The Aran Islands (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Lively Reading
Review: The search for authentic experiences is regarded as an important theme in postmodernism. John Millington Synge's book demonstrates that this quest for authenticity has been an important part of cultural inquiry for a long time. This wonderful book was written almost one hundred years ago, but it reads like a contemporary ethnographic inquiry. He provides vivid descriptions of daily life and wonderful presentations of the folklore of the Aran Islands. The book is primarily descriptive, but there are interesting textures and conclusions throughout Synge's writing. I would recommend reading this book and then watching Flaherty's film "Man of Aran." Follow up that visual feast with Stoney's "The Making of the Myth." To complete your excursion, top things off with a reading of Synge's "Playboy of the Western World" and "Riders to the Sea," two fine plays that he set on the Aran Islands. The stories, descriptions, and textures within Synge's book will become very clear when you're finished.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth giving it a chance
Review: This book definitely starts slowly, and initially one may be put off by a sense that Synge is trying to adopt an appropriate voice and is uncertain where he fits in with the picture. Give it time, however, and both the description of the time and place, and finally Synge's place in it, become really interesting. He was young but also something of an invalid at the time, and the perspective varies movingly and thought-provokingly, from total outsider to partial insider, thanks to huge but under-stated effort on the part of Synge, driven by both a desparate urge to amount to something in his short life, and a wistful desire to partake of a "normal" life that would elude him.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth giving it a chance
Review: This book definitely starts slowly, and initially one may be put off by a sense that Synge is trying to adopt an appropriate voice and is uncertain where he fits in with the picture. Give it time, however, and both the description of the time and place, and finally Synge's place in it, become really interesting. He was young but also something of an invalid at the time, and the perspective varies movingly and thought-provokingly, from total outsider to partial insider, thanks to huge but under-stated effort on the part of Synge, driven by both a desparate urge to amount to something in his short life, and a wistful desire to partake of a "normal" life that would elude him.