The Dalkey Archive, The Third Policeman, The Hard Life, and The Poor Mouth, all available from Dalkey Archive Press. Also available are three volumes of his newspaper columns: The Best of Myles, Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn, and At War.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Would be five stars if it came with the first bit blun off, December 5, 2005

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Noddy Box (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including The Brother (Hardcover)

A welcome compilation of the incomparable Myles marred only by a thoroughly cack-handed introduction by Jamie O'Neill, whose sole qualification for the job it seems is having written something called At Swim, Two Boys--a novel apparently, set against the backdrop of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, about the love that blossoms between two boys. Shudder. Seriously though, I haven't read this much cartoon Irish claptrap in prefatory remarks since I ran across Malachy McCourt's acknowledgements in his ghastly little memoir, A Monk Swimming. If O'Neill's smugly contemptuous and entirely unwarranted swipe at the Catholic Church doesn't give you the full measure of this imposter's stunted perspective, then his trite and tired rehearsal of the Irish way with the English language certainly will. My advice is skip the introduction, better yet yank it completely, and start straight in on Flann, a joy as ever from start to finish. Saw Eamon Morrissey do his thing too so I did, back in the eighties, and he done full justice to your man up above in the bed I can tell you.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Brother is universal human self-pride, July 3, 2011

By 

Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say" (OLLIERGUES France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Various Lives of Keats and Chapman (Paperback)

This is the script of a one man show. The originality is not in the stories themselves that can be found in other writings by Flann O'Brien, but first of all in the language which is systematically colloquial Irish English. Yje, we have the situation that is a cliché about Ireland: It all takes place in the snug of a pub, downing stouts or plains. But this cliché is not gratuitous. It is thrown at the face of the Irish audience to show them how they look to outsiders. They look soused all the time. But it is a cliché that is untenable more than five minutes. And does it concern only the Irish?

Since this is a one man show it is composed of several stories and one is that of a drunkard who stops drinking one day but is put back on the beer road by his own wife and he ends up really badly and the conclusion is the introduction of Jem Casey, the working class poet who will tell you that in life there is nothing but a pint of plain, a poetry of the beginning of the 20th century when street singers were singing songs of that type at street corners. That's how Edith Piaf started. But once again it is derisive, overdone, exaggerated but it is also self-critical and directed at the Irish audience. Funny isn't it? But funny ah ah? Probably not. And does it concern only the Irish?

Some of the stories are very good indeed and the telling of them makes them even more dynamic than they could be in the novels.

We can wonder who the Brother is. Some kind of impersonation of the standard average median normal Irishman. If you can survive that kind of thrashing you get from that Brother, you have some eventual possibility to get back to sanity. Otherwise you are dead, body and soul and you have been swallowed by the Sea Cat. Good riddance. But does it concern only the Irish?

This script is full of real pearls and gems at times, here and there, and I do not want to list them all.

What is more interesting to reflect on is the use and value of derision and even self-derision. This derision is a common rhetorical means used by many. It has often been called black humor and Daniel Defoe is a great master of it. James Joyce has some of it. Yeats does not play on derision. He is too dramatic, even tragical in his vision of the future. Mark Twain is just depicting grotesqueness via exaggeration and it is not even derisive, just entertaining. Derision in this present particular case is directed at the Irish themselves and its aim is curative: let you laugh at yourselves and you may be able to change the clichés about you by being different, by reforming yourselves. The tiger is definitely an animal that cannot cultivate self-pity and tear-shedding pity-begging. But does it concern only the Irish?

Exaggeration then is not there to just make you laugh, or just to make you feel sad, nostalgic about the quaint past that is disappearing so fast we do not even have enough time to see its red rear lights. Exaggeration is there to amplify the message. It is a loudspeaker and a microphone to make sure you can hear and understand the message. It is high time to leave the past of colonization, frustration, humiliation that produced the over-famous starving, alcoholic, poor Irishman who believes his fate is to be a true Gaelic chap in this cultivated poverty, proud violence, even arrogant alcoholism and it is high time to develop the other Irishman, that of the future destiny that is hardly imaginable and definitely invisible in that fate: the destiny to be a champion long-jumper, a real conqueror of fear, riches (and treasure, that of Mael Duin?) and creativity.

Flann O'Brien then goes beyond Mael Duin. Mael Duin at the end of his voyage could only become a monk locked up in his religion and in his total resignation that life is god-given, both bright sides and dark sides, and that suffering is part of human life. Flann O'Brien is not locked up in a narrow religion that closes the sky but his positive message is to be found in the self-derision directed at the absurdity of any belief that considers the future is the same as the present which is the same as the past. Time never stops and then every moment is different and can be better, if we stop being locked up in the Murphy-Kelly syndrome: Murphy kills Kelly but transforms himself into Kelly and he will hand as Kelly for the murder of Murphy who has never been murdered.

The last image of this one-man show is that of a German locked up in ternary patterns and ends up killing himself in a ternary manner leaving a ternary suicide note. This German is anyone in the world who can only feel self-pity for their umbilical cords that were cut off so long ago. It is high time we learn how to walk and live without an umbilical cord, physical, ethical or cultural.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars thin stuff, February 11, 2007

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another reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Various Lives of Keats and Chapman and the Brother (Paperback)

If you loved Poor Mouth, you may well be seriously disappointed by this collection, which consists of several very short sketches, each ending in an outrageous pun. The pun would be funny in a pub to someone who had drink taken, but not here.