Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Really getting into The Third Policeman now. The narrator has just been shown MacCruiskeen's collection of beautifully made, ever-diminishing wooden chests. I love the dialogue, it's so mannered and formal but at the same time full of, not exactly malapropisms, but very unusual and un-obvious ways to put things. And the general grammar and syntax has got me reading it to myself in a broad Irish brogue, it's just impossible not to.

I can certainly see why people have said he's a big influence on Robert Rankin. Any RR fans here? It's very silly, quite entertaining though.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah, in The Third Policeman you've got the bicycle painted a colour that drives people mad or something, maybe a precursor of Rankin's invisible paint. Find Rankin a bit annoying though to be honest.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, Rankin's silliness does get a bit over the top sometimes. With O'Brien I think it's more an extremely refined sense of the surreal than straight-up silliness.
 
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mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

Love the love Flann O'Brien is getting :


This is The Brother by Eamonn Morrissey is great.

Genius.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Great writer...your fears are unfounded, as far as I recall (read it years ago). Just finished this Horace McCoy, a great depiction of despair in search of the Hollywood dream.

He (Lou, that is) sort of explains himself but doesn't really succeed, perhaps isn't even trying to succeed. The economy of the prose, the apparent clarity of it, sketching the physical world vividly but the emotional world only vaguely - this contributes to the ambiguity of it all, the sense of desperation in the fact of a nebulous, perhaps meaningless world.

I'd like to read more by him, any recommendations? And similar authors - I hear Ellroy is somewhat similar.

Trying to decide what to read next. I bought ''Death in Venice'' today and its quite short so I'll probably give it a shot.
 

slim jenkins

El Hombre Invisible
Pop.1280 springs to mind as another Thompson classic. I suggest that as your next choice. Nice summary of the book.

Ellroy's different, but obviously inspired by the likes of Thompson. He takes the idea of 'hardboiled' to an extreme, but is still a very interesting writer.

James M Cain, David Goodis, Charles Willeford's 50s novels...the list could be long. The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette is top-notch - I recommend that to anyone interested in crime novels of the lean and mean variety.
 

Gregor XIII

Well-known member
Just wanted to join the praise of Flann O'Brien. One of my favorite writers. His The Poor Mouth is also brilliant. I kinda think of that one as an interesting precursor to all the post-colonial writings of the latter half of the twentieth century. Minus all the exoticism.

And if you love At Swim-Two Birds, check out Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino. It burrows very much from O'Brien, including using his persons as characters in this fiction, and it is also about writers and their characters. But it's told only through written sources, there is no narrator, just letters, diary entries, magazine articles, sketches of crime novels, erotic poems, etc. It's really fun.
 

jenks

thread death
Agree with everyone else about Flann O'Brien - despite the humour and wonderfully bizarre moments in Third Policeman I also feel the final section is deeply moving as if a veil is lifted and a new seriousness is placed in front of the reader.

I'm reading Mao's Great Famine which is bloody grim but meticulous. Also a biog of Jacques Anquetil - the great french cyclist. Trying to decide if I have the necessary energy for yet another go at Tristan Shandy - never got beyond about fifty pages yet.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just got started on A Void the Gilbert Adair translation of Perec's novel without an e. Already seen some witty twists to get around this - his description of a racial group as "non-goyim", a sentence when listening to the radio "coming up an important announc... but the rest is lost in static" - and also what I thought was a cheat, the spelling "phony" but it seems that that is just about acceptable so I'll let him off I guess. The main character Anton Vowl embodies the whole idea beautifully in his name I think. Not totally sure about the actual story so far, I'm finding the ironic narrative slightly annoying but we'll see.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
a sentence when listening to the radio "coming up an important announc... but the rest is lost in static"

Uh, "rest"?

and also what I thought was a cheat, the spelling "phony" but it seems that that is just about acceptable so I'll let him off I guess.

I thought "phony" was the standard spelling? "Phoney" looks like it should mean "like a phone".


I think I read about the nutter who wrote that book - apparently he did so while simultaneously working two more or less full-time jobs and doing a PhD. He must have been going out of his mind...
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Uh, "rest"?
Ha, I wrote that from memory, shows how difficult it is - what it actually says is

Coming up an important announc.... "Damn that static"

"I think I read about the nutter who wrote that book - apparently he did so while simultaneously working two more or less full-time jobs and doing a PhD. He must have been going out of his mind..."
I thought that was the guy who was writing the book where every word in a given chapter began with the same letter? Canadian I think.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I've just finished about 85% of David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men". It's very very clever, and he was obviously an exceptional writer, but BY GOD it's fucking tedious. Long long long and incredibly self-absorbed and obsessively detailed interior monologues, over and over again, picking apart ever painful detail - I can liken it to having an argument with a really clever friend at 5am when you're both really pissed on gin and really should be going to bed, but can't. I only managed to finish so much of it because it was the only thing I had on me on a long train ride across Catalonia. Amazingly clever, witty and perceptive, and at moments he manages to transcend the tedium, I suppose, so worth reading but rather teeth-grinding.

Has put me off wanting to read Infinite Jest, a bit.
 

you

Well-known member
Holiday time has meant I have been reading lots and reading fun books! No Eugene Thacker, no Evan Calder Williams, no Ranciere oooh no. I have been stuck into:

Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - great if you like succubi, eroticism, heros, gangs and cabalists.

DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little - page turner booker winner, don't dwell on it, I'd prefer an auto-biography to be honest but Hay(!).....

Will Self's How the dead live - really getting into Self, 5 years ago I just hated his prose, now I adore it.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
Manuscript is a really funny book I thought, lots of dry humour in there. Compare it to Cervantes but not as morally bankrupt.
 

bruno

est malade
i've just finished somebody else, a travel book/biography of rimbaud's years in africa by charles nicholls. a bit dry in places, but very interesting if you fancy the horn of africa and the history of african trading. very poignant as well, i never paid much attention to rimbaud before this book but am now freshly intrigued.

curently reading contra el cambio by an argentine climate sceptic journalist, unfortunately not off to a good start, i will probably end up taking it to the exchange.

and i'd like to thank whoever mentioned ryszard kapuscinski upthread, i stumbled on travels with herodotus and now have a new writer to hunt down obsessively.
 

slowtrain

Well-known member
I just picked up Don Quixote the other day on a Penguin Classic binge (Villette and a new copy of Women in Love as well!) - looking to read it over this summer, should be fun.

I've been reading Keri Hulme's 'The Bone People' at the moment (for class) - it's seriously good. Brilliantly subtly and insightful look into New Zealand / Maori 'viewpoints' (for lack of a better term) - all shot through with extraordinarily gorgeous details. The way she writes out the characters thoughts, and the way she uses the old free indirect discourse is brilliant, amazing subtleties in the tone.
 
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