Yeats Is Dead! A Mystery by 15 Irish Writers

Rating:
Summary: And a good thing to, as they buried him and all.
Review: Fifteen Irish writers take their turn (one chapter each) at ratcheting up the silliness while developing a story centered on the discovery of James Joyce's final unpublished work. Organized crime, organized crime fighters, and Irish society in general take on a generous helping of ribbing while each author does his or her best to out do the previous. What is funny is how many of the authors take what was written before and then throw in a bizarre twist. Or just simply kill off a character nurtured and developed by a previous writer. One poor soul about halfway through makes some attempt at stabilizing the story, only to be completely blown out of the water by the next. And yet at the same time, a couple of gags presented near the beginning of the book find their way into every chapter up to the end.

All in all it is a very fun collection of work, and edifying as well in the sense that the reader may find a new author or two to try out after putting this one down. Because of the nature of this type of work, naturally the writing styles and quality vary greatly from one chapter to the next. This fact in itself will disturb the reader that attempts to take the novel too seriously. Although why this feat is even attempted when you are reading about a ginger haired young Irishman who likes to speak in American ghetto slang is beyond me.

Rating:
Summary: Wild ride!
Review: The first few pages almost turned me off because I thought it was a run-of-the mill mystery. But then, after leafing through the succeeding pages, I got a glimpse of Kafkaesque characters in the two stupid cops, who are arguing, philosophically and pathetically, whether the dead man, Tommy Reynolds, was already dead before one of them shot him. I got hooked. I couldn't stop turning the pages until I got acquianted with a network of psychotics and maniacs. Although each author kills more people in every succeeding chapter, the taste of violence is somehow offset by the authors' wits and creativity that revealed the authors' intention to turn Yeats is Dead into a literary piece rather than an ordinary mystery. In Yeats is dead, 15 Irish authors created their dream world, where every living person is a literati. Consider these: a garbage collector, who reveals his aversion to the language of Mills and Boon; a cop who writes poetry; drunken old bums who can appreciate the value of James Joyce's missing manuscripts; and crime bosses who can enumerate a long list of Irish authors. This is a wild and fun read!

Rating:
Summary: "Yeats is dead?" O yes.
Review: Well, of course he is; in fact, has been for some 60 years now. But that's not the point. The point is, or at least seems to be, that "Yeats Is Dead!" is the unpublished last work of the doyen of Irish literature himself, James Joyce. Or is it? Or are the 600 pages of undecipherable scribble that are at the center of this book's wild ride really the chemical formula for a new anti-ageing skin cream? Or something else entirely? In short, what is the point of the chase; or put differently: Is there any point at all?

"Yeats Is Dead!" is the literary version of a midrange relay race; or of that party game in which a story is built one word or one sentence at a time, added in turns by each of the participants, often with hilarious results, particularly if the players abandon the idea of creating a story that actually makes sense and take off in whatever direction their fancy takes them. Here, the participants are fifteen Irish writers of varying calibers with a very well-developed sense of humor, who each get to add one chapter to the story, and the results are hilarious indeed. Bodies fall like flies, allusions to Joyce abound, and Irish cliches are jiggled by the dozen, from "O Danny Boy" (here: in a Rasta version) to bars serving whiskey and very strangely named drinks indeed, and accents from working class Dublin to Limerick and beyond. (And can there possibly be a more Irish-sounding name than Grainne O'Kelly?) Even one of Ireland's football - i.e., soccer - heroes, ex-midfielder turned sports journalist Eamon Dunphy (yes, that one) gets his fair share of shots from the authors' collective hips.

The book follows the example of the two short story collections "Finbar's Hotel" and "Lady's Night at Finbar's Hotel," likewise collaborative efforts by some of modern Ireland's best-known authors. Unlike those two collections, however, "Yeats Is Dead!" discloses the authors of the individual chapters; and unlike them, it also pretends not to contain several loosely-connected short stories but one continuous, novel-length storyline - for whatever that's worth, though, given the book's general premise and the differing styles and approaches of its writers. Contributors include acclaimed writers Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt, Gene Kerrigan, Anthony Cronin and Joseph O'Connor (who also served as the book's editor), playwrights Conor McPherson and Gerard Stembridge, comedian Owen O'Neill, sports writer Tom Humphries, and others. Roddy Doyle gets to deliver the opening salvo, which is of course a hard act to follow - personally, I would rather have seen him write the final chapter; and I would also have loved to see a contribution from the editor (and co-contributor) of "Finbar's Hotel," Dermot Bolger. But from the murder by heart attack which starts it all to the surviving cast members' final conclave in (where else?) a bar in County Limerick, this is one great frolicking literary tour de force. It's not great literature; nor does it pretend to be ... just fifteen Irish writers poking fun at themselves, their country and the mystery genre, and they had me laughing out loud a lot in the process. Definitely. O yes.