Have you heard of Flann O' Brien?
Until fairly recently, neither had I. O' Brien was one of the many pen-names used by Irish wit, raconteur, writer and civil servant Brian O' Nolan, also writing as An Broc and Myles na gCopaleen. I was browsing, as one does every so often, the bookshelves in Foyles and my eye was caught by a very improbable title: At Swim Two Birds. I opened it at random and read a paragraph. Then another one. And I didn't understand where the author was coming from - the book had been published in 1939, and here I was reading a post-modern novel mixing several levels of reading, authorship and meta-authorship and recycled characters coming already formed from Irish folklore and popular literature, plus an unhealthy dose of existential ennui drowned in pints of stout in various pubs around Dublin.
The surprises come from the first page:
"A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings:
Examples of three separate openings - the first: The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. [...]
The second opening:
There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr John McFurriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered - he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with memory but without a personal experience to account for it [...]
The third opening:
Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse's belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal [...]
I hurt a tooth in the corner of my jaw with a lump of the crust I was eating. This recalled me to the perception of my surroundings. "
And so we continue all along the book, learning of the art of giving birth through purely aesthetic means, and about the dangers of being able to control your characters only when awake, and what unhappy characters might do to their originators. To this end, I was reminded by Raymond Queneau's Flight of Icarus where we have characters running away from the pages of the unfinished novels they are supposed to inhabit. However, I think it's rather a case of great minds thinking alike, since Queneau's book was published in 1968 and I am not sure he had access to O' Brien's work.
Having enjoyed this book greatly, I looked for other works by O' Brien, and soon found The Third Policeman, a novel about finding your heart's desire and about bicylces, and The Poor Mouth (published originally in Irish as An Béal Bocht), about seeking and finding true poverty.
I also found out that, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O' Nolan was one of the most read Irish journalists, his column Cruiskeen Lawn appearing in the Irish Times from 1940 to 1966. Let's leave Mr Tommy Tiernan give you a short reading: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT2YiDNHGyU
More about Flann O' Brien here: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/12/flannobrien
Until fairly recently, neither had I. O' Brien was one of the many pen-names used by Irish wit, raconteur, writer and civil servant Brian O' Nolan, also writing as An Broc and Myles na gCopaleen. I was browsing, as one does every so often, the bookshelves in Foyles and my eye was caught by a very improbable title: At Swim Two Birds. I opened it at random and read a paragraph. Then another one. And I didn't understand where the author was coming from - the book had been published in 1939, and here I was reading a post-modern novel mixing several levels of reading, authorship and meta-authorship and recycled characters coming already formed from Irish folklore and popular literature, plus an unhealthy dose of existential ennui drowned in pints of stout in various pubs around Dublin.
The surprises come from the first page:
"A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings:
Examples of three separate openings - the first: The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. [...]
The second opening:
There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr John McFurriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered - he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with memory but without a personal experience to account for it [...]
The third opening:
Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse's belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal [...]
I hurt a tooth in the corner of my jaw with a lump of the crust I was eating. This recalled me to the perception of my surroundings. "
And so we continue all along the book, learning of the art of giving birth through purely aesthetic means, and about the dangers of being able to control your characters only when awake, and what unhappy characters might do to their originators. To this end, I was reminded by Raymond Queneau's Flight of Icarus where we have characters running away from the pages of the unfinished novels they are supposed to inhabit. However, I think it's rather a case of great minds thinking alike, since Queneau's book was published in 1968 and I am not sure he had access to O' Brien's work.
Having enjoyed this book greatly, I looked for other works by O' Brien, and soon found The Third Policeman, a novel about finding your heart's desire and about bicylces, and The Poor Mouth (published originally in Irish as An Béal Bocht), about seeking and finding true poverty.
I also found out that, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O' Nolan was one of the most read Irish journalists, his column Cruiskeen Lawn appearing in the Irish Times from 1940 to 1966. Let's leave Mr Tommy Tiernan give you a short reading: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT2YiDNHGyU
More about Flann O' Brien here: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/12/flannobrien
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