As I may have noted before, I make a lot of trips to the
Daedalus Books Warehouse in the anonymous business park wastelands of Columbia, MD. You can't really go there looking for anything specific as their stock is largely dependent on which publishers' eyes were bigger than their stomachs. There's always at least three things I want there, I just have to spend time browsing, but for $3-4 a pop, it's worth it. That much browsing can give you a false sense of an author's popularity. "Have I actually heard of this guy or have I just been seeing his unwanted overstock here for the past three years?"
I'd been seeing Flann O'Brien's novels there for a few years before I picked up the big book project's own
Complete Novels last year. After seeing unwanted copies of
The Third Policeman and
The Poor Mouth I made a point of looking
Flann up on Wikipedia. I was intrigued enough by the multiple super-Irishy pen names to pick up the
Complete Novels on my next visit. I also noticed that there was an
entire publisher named after his novel,
The Dalkey Archive.
These novels were fitting follow-ups to
Ulysses in my year of potato-eatin' readin'.
Obama fave Joseph O'Neill awarded O'Brien the bronze medal in Irish Lit (Gold, Silver) in an excellent
Atlantic Monthly reexamination. Apparently the dude had a tough time of it during his life and never even got
The Third Policeman, his second (an my favorite of his) novels published.
So over a couple weeks of
federal negotiated rule-making I was able to go through the works of one of his pseudonyms. The novels broke down like so:
At Swim-Two-Birds - Reeeeeeeeally experimental. Funny in parts, but I don't think I got it. Involves several layers of books within books. Too much of a "looking into opposite mirrors" experience at times. It also includes a quote that has been proven wrong by
a certain movie and Ireland's Olympic medal counts: "With all his faults and by God he has plenty, the Irishman can jump. By God he can jump. That's one thing the Irish race is honoured for no matter where it goes or where you find it - jumping. The world looks up to us there." I liked it, but not as much as...
The Third Policeman - Very funny and much more focused. Involves a gag in which an Irish-equivalent,
Hot Fuzz,
country policeman purports his theory that people ride bicycles so much that they exchange molecules and at a certain point people can become more than 50% bicycle and be dangerous to society.
The Poor Mouth - Originally written in Irish and published under O'Brien/O'Nolan's
other pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. A good, short parody of Irish sentimentality. Poor Frank McCourt wouldn't have a career if more people thought this book was funny.
The Hard Life - A coming-of-age/bildungsroman story that takes clearer, better shots at Catholicism than
A Portrait of the Artist.... I might have enjoyed this more because I read it after attending an awful Catholic wedding service.
The Dalkey Archive - Supposedly Flann's worst. I liked it mostly because it rehashes the crazy bicycle story from the (as then unpublished)
The Third Policeman and because James Joyce appears as a character who never actually died and forgets that he wrote
Ulysses.
It's kind of a given that a guy who came up with two good pseudonyms would have some great (and Irish-tastic) character names. Here are but a few:
- Pooka MacPhellimey
- Sgt. Pluck
- Policeman MacCruekeen
- Father Fahrt (har har har)
- Finnbarr and his brother, Manus
- McGettigan
- Sgt. Fottrell
God this picture kicks ass:
Most recently read and most impossible to summarize, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Structurally it's similar to Barth's Sot-Weed Factor in that it's a post-modern novel written in an 18th century style. Pynchon went all out with random capitalization and olde-tyme spellings. Overall, it's a good book about friendship through shared circumstances, but it shines in its craziness. The book includes a talking dog and a mechanical duck that carries grudges. It also includes these two ridiculous anachronisms:
