Flann O'Brien
Flann Oâ€™Brien, along with Joyce and Beckett, is part of the holy trinity of modern Irish literature. His five novelsâ€“collected here in one volumeâ€“are a monument to his inspired lunacy and gleefully demented genius. ,Oâ€™Brienâ€™s masterpiece, ,At Swim-Two-Birds,, is an exuberant literary send-up and one of the funniest novels of the twentieth century. The novelâ€™s narrator is writing a novel about another man writing a novel, in a Celtic knot of interlocking stories. The riotous cast of characters includes figures â€œstolenâ€ from Gaelic legends, along with assorted students, fairies, ordinary Dubliners, and cowboys, some of whom try to break free of their authorâ€™s control and destroy him., The narrator of ,The Third Policeman,, who has forgotten his name, is a student of philosophy who has committed murder and wanders into a surreal hell where he encounters such oddities as the ghost of his victim, three policeman who experiment with space and time, and his own soul (who is named â€œJoeâ€)., ,The Poor Mouth,, a bleakly hilarious portrait of peasants in a village dominated by pigs, potatoes, and endless rain, is a giddy parody aimed at those who would romanticize Gaelic culture. A naÃ¯ve young orphan narrates the deadpan farce The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive is an outrageous satiric fantasy featuring a mad scientist who uses relativity to age his whiskey, a policeman who believes men can turn into bicycles, and an elderly, bar-tending James Joyce. With a new Introduction by Keith Donohue
Fiction,Classics,Cultural,Ireland,European Literature,Irish Literature,Literature,Humor,Novels,Literary Fiction,Surreal,Anthologies
The Complete Novels