Scenes from a Receding Past

by Aidan Higgins

Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan--"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning"--Scenes from a Receding Past constructs the adolescence and early adulthood of Dan Ruttle out of a variety of scenes and reminiscences about his life in Ireland, his time in a Catholic school, his first sexual experiences, and his brother's mental breakdown. The second half of the book centers around his relationship with his future wife Olivia, her past, and her former lovers. Calling to mind Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Dan Ruttle's love-hate relationship with Ireland and the stylistic innovations employed by Higgins, Scenes from a Receding Past is a masterpiece from one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers.

Genres: Fiction

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Aidan Higgins was an Irish writer. He wrote short stories, travel pieces, radio drama and novels.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Aidan Higgins’s fourth novel is a trial run for the three volumes of lauded autobiography he would publish in the ‘90s and ‘00s, a fictional whirlwind through memory, reinventing and reconstructing pivotal scenes from childhood and young adulthood in a blitz of flouncily descriptive staccato sentences, like a series of extremely literary brain-farts coming in sequence of furious recall. The act of autobiography, as Christine Brooke-Rose ably punned, is more like the act of autobifography, as the memory is an utterly unreliable, seriously disreputable narrator, making novels like this a more honest effort at truth than a straightforward memoir. The stylistic swagger and erudition of the novel is impressive, although the tone is clinically removed from the various family miseries that befall the narrator-author.