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At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien








At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O

Nowadays, he is best known to us as Flann O'Brien, the soubriquet under which he published his novels, which range from the 1939 classic, At Swim-Two-Birds, to The Third Policeman, published posthumously in 1967. Sometimes he rendered it in Irish: Brían Ó Nualáinn. A chalk grazes his ear, fired from the blackboard where the teacher glowers.īut the glory of Brian O'Nolan is that he did pay attention, a precise delightful attention to words, and the fantastical whimsy -given leash - they will convey.īrian O'Nolan was his given name. Chapman's homer, do you see? - it's a pigeon. of course! He giggles nudges his deskmate to share the joke. And slowly a smile forms on the schoolboy's face. The pigeons troop to the windowsill, drooping under the shelter. Outside it is raining, as it always is for English class on Friday afternoons. The schoolboy is quite stupefied and who can blame him if once more his arms fold on his desk, he daydreams out the window. Three poems have we here: Homer's original Iliad, Chapman's rendering of this into English, and rounding it all off, on the page before us, Keats's wonderment on "first looking into" Chapman's translation. We begin with a traveller who tells of ancient bards, he briefly tries his hand at astronomy, till "silent, upon a peak" he's transformed to the "stout" conquistador. A giddy geography - we're swept from Apollo's Aegean to Cortez on his Pacific shore. A hotchpotch of names - Keats, Chapman, Homer: they bounce the reader through literature, through time. It is a true masterpiece of Irish literature.(Publisher).We "did" this poem at school - and even to my schoolboy's eyes it seemed an unlikely brew. Hilariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, opening up new possibilities for what can be done in fiction. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance.

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O

ABOUT THIS BOOK: A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. Previous owner's name in ink to inside of front cover.

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O

Toning to insides of front and rear covers. Wear to pictorial paper wraps with rubbing, toning, and creasing to covers, corners, and edges.










At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien