Rating: 
Summary: A comedy classic of 20th Century Irish literature
Review: A madcap mix of Irish poetry, humor, tall tales, and multi-leveled meta-fiction, from its three openings to its three conclusions, O'Brien's comic masterpiece is an unlikely wedding of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Tristam Shandy that sets a new standard in Irish literature. The narrator of the more autobiographical sections is an apparently shiftless student and writer, who spends most of his time shut up in his foul-smelling room in his father's house, working on a novel that focuses on one Dermot Trellis. Trellis is a scrupulously moral man who is in turn writing a cautionary novel on the consequences of drinking, licentiousness, and other assorted wrongdoing. Whenever Trellis goes to sleep, his characters take on a life entirely their own, which they can live at their own discretion, so they ambitiously undertake to keep their creator drugged to secure their own freedom. There are further complications, with plenty of drinking, violence (more threatened and imagined, than real), and plenty of unforgettable conversations (particularly the long, confused colloquy between the demon and the fairy about the fate of humanity). The poems are also substantial parts of the story, and run the gamut in style from epic tale to drinking songs, but are almost invariably hysterical. The conclusions neatly tie up the loose ends in such a way as to strongly affirm traditional values, despite the characters' occasional moral lapses. This book is definitely Irish through and through, so readers who are put off by straight talking, hard drinking working men spouting absurdly bad poetry at every opportunity may wish to pass on this one. Also, the three-fold plot is sometimes a bit confusing, probably too much so for youngsters, although college age readers might enjoy its feeling of youthful exuberance and freedom. For the literary-minded, this is one of the comedic classics of the 20th Century, emphatically not to be missed.
Rating: 
Summary: High Comedy, Great Sentences, Powerfull Imagination
Review: Flann O'Brien never says anything outright, he is not direct, and he loves language. Sounds like exactly the type of author who would fade away in today's forever colloquial world. This is not the case. Flann O'Brien represents the funniest and least pretentious of what I call the holy Irish trinity of literature (Joyce, Beckett, O'Brien). This is his beggining, and as such is absolutely brilliant. The novel is post modern before post modernity, follows no set story, offers up brilliant ideas, and is very funny. O'Brien plays with language in a way that should make everyone jealous. His monologues about booze and it's effect are some of the most entertaining I have ever read. This is not a story, as we are used to. Similar to Joyces last two works it is the novel removed. You don't sit down and read this like a conventional novel, but, you can flip through it once you are familiar with it and it offers more re-readability than normal novels as a result. Flann O'Brien is endlessly imaginative, and his phrasing is a force to be reckoned with. This, along with L.F. Celine, is some of the best comedy in high art ever. If you like to laugh while you think, pick up Flann O'Brien........but I reccomend starting with The Thid Policeman, which is infinitely more readable, and cohesive. This is O'Briens only novel in this style, but a bold and funny experiment it was.
Rating:
Summary: Danger:Reading this book can seriously affect your passivity
Review: I first came across Flann O'Brien in the shape of his novel "The Poor Mouth". My University lecturer lent me the book suggesting that his treatment of the subject of the Irish Language might give me some insight on how to approach an essay on Joyce and Beckett's treatment of the same. Whilst it must be said I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, I could see little relationship between what I considered this O'Brien's coarse impudence, and the styles of the undisputed masters of Irish literature in English. My mistake was that I should have read "At Swim-Two-Birds" first. It is here, in his first novel, that O'Brien establishes his right to rank among the heavyweights; his intellectual highground from which he can descend mercilessly upon any batallion of false pride he damned well choses.Be warned. This is not a book for the lover of Jane Austen romance or a Dickens narrative. Rather, it demands parallels with the likes of Sterne for its sheer structural trickery - (imagine, if you will, the author who writes about an author who writes about an author whose characters revolt against his authorship, in taking over the narrative for themselves), -parallels with Beckett in the subversion of continuity and chronology of plot, and the frustrating of plot development with obsessive attention to mudane detail; parallels with Joyce in respect of the inclusion of historical classicism, here in the shape of the heroes of old Ireland, not least the mad king Sweeney whose inclusion in one of the fleeting strands of narrative rather tenuously povides the title for the novel itself. Even this torturous attempt at grasping some semblance of what "At Swim-Two-Birds" is about, does not even begin to scratch the surface of the richness of form, of content, of style contained within its too few pages. When you read this book, and you should if you love literature, take your time over every page; bask in its complications; marvel at its ingenuity; guffaw at its hilarity. Before you realise it, it'll be over, and you'll have read one of the most intriguing books ever written. Now what was it about, again?
Rating:
Summary: A book of a century
Review: Is Swift's A Tale of a Tub a great novel? Is Carlysle's Sartor Resartus a great novel? Is Tristram Shandy a great novel? Each of these works takes as its basis another form, whether the controversialist pamphlet, the philosophical treatise, or the biography, and comes out the other side with a new type of work, as well as a new work. These books occupy an originary and terminal position: they are the first and the last of their kind. For readers, these works are stones -- either the stones that become the foundations for understanding or the stones that drag them down. At Swim-Two-Birds takes as its foil the popular novel and the Irish renaissance myth discovery and the personal narrative. Why should a novel have only one beginning, O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Brian Nolan -- a man who got into university with a forged interview with John Joyce) asks? Why one ending? If, as some reviewers have suggested, you try to find the "structure," you're missing the point. Trying to mash this book into a novel's mold is misguided, and O'Brien will eventually make that clear. In fact, it is the story of a college student (fictional), who is writing a novel about a man (fictional) who is writing an Irish western (which cannot be). Additionally, the student's translation homework -- tales from the Dun Cow Book -- emerge in a full Lady Gregory parody and begin to interact with the other fictions, and the characters of the Irish Western themselves begin to resent their lots in life. The book plays games on so many levels that reading it the way one reads a novel is useless. This is not about information and straight lines, but about play -- sometimes rough and tumble and sometimes gentle. All of the narrators lie, by the way, and there is always one more frame of fiction beyond the one in action at the moment. Do not buy this book if you're intolerant of play. Do not buy this book if you look at books for "what happens." If, however, you're one of those who enjoys, instead of resents, reading milestones like Sartor Resartus or think that Italo Calvino is extremely sophisticated, this book (not novel) will be the greatest delight the 20th century can offer you.
Rating:
Summary: Postmodern before postmodern was cool!!
Review: Like the country music to which I allude, this book is not for all. It is something for the serious reader of experimental fiction. Note, I do not call it a novel. But, nor do I think of Finnegan's Wake as a novel. Flann O'Brien takes us through levels of levels which demonstrate the onionlike quality of what we call fiction. What/where is the real world? Fiction obviously comments on "real" events, for examlple Huck Finn tell us about the consequences of slavery. And after all in "The Agamemmnon" we hear the consequences of leaving the wife at home and concentrating on work. And the legends of Vulcan and Venus are a soap opera.
Still, when a character in a book creates characters who interact with him where is the line of reality? Borges gives us men who dream up other men. Woody Allen has charcters spending lazy afternoons at the Ritz with Madame Bovary, or Kugelmassing around the French countryside. Thus when a never get out of bed college student starts creating a world of imagination, the reader is in for an O'Brienesque spin.
It is obvious, I think, that I enjoyed this book, but I must include a warning. This is not a typical, standard, straight line plotted piece of fiction. It is not mere entertainment. If you want a tale of early twentieth century Dublin life, stick to Dubliners.
Rating:
Summary: Postmodern before postmodern was cool!!
Review: Like the country music to which I allude, this book is not for all. It is something for the serious reader of experimental fiction. Note, I do not call it a novel. But, nor do I think of Finnegan's Wake as a novel. Flann O'Brien takes us through levels of levels which demonstrate the onionlike quality of what we call fiction. What/where is the real world? Fiction obviously comments on "real" events, for examlple Huck Finn tell us about the consequences of slavery. And after all in "The Agamemmnon" we hear the consequences of leaving the wife at home and concentrating on work. And the legends of Vulcan and Venus are a soap opera.
Still, when a character in a book creates characters who interact with him where is the line of reality? Borges gives us men who dream up other men. Woody Allen has charcters spending lazy afternoons at the Ritz with Madame Bovary, or Kugelmassing around the French countryside. Thus when a never get out of bed college student starts creating a world of imagination, the reader is in for an O'Brienesque spin.
It is obvious, I think, that I enjoyed this book, but I must include a warning. This is not a typical, standard, straight line plotted piece of fiction. It is not mere entertainment. If you want a tale of early twentieth century Dublin life, stick to Dubliners.
Rating:
Summary: "Where will you find, these days, as joyous a throat?"
Review: 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. Mary Whipple
Rating: 
Summary: Garbled postmodern gobbledy-gook
Review: Thank you, Flann O'Brien/Brian o Nuallain, for reinforcing my passionate hatred of diffuse and disordered postmodern novels.
Rating:
Summary: One of the greats
Review: This book delivers so much pleasure that I find it impossible to remain physically still while reading it. It makes me wriggle.
Rating:
Summary: James Joyce liked it
Review: This is an enjoyable book although my favourite book by Flann O'Brien is 'The Dalkey Archive'. 'At Swim Two Birds' contains an excellent retelling of the King Sweeney myth - an Irish king/lord who was turned into a bird - which is where the book gets its title. It is mainly about a guy writing a book which writes itself. There are some excellent comic characters including the Pooka McPhellimey and some tiny Fairy. The Pooka behaves a bit like Freddy Krueger at times, and there is some 'dream violence' in this book which you might not like. The violence does seem a bit over the top in this area and shouldn't be taken seriously. Like much of the book although I thought the interaction between King Sweeney and a similarly afflicted English person was quite moving. In the past I have been very enthusiastic about this book.
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