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Apocalypses
Two novellas by an author who has earned a reputation for original and imaginative writing, with a spark-bladed humour that is unlike anything ever have You been Sandaliotis?The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney
354 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 1977
3 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
About the author
R.A. Lafferty
542 books313 followersRaphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 17, 2021
"The Captain Beefheart of American Literature"
....is how someone on twitter described Lafferty.
After reading this book (which, fittingly for Lafferty, is actually two books) I have to say this is a perfect appellation. I spent a lot of the time I was reading it/them in a state of bewilderment, but also I can't think of any books I've read since Douglas Adams that were as laugh-out-loud funny. Somehow he describes scenes of impossible absurdity so vividly that I could actually visualize them, while simultaneously shaking my head in disbelief.
Sometimes, he seems to be headed towards making a very profound philosophical point about the nature of time and reality, but then derails it with an offhand quip. Kinda like a Zen koan. Don't think for a second you are going to wrap your mind around this.
I didn't give it an enthusiastic 5 stars because it took me so long to finish, and especially it took me a long time to get into the second story. But I'm thrilled to have been introduced to this mind bending mind, and I'm looking forward to reading more and more.
....is how someone on twitter described Lafferty.
After reading this book (which, fittingly for Lafferty, is actually two books) I have to say this is a perfect appellation. I spent a lot of the time I was reading it/them in a state of bewilderment, but also I can't think of any books I've read since Douglas Adams that were as laugh-out-loud funny. Somehow he describes scenes of impossible absurdity so vividly that I could actually visualize them, while simultaneously shaking my head in disbelief.
Sometimes, he seems to be headed towards making a very profound philosophical point about the nature of time and reality, but then derails it with an offhand quip. Kinda like a Zen koan. Don't think for a second you are going to wrap your mind around this.
I didn't give it an enthusiastic 5 stars because it took me so long to finish, and especially it took me a long time to get into the second story. But I'm thrilled to have been introduced to this mind bending mind, and I'm looking forward to reading more and more.
March 29, 2023
This is a review of The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, the second of two short novels contained within this book. I read and liked the other one (Where Have You Been Sandaliotis, which is by the same author and also deals directly with reality and forgery but is otherwise unrelated), but it’s been years.
So anyways, I read this once before and I still got two chapters in and was wondering what on earth I was reading. It’s unlike anything else I’ve read, or at least anything that isn’t by Lafferty.
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is something of an epistolary novel, containing 11 sections consisting of various material toward a biography of the titular character—who either opened the clanging gates of hell or tried to close them—with an introduction and conclusion framing a series of letters, academic articles, cultural criticisms, reports from private investigators, and reconstructed timelines of Sweeny’s world.
Basically the only thing I recalled from my first read is the premise: an idyllic and utopian 20th century, in which the world wars (I, II, and III) were not real events but merely operas composed by Sweeny. Except that as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly less clear whether the wars were in fact history or fiction.
But if that’s the premise and main thrust of the story, it doesn’t come in any sort of clear narrative. We open with a collection of wooly tales about Sweeny’s life and childhood, and then a faux academic article on a mathematical equation that proves Sweeny will destroy the world, which sets a cult of world-saving mathematicians on a quest to destroy Sweeny first. From there, we have murders and ghost stories and interludes with angels and/or demons and/or something else entirely, and a whole lot of social commentary that feels remarkably prescient of the year 2023.
None of it really feels like it’s supposed to come together and make sense—I’m not sure I can say whether Sweeny’s fictions were fictions or facts—but that doesn’t mean that the ride isn’t a whole lot of fun, once you move past the introductory material and into the meat of the novel. Lafferty has brilliant turns of phrase every few pages, bizarre would-be murderers who persist beyond the grave, lots of philosophizing, and incredible commentary on cultural responses to the world’s great moral horrors, that doesn’t feel preachy because it’s just too weird and sometimes brilliant to be a sermon.
If you’re new to Lafferty, I wouldn’t start here. His short stories are much easier to get ahold of, and other novels like the comic Odyssey-retelling Space Chantey or the brilliant tale of the 19th century Choctaw in Okla Hannali, are much easier to follow. But if you want some weird alt history that possibly involves memeing our way to the apocalypse and feels like fodder for a dissertation more than a book review? Well, give The Three Armageddons a try. It has some slow and even mystifying pieces, but there’s enough brilliance there to be worth the price of admission (especially with this collection being so cheap and easy to find in secondhand stores).
First impression: 17/20. Full(?) review to come at www.tarvolon.com
So anyways, I read this once before and I still got two chapters in and was wondering what on earth I was reading. It’s unlike anything else I’ve read, or at least anything that isn’t by Lafferty.
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is something of an epistolary novel, containing 11 sections consisting of various material toward a biography of the titular character—who either opened the clanging gates of hell or tried to close them—with an introduction and conclusion framing a series of letters, academic articles, cultural criticisms, reports from private investigators, and reconstructed timelines of Sweeny’s world.
Basically the only thing I recalled from my first read is the premise: an idyllic and utopian 20th century, in which the world wars (I, II, and III) were not real events but merely operas composed by Sweeny. Except that as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly less clear whether the wars were in fact history or fiction.
But if that’s the premise and main thrust of the story, it doesn’t come in any sort of clear narrative. We open with a collection of wooly tales about Sweeny’s life and childhood, and then a faux academic article on a mathematical equation that proves Sweeny will destroy the world, which sets a cult of world-saving mathematicians on a quest to destroy Sweeny first. From there, we have murders and ghost stories and interludes with angels and/or demons and/or something else entirely, and a whole lot of social commentary that feels remarkably prescient of the year 2023.
None of it really feels like it’s supposed to come together and make sense—I’m not sure I can say whether Sweeny’s fictions were fictions or facts—but that doesn’t mean that the ride isn’t a whole lot of fun, once you move past the introductory material and into the meat of the novel. Lafferty has brilliant turns of phrase every few pages, bizarre would-be murderers who persist beyond the grave, lots of philosophizing, and incredible commentary on cultural responses to the world’s great moral horrors, that doesn’t feel preachy because it’s just too weird and sometimes brilliant to be a sermon.
If you’re new to Lafferty, I wouldn’t start here. His short stories are much easier to get ahold of, and other novels like the comic Odyssey-retelling Space Chantey or the brilliant tale of the 19th century Choctaw in Okla Hannali, are much easier to follow. But if you want some weird alt history that possibly involves memeing our way to the apocalypse and feels like fodder for a dissertation more than a book review? Well, give The Three Armageddons a try. It has some slow and even mystifying pieces, but there’s enough brilliance there to be worth the price of admission (especially with this collection being so cheap and easy to find in secondhand stores).
First impression: 17/20. Full(?) review to come at www.tarvolon.com
April 9, 2019
R.A. Lafferty has been a favorite since 1968, when I first discovered his short stories in scifi anthologies. I used to have multiple copies of 900 Grandmothers that I gave away to friends. His novels, beginning with Past Master and Fourth Mansions, have always bewildered me, though Space Chantey was a pretty straight-forward rendering of the Odyssey into Lafferty’s rollicking Gaelic cadences, and Okla Hannali is a wonderful tall-tale rendering of the history of the American Indian. This volume’s two short novels are quite different from one another, but each vexed me in different ways as not being enough of the Lafferty whose essence is best distilled/sampled in his short stories.
Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? is the story of detective/secret agent who may or may not be a duplicate of himself who has no memory of why he is on a mission to save Monaco from being stolen. The story entails a cabal of aliens (or are they off-world humans?) who create a false construct of a forgotten island in order to scam money and real estate (land). Much of the novel is about the nature of what is real and how the real can be simulated. The novel ends without any real resolution to the enigmas Lafferty poses, whether dramatic or ontological/metaphysical or aesthetic. There’s a chipper sprightliness to the story, and when it appears to be gaining some traction, it swerves off on in another direction. At the conclusion one is left with the sense that one has tried to lift a sandcastle from the ground, and there is nothing to show, only sand trickling through one’s fingers.
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is a more serious treatment of what constitutes the social/historical reality we participate in, presented as a mass of raw and diverse source materials for the unwritten biography of composer Enniscorthy Sweeny. What we become aware of is that Sweeny is an extraordinary individual who somehow is able to have anything he wishes, even alter events/history. He re-conjures 20th century history so that it becomes the golden century where everyone prospers, and the events of WWI, the Depression, and WWII are tucked away into his massively entertaining and popular operas, which he calls Armaggedons I, II, and III. There is a small faction of intellectuals that believe his actions will be disastrous for humankind, and they seek to kill him, hence much of his life is an avoidance of assassination, even as he re-jiggers events to save humanity from its worst excesses. Also explored is the idea of some great unconscious in everyone that recognizes that the events which Sweeny has aestheticized have somehow occurred; and as a corollary, there is a small minority that “knows” they have participated in and survived those events.
Both novels offer readers something other than “real” characters engaging in any sort of recognizable drama, and each in its way is a fabulous puzzle—one unraveling even as its winding up, the other a jigsaw of peculiar pieces—both offering new perspectives on what constitutes our notions of reality.
Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? is the story of detective/secret agent who may or may not be a duplicate of himself who has no memory of why he is on a mission to save Monaco from being stolen. The story entails a cabal of aliens (or are they off-world humans?) who create a false construct of a forgotten island in order to scam money and real estate (land). Much of the novel is about the nature of what is real and how the real can be simulated. The novel ends without any real resolution to the enigmas Lafferty poses, whether dramatic or ontological/metaphysical or aesthetic. There’s a chipper sprightliness to the story, and when it appears to be gaining some traction, it swerves off on in another direction. At the conclusion one is left with the sense that one has tried to lift a sandcastle from the ground, and there is nothing to show, only sand trickling through one’s fingers.
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is a more serious treatment of what constitutes the social/historical reality we participate in, presented as a mass of raw and diverse source materials for the unwritten biography of composer Enniscorthy Sweeny. What we become aware of is that Sweeny is an extraordinary individual who somehow is able to have anything he wishes, even alter events/history. He re-conjures 20th century history so that it becomes the golden century where everyone prospers, and the events of WWI, the Depression, and WWII are tucked away into his massively entertaining and popular operas, which he calls Armaggedons I, II, and III. There is a small faction of intellectuals that believe his actions will be disastrous for humankind, and they seek to kill him, hence much of his life is an avoidance of assassination, even as he re-jiggers events to save humanity from its worst excesses. Also explored is the idea of some great unconscious in everyone that recognizes that the events which Sweeny has aestheticized have somehow occurred; and as a corollary, there is a small minority that “knows” they have participated in and survived those events.
Both novels offer readers something other than “real” characters engaging in any sort of recognizable drama, and each in its way is a fabulous puzzle—one unraveling even as its winding up, the other a jigsaw of peculiar pieces—both offering new perspectives on what constitutes our notions of reality.
October 29, 2024
B+/A-
1st novella: B+/A-
2nd novella: B+/A-
There’s a lot to like, even love, about this book.
The first novella (Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?) is a pretty fun romp. Mysteries abound, and most are never fully resolved, although various theories about the mysteries are repeatedly explored. My main theory about this book is that the main character, the world’s best detective / secret agent, is dead and is exploring a sort of purgatorial afterlife. Specifically, he died in Marseilles before the start of the novel, in a showdown with a criminal that is never fully set down on paper but is referred to time and again by the main character. This would of course explain why the main character (whose POV we never stray from) doesn’t remember anything beyond what occurs during the opening pages of the book, and why he feels he is friends with and/or knows all these characters who he repeatedly realizes he has seemingly never met before. I did enjoy this one a lot but the overlong monologues and lack of resolution at the end dropped down my score for it a bit.
As you can see from the grades at the top of this review, I enjoyed the second novella (The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy (Something… I forget his last name and I’m at work so I can’t look it up) about as much as I enjoyed the first one. Although this one is much less focused on just one character and jumps around in the fictional timeline a lot more, it is about as experimental as the first one. I particularly enjoyed the fictional yet scientific articles, all the letters (especially the one to the pope), the description of the main character’s boxing match, and the ending of the novella, which is appropriately absurd yet also apocalyptic. There were parts where I laughed out loud, which is rare for me (I found the detective repeatedly losing card games to the skeleton of his nemesis particularly hilarious). So… why not an A grade? I’m having trouble putting it into words… as virtuosic as the book is, I did sometimes find it difficult to find a thru line between all the disparate elements. Parts could’ve been cut and nothing would have been lost. There were things I had trouble pinning down, like how the main character’s book about secret agents played into the reality of the detectives hired to protect the main character and their opponents.
I also wish it wasn’t so nebulous whether or not the world wars happened… personally I think they just might’ve, and everyone might have forgotten about it / willingly moved on from it, in the way that Holocaust deniers try to deny that the Holocaust happened despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise. It’s definitely not definitive, though, which I also enjoyed. Speaking of, all that stuff about how 1% of the world believe that the main character’s Armageddons were real does remind me of the recent proliferation of conspiracy thinking across the globe; this aspect of the book was particularly prescient in that way.
I do think this second novella would make a killer miniseries. I kept picturing it in my head. It would definitely have to be avant-garde and would hardly be commercial but I think someone like Paul Thomas Anderson or even David Lynch could do it justice.
1st novella: B+/A-
2nd novella: B+/A-
There’s a lot to like, even love, about this book.
The first novella (Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?) is a pretty fun romp. Mysteries abound, and most are never fully resolved, although various theories about the mysteries are repeatedly explored. My main theory about this book is that the main character, the world’s best detective / secret agent, is dead and is exploring a sort of purgatorial afterlife. Specifically, he died in Marseilles before the start of the novel, in a showdown with a criminal that is never fully set down on paper but is referred to time and again by the main character. This would of course explain why the main character (whose POV we never stray from) doesn’t remember anything beyond what occurs during the opening pages of the book, and why he feels he is friends with and/or knows all these characters who he repeatedly realizes he has seemingly never met before. I did enjoy this one a lot but the overlong monologues and lack of resolution at the end dropped down my score for it a bit.
As you can see from the grades at the top of this review, I enjoyed the second novella (The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy (Something… I forget his last name and I’m at work so I can’t look it up) about as much as I enjoyed the first one. Although this one is much less focused on just one character and jumps around in the fictional timeline a lot more, it is about as experimental as the first one. I particularly enjoyed the fictional yet scientific articles, all the letters (especially the one to the pope), the description of the main character’s boxing match, and the ending of the novella, which is appropriately absurd yet also apocalyptic. There were parts where I laughed out loud, which is rare for me (I found the detective repeatedly losing card games to the skeleton of his nemesis particularly hilarious). So… why not an A grade? I’m having trouble putting it into words… as virtuosic as the book is, I did sometimes find it difficult to find a thru line between all the disparate elements. Parts could’ve been cut and nothing would have been lost. There were things I had trouble pinning down, like how the main character’s book about secret agents played into the reality of the detectives hired to protect the main character and their opponents.
I also wish it wasn’t so nebulous whether or not the world wars happened… personally I think they just might’ve, and everyone might have forgotten about it / willingly moved on from it, in the way that Holocaust deniers try to deny that the Holocaust happened despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise. It’s definitely not definitive, though, which I also enjoyed. Speaking of, all that stuff about how 1% of the world believe that the main character’s Armageddons were real does remind me of the recent proliferation of conspiracy thinking across the globe; this aspect of the book was particularly prescient in that way.
I do think this second novella would make a killer miniseries. I kept picturing it in my head. It would definitely have to be avant-garde and would hardly be commercial but I think someone like Paul Thomas Anderson or even David Lynch could do it justice.
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May 8, 2022It makes me think of multi-metaphorical apocalypses as suggested in the Adam McKay, David Sirota, and Ron 'We're an Empire Now' Suskind fabulous film "Don't Look UP" --- which includes at least 3 (and perhaps 4) apocalypses:
1.The fictional "Comet" that will be centuries away
2. The real "Global Climate Crisis" which could be in this century
3. The real, but highly camouflaged Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal & War-Starting EMPIRE, controlled by the ‘Ruling-Elite’, UHNWI, <0.003%ers, TCCers, arrogantly self-appointed "Masters of the Universe", and "Evil (not-so) Geniuses" [Kurt Andersen] which hides Empire behind their totally corrupted dual-party Vichy-facade of faux-democracy -- which is closing in fast within this decade.
4. Including any one of the major 'negative externality cost' explosive events, 'culture issue fights' and political divisions that could easily happen within this decade.
Alan MacDonald
1.The fictional "Comet" that will be centuries away
2. The real "Global Climate Crisis" which could be in this century
3. The real, but highly camouflaged Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal & War-Starting EMPIRE, controlled by the ‘Ruling-Elite’, UHNWI, <0.003%ers, TCCers, arrogantly self-appointed "Masters of the Universe", and "Evil (not-so) Geniuses" [Kurt Andersen] which hides Empire behind their totally corrupted dual-party Vichy-facade of faux-democracy -- which is closing in fast within this decade.
4. Including any one of the major 'negative externality cost' explosive events, 'culture issue fights' and political divisions that could easily happen within this decade.
Alan MacDonald
February 18, 2024
Can't rememebr who, but someone said a film can't be a dream within a dream because fiction is already a dream. This book feels like that. You have no grounding, the rules of the world aren't ever established and things happen and pass without any meaning.
August 14, 2024
I couldn’t finish this but I spent too much time reading it to not include it. Found this in a thrift store thought it looked cool. It’s not cool it’s actually very confusing
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