[.ca] Modern Classics At Swim Two Birds (ISBN 0141182687)

From Amazon.com:
In a 1938 letter to a literary agent, Flann O'Brien described his first novel as "a very queer affair, unbearably queer perhaps." The book in question was At Swim-Two-Birds--and if we take queer to mean diabolically eccentric, then truer words were never spoken. The author, whose real name was Brian O'Nolan, had successfully stirred Gaelic legend, pulp fiction, and grimy Dublin realism into a hilarious cocktail. His mastery of modernist collage would have been an ample accomplishment itself. But O'Brien was also blessed with the writer's equivalent of perfect pitch, and in At Swim-Two-Birds he squeezes the maximum beauty and banality out of the English language. All he lacks is a tragic register, but he makes up for this deficit with a sense of comedy so acute that even James Joyce couldn't resist blurbing his fellow Dubliner's creation: "A really funny book." O'Brien labored mightily to make At Swim-Two-Birds summary-proof. But here, anyway, are the bare bones: the narrator, a university student, is writing a novel, which keeps morphing from mock-heroics to middlebrow naturalism. Meanwhile, one of his characters, Dermot Trellis, is himself writing a Western--an Irish Western--whose cowpunching protagonists will eventually throw off their fictional shackles and attempt to murder their creator. (Talk about the death of the author!) There's enough structural shenanigans here to keep an entire industry of critics afloat. Still, what matters most is the pungency of O'Brien's prose. His dialogue is agreeably grungy, his parodies delicious, and the narrator speaks in the sort of Jesuitical dialect that we associate with Samuel Beckett: That same afternoon I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan's licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being. In my thigh pocket I had eleven and eightpence in a weighty pendulum of mixed coins. Snippets, alas, do little justice to At Swim-Two-Birds, which relies heavily on cumulative chaos for its effect. Graham Greene, an early fan, compared its comic charge to "the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage." A half century after its initial appearance, O'Brien's masterpiece remains a gleeful read--a marvelous, inventive, and (last but not least) really funny book. --James Marcus

Quare Bit of Bother:
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.

One of the greats:
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.

O'BRIEN IS YOUR ONLY MAN:
This book delivers so much pleasure that I find it impossible to remain physically still while reading it. It makes me wriggle.

I was shocked by this book.:
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.

I was absolutely riveted:
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.