Rating: 
Summary: Not for Nationalists
Review: This book is an inside joke, and a classic at that. It is a grand send up of professional Irish (both at home and abroad). As example, consider a book written in Gaelic making sport of the Gaelic movement by means of a Gaelic festival. ( In ourland of the professional ethnic festival, this might serve as an effective antidote to "Irish" nights and "Scots weekends.") If you are inclined to romanticize villages of the old sod dominated by pigs, mud, rain and potatos, avoid this work. If you want a great classic of the jaundiced eye school of literature, read this book. By the way, some of the fun lies in the many parodies of Irish literary works in the assorted chapters; knowledge of the genre helps.
Rating: 
Summary: The Dampest Story I Ever Read
Review: This story was written in Gaelic and published in 1941. Patrick Power brought it into English in 1973. In spite of what seems a stellar job of translating, this is still a very foreign work. It is a story of the Gaels of the west of Ireland in an imaginary place where it always seems to be raining. The characters are rural poor who could not be called peasants, as they seem to raise but potatoes to fatten their pigs and keep themselves lean. Ralph Steadman's crude pencil illustrations do justice to the characters and their miserable climate and squalid habits. The outside world, in the form of city people whose first language is English, is just trouble. It might take the form of 'friends' of the Gaelic language who descend on them with puzzling and degrading demands, or of brutal schoolmasters with no Gaelic and no patience, or the law, which can pluck someone away and lock him up for years without justification, or even explanation. And always, there are the rain and the potatoes. The book has some funny scenes, I suppose, although the humor would be called black if the whole atmosphere were not so gray. From my distance and ignorance I can imagine that the effect of this book, once it was translated, was to embarrass all of Ireland about its Gaeltacht. The misery of the people seems unrelieved, and their reason for being but to preserve the Gaelic heritage in a kind of cultural zoo. I don't know the current status of that area, nor the effect the book had, but I am curious. The book takes place in an area not far from the Yeats country. In the Mythologies and the fairy tale collection, the peasantry seem not so bad off as here. I think I prefer Yeats.
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