Product Description

Flann O'Brien's first novel is a brilliant impressionistic jumble of ideas, mythology and nonsense. Operating on many levels it incorporates plots within plots, giving full rein to O'Brien's dancing intellect and Celtic wit. The undergraduate narrator lives with his uncle in Dublin, drinks too much with his friends and invents stories peopled with hilarious and unlikely characters, one of whom, in a typical O'Brien conundrum, creates a means by which women can give birth to full-grown people. Flann O'Brien's blend of farce, satire and fantasy result in a remarkable, astonishingly innovative book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20785 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

"Where will you find, these days, as joyous a throat?"
Published in 1939, the same year that James Joyce published Finnegan's Wake, this novel was lauded in its day by Joyce himself, Samuel Beckett, and Graham Greene. A wild concoction involving a completely disjointed narrative, multiple points of view, farce, satire, and parody, this "novel" offers any student of Irish literature unlimited subject matter--and equally unlimited laughs. In this unique experiment with point of view, author Brian O'Nolan has used a pseudonym, Flann O'Brien, to tell the story of the novelist/student N, who tells his own story at the same time that he is writing a book about an invented novelist (Trellis), who is himself developing another story, while Tracy, still another author, tells a cowboy story and appears in the previous narratives.

Believing that characters should be born fully adult, one of the writers tries to keep them all together--in this case, at the Red Swan Hotel--so that he can keep track of them and keep them sober while he plans the narrative and writes and rewrites the beginning and ending of the novel. But even when the primary writer stops writing to go out with his friends, the characters of the other (invented) fictional writers continue to live on in the narrative and comment on writing. Before long, the reader is treated to essays on the nature of books vs. plays, polemics about the evils of drink, parodies of folk tales and ballads, a breathless wild west tale starring an Irish cowboy, the legends of Ireland, catalogues of sins, tales of magic and the supernatural, almanacs of folk wisdom and the cures for physical ills, and even the account of a trial--and that's just for starters.

Totally unique, O'Brien's creation defies the conventions, both of its day and of the present, and even the most jaded reader will be astonished at the unexpected twists the narrative takes. Steeped in the traditions of the Irish story-teller, O'Brien keeps those traditions alive by creating multiple narrators to tell multiple stories simultaneously, while also skewering the very traditions of which he--and they--are a part.

"A pint of porter is your only man"
Nature of this review: unsolicited, impertinent, self aggrandising.

Nature of the reviewer: benign, well lubricated, an admirer of our English tongue, part Irish and cursed thereby to all the ills of that unhappy and rain-sodden race, including the following: unreasoning pride; pathological loquacity associated with but not inseparable from a fondness for porter; a predilection for exaggeration (the mundane being otherwise intolerable); an inability to take anything seriously. Conclusion of the foregoing. At Swim-Two-Birds is unquestionably the best book on my shelves, constructed by one of the finest authors who ever graced the world. Mr O'Brien has exploded all the absurd and deceitful conventions of the fictioneer and put the pieces back together in a confection which must, from time to time, if you have any sense of humour whatsoever, have you laughing out loud. He wipes the ground with such pretenders to the throne of absurdity as Monsieur Alfred Jarry, and even with worthier contenders such as the excellent, late, and much lamented Mr B.S. Johnson. Be warned: if you read this, you will NOT be the same again.

A readable Finnegans Wake...
Quite simply, the funniest and cleverest book ever written. After the first glimpse, it takes at least three years to stop trying to write and talk O'Brienese.