At Swim-Two-Birds

Rating:
Summary: Quare Bit of Bother
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: the sun is not yellow, it's chicken
Review: Very little can be added to what this novel's enthusiastic fanbase has already stated. But I will add that despite being incredibly whimsical, trafficing in fallacious logic and pseudo-intellectualism and adhering to laws of physics which are impossible to explain or set down, this book is somehow intensely hyper-realistic and some portions are just insanely beautiful. It's an incredibly energetic and endlessly playful pop song, in a way-and if you understand how to read a text like one might read a piece of music, giving in to a rhythm that is self creating and warms you over with its stylistics, that explains its own parallel world to you with an idiosyncratic language of motion and tonality, that begs intense celebration and rereading, you will be a more available audience for this book. Watch for Flann's scrupulous attention to detail regarding musical functions-I think that they beg a further understanding of how this book moves and relates to its audience.