Customer Reviews

At Swim-Two-Birds

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Flann's book is about as close to a perfect novel as you're likely to find. It is a masterpiece of style and composition. It has great characters vividly rendered. And it "breaks the ice" within us, as Kafka insisted all great art do. It's also very, very funny.

This book delivers so much pleasure that I find it impossible to remain physically still while reading it. It makes me wriggle.

Trying to describe this one long joke of a novel is a bit like retelling someone else's disjointed dream with Chinese sign language. Aach, why bother. Suffice to say, the wee man of many monikers made his reputation with this book, getting lumped in with those other tricksters of narrative form, some of them his countrymen in self-imposed exile. With multiple openings, this madcap book discards quare old conventions like consistent point of view and plot. A Dublin student goes mouldy in his bedroom while characters rebel against their slumbering creator and the barmy Sweeney hops from tree to tree. Horseman, if you're looking for linear progression, pass by. All clever parody of Irish literature and mythology aside, the novel has a reassuring warmth. The student, branded a dozey ne'er-do-well by his blockhead uncle, has a small but delightful triumph near the end that makes his part in O'Brien's tangled web particularly satisfying. A novel to be read when whimsical, when life has lost its vim and bubble.

This just might be the funniest book of the 20th century. I have seen this book and read it and . . . do you know what I'm going to tell you, I have loved this book. Do you understand what I am saying? Now you go read your chapter 12 of Ulysses and many other passages that might incriminate my good author here by the proof of that book's very burdensome influence which became like a terrible complex for the man who became after the writing of this book the Dublin columnist known as Myles na Gopaleen but was at this time still the man of imagination, Flann O'Brien . . . and you come back here, with all your expectations about first novels and incomprehensible, overindulgent spaghetti-messes of plots . . . and try to tell me that every aspect, those and all the others, one might apply to this type of book that could have been fatal faults are here made in its favor by the undeniable force of its whole, a power that cannot be denied in the same way that a frigging cloud cannot be denied to resemble a plate of hot mashed potatoes or what-you-will . . . you come back here and try to tell yourself that you didn't like it . . . and then I will ask you to kindly try to read it again, this time with your skull-boned eyes open. P.S. This is a much better book than The Third Policeman.

I have read few books which have delighted me as much as At Swim-Two-Birds..I will not do the book a disservice by attempting to summarize the plot. This must be one of the most original debut novels ever written; its form is like that of nothing else I've read, and is used with great success for the purpose of, among other things, parody. The facility the author displays with language is astonishing and unsurpassed; he has a perfect `ear' for the language, and combines it with brilliant comic invention, which pervades the structure and scaffolding of the book down to the prose. In my opinion, this is definitely his masterpiece in English; and certainly one of the greatest novels in the language.

A wonderful ride through the author's (and author's author's and author's author's author's) grasp of reality and lack thereof. Possibly not as great as The Third Policeman, but quite different. The juxtaposition of the college student's rowdiness with psuedo-intellectual posturings and refreshing recreations of Irish mythos are combined into a remarkably funny pastiche.

...you know a bit about Irish literary history and are willing to put up with a very, um, fractured plot. Unless you know about, for example, the story of the Madness of King Sweeney, the book might not work as well for you. However, my main reason in writing this is to point out something about the editorial review:

This book was NOT published a year before Ulysses. That's silly. Ulysses had been published over 20 years previously, I think. Thank you.

When I was reading this book, people would ask me what it was about. I told them it was indescribable, that I could only sum it up with one word, "dee-licious"! Some of the word-play delightfully trips off of your tongue, which I found fun, and the story moves along so fast that there isn't time to relay what is happening. This is an absolutely brilliant, funny book. I will never give up my copy!

This is, above all, a funny and playful book, playful with itself and the various conceits of fiction: the suspension of disbelief, the conventions of form, and the pretensions of rhetoric. Think of it as Pirandello meets the Marx Brothers.

"At Swim-Two-Birds" delights in rapid-fire wordplay and sophomoric experimentation (there are three alternative beginnings to the story). O'Brien succeeds in this bombastic flair partly because he doesn't take the literary enterprise--his own included--too seriously. He races along at a Groucho-like pace, only to slow down in wonderfully overwritten and overwrought scenes:

"Together the two strong men, joyous in the miracle of their health, put their bulging thews and the fine ripple of their sinews together at the arm-pits of the stricken king as they bent over him with their grunting red faces, their four heels sinking down in the turf of the jungle with the stress of their fine effort as they hoisted the madman to the tremulous support of his withered legs."

Indeed!

James Joyce praised O'Brien as "a real author, with the true comic spirit," and Graham Greene called this "a book in a thousand....in the line of Tristram Shandy and Ulysses." Like Joyce, O'Brien dazzles us with language and the sheer sound of words. The narrative is interrupted with rhetorical notes ("Name of figure of speech: Litotes [or Meiosis]"), populated by varying narrators "Tour de force by Brinsley, vocally interjected, being a comparable description in the Finn canon:," and buoyed by dialogue that variously recalls 30's screwball comedies,B-movie Westerns, and bad courtroom dramas.

O'Brien himself offers some literary "theory" that illustrates his comic sensibility and offers sly clues for his delighted (and maybe perplexed) reader: "...a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity," and, "Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before--usually said much better (Page 33)." Flann O'Brien's command of--and upending of--narrative forms, and the hilarity of his farce make this an essential addition to any comic library. Then again, I could be wrong.

(Buy it!)

It has been brought to my attention that some blagard representing himself as the reader from Winston-Salem has been on here with a great deal to say for himself. In the words of the great man himself (MnagC) this sort of thing has gone too far. (Murmurs of approval from the torch bearing hoard of villagers a.k.a. the Plain People of Ireland.) I am the real reader (a singularity) from Winston-Salem and I intend to stay this way. I will have the Civic Guards look into this matter of virtual impersonation.

By the way, this book deserves a full 5 stars (although the German professor described on the last page who made his life a thing of triads would have had some difficulty with such a quintet) and should not be reviewed by people who would put it about that they have read "Finnegan's Wake".