Reading 1001 discussion

Rating: 4 Stars
Read: April 2017

This is a funny and highly creative book. It is unlike anything I have read previously. It is basically a novelist writing about a novelist who is writing about a novelist. It really doesn't always make a whole lot of sense, but it is fun to read all the same. Great ending, too. I still liked The Third Policeman a bit better, though.

I read this book thinking it was the Book of the Month. It wasn't. At Swim, Two Boys was. The title was sufficiently unusual for me not to consider there might be two similar titles and the author was Irish, I didn't check further until I came to answer the questions. Never mind, it is a book I am glad to have listened to. It was read by Aidan Kelly, who had a wonderful lilting Irish accent, but was also adept at different voices, so it was relatively easy to keep track of who was speaking. Keeping track of the plot was another thing! The slacker student who is writing a novel, has three different strands. The first is about the Pooka MacPhellimey, with whiffs of magic realism about him. The second concerns Mr John Furriskey, who is a character in a novel written by another character, Dermot Trellis, who has trouble with his characters, who rebel against him and do what they like while he sleeps, As if that isn't enough the third strand is about the legendary characters Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeny.
Somehow the "real" characters, the unnamed student, his anxious uncle and a friend, get mixed up with the other characters, where else, but in an Irish pub. The conversations have such a ring of truth about them as they convey the sort of nonsensical discussions that happen in pubs, but with such fondness and authenticity that one is simpy carried along. I discovered a PDF as I looked up Aidan Kelly, and if I ever get ahead in my reading I think that this is one book that deserves to be read, not heard.

This parody of all the Irish stereotypes; the love of drinking, the love of violence, the love of sentimental poetry and the belief in fairies is a wonderfully humorous send up of metafiction while being the very essence of metafiction.
Our main narrator is a slothful student who learns to drink rather late in life (in college) and who spends much of his time in bed thinking up his literary efforts. The efforts lead to a number of story lines from an author, Trellis, whose domination of his characters causes them to rebel. The legendary Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney play their parts and Pooka, of the devil class, and the Good Fairy is another story line. All the story lines dip and weave and get all tangled up however, while we also are treated to parodies of James Joyce and other modern Irish writers. There is even a section where the cowboys (some of Trellis' characters) sing "home on the range" and then continue on to singing all 242 songs by Schubert in the original German. To top it off, the author also treats us to many references to ancient Irish culture and legends most of which I would not have caught.
While the author makes fun of everything he is writing about, at the core of the book is a deep love of the old Irish culture of traditional tales written in verse.
The ending, for all the narrator's comments about having to have more than one ending, is actually a true wrap it all up ending.
All in all a most enjoyable read.

I found it amusing but not sure what I read. The structure jumps about and goes from the unnamed narrator, his uncle, to tales about all these myths and personages. The narrator is a person who is rather isolated as he stays in his room, in his bed and he does entertain the idea of writing and even writes a bit. I think he might be a rather smart, perhaps socially awkward person who likes to drink or he might just be lazy. The Legacy might be the structure, the inclusion of the myths and folklore. It is a writing about a guy who writes, whose characters turn on him. I am not sure if the novel is plot or character driven because it is hard to follow but there is a plot. It might be more experimental and modernistic than plot or character driven. It was interesting to be introduced to so many new mythological and folklore. It wasn't hard to listen to the audio because the accent was so fun, and the Anglo Gaelic sentences were great. It is short so that helps too. I really liked many of the sayings in the book. I think it is quite quotable. I liked the intro where he discusses that a book can start and end in many different ways. I think I've read that idea in another book that was about writing and reading novels. Given that the book was published in 1939, this author was ahead of its time. This was his debut novel. I've read The Third Policeman a while back which is also a weird book. The author had a wonderful sense of humor.

Bizarre slice of metafiction, blending myth and legend with bar room banter and the literary endeavours of a lazy student.

I can’t claim to have followed all of it (!) but there are three strands to the student’s story - a spin on magical realism featuring the devil Pooka MacPhellimey who has a Good Fairy in his pocket, an author called Trellis who is struggling with his characters who gang up on him to bully and torture him, and the stories of the legendary Finn MacCool and Mad King Sweeny. These plot lines cross over and become intertwined in a raucous parody of metafiction, while in the ‘real world’ the student has to deal with his anxious uncle and his hard drinking friends.

There are some wonderful lyrical passages and smart wordplay, plenty of humour, and outrageous discussions. I preferred the author’s The Third Policeman which was easier to follow and engage with - this wasn’t totally my kind of book, but I could certainly acknowledge its hectic genius.

This book is totally banana pants we have characters from all kinds of stories escaping from their confines and encountering each other and a fictional author, in the meantime we also have our narrator who intervenes at certain points with his observations on the real world around him.

Very funny at points this does book will mess with your head as you try to maintain who is who and where they should be.

3 stars - A short fun read but don’t expect to understand it fully.

read June 2022

Goodness, this was fun. I loved ‘The Third Policeman’ so I was really looking forward to reading this. This is such a stellar example of metafiction. It makes some of the other practitioners seem like amateurs. The structure is unique in that there is a story within a story within a story (etc). This is signalled right from the beginning of the novel. I will admit that it took me a little bit to get into the novel, but then something ‘clicked’ for me and I just loved it. 4*