BOOK REPORT: At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

Title:                     At Swim-Two-Birds
Author:                 Flann O'Brien
                              (aka Brian O'Nolan)
Copyright Date: 1939

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars (over my head)

Backcover Description
Along with one or two books by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds is the most famous (and infamous) of Irish novels published in the twentieth century.

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading, he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermont Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance.  From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing.

Hilariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, opening up new possibilities for what can be done in fiction.  It is a true masterpiece of Irish literature

My Thoughts

I was really excited about reading this book.  It had all of the elements that, when used properly, can make for a really interesting read.  It had a very compelling structure (it is a great example of  meta-fiction); it was portrayed as wildly comic, and it was on several lists of recommended books.  Unfortunately, most of the humor was above my head, buried deep inside stories pulled from Irish folklore of which I was totally ignorant.

The structure of the book is great in theory.  Our unnamed narrator is a lazy college student who is writing a novel when not at a pub with his friends or sleeping.  His novel is about a lazy man, Dermont Trellis, who sits in bed all day writing bad novels. The characters he creates are just like real actors in that they play the role outlined in the script and when not a scene, they hang out like normal people do.  There are some American cowboys, there are several female leads, a few  villains, an Irish version of Puck from a Midsummer Night's Dream, and Finn McCool (Finn is a warrior of Ireland from long ago which folklore has turned into more hyperbole than human.), among others.  Some of characters fall in love, they play cards together, and otherwise sit around lamenting the work they must perform at the behest of Dermont. These characters get so fed up with the bad writing that they start to find ways to keep him asleep so they don't have worry about him writing.  Of course everything escalates to the point of the cast writing their own book making Dermont the actor in a play in which his character is dragged through a gauntlet of painful tortures.   It sounds pretty neat, huh?  Flann O'Brien does an excellent job making it easy to keep track of all of the nested layers, but as you will see below the content portrayed within these layers was just too foreign to me. 

Every time I told someone about this book, the first question was, "What does the title mean?"  Swim-Two-Birds is a ford on the River Shannon in Ireland where one of the mythical characters, King Sweeney, visits briefly.  This is the same ford that St. Patrick used to cross the river Shannon.  I don't know why it was important for St. Patrick to cross at this ford, but it is one of its claims to fame.

For those with intimate knowledge of Irish folklore, you know that King Sweeney, also known as "Mad Sweeney" is a Irish king of yore that was cursed by a bishop after Sweeney tried to kill him when the church bells woke him up one morning.   This curse turned Sweeney into an insane man-bird flying around all of Ireland for years until he was finally forgiven. Then he was killed by a spear.  Please, go ahead and read those sentences again.  This is just the beginning of how over-my-head this novel was.  I looked up Mad King Sweeney on Wikipedia just to get a context of the story being told but never really understood *why* it was being told.  

After a while I stopped trying to dig up every reference to Irish folklore and just pushed through it. Most of the humor was lost on me and I found myself unable to read the book for longer than twenty or thirty minutes before I would compulsively (sometimes mid-sentence) play a game on my phone, or just go to sleep.

At Swim-Two-Birds also changes style throughout the book. I counted at least seven distinct writing styles and there were probably more that I just didn't notice.  These styles are meant to parody other famous Irish novels and folktales. Unfortunately for me, I haven't read any of the source materials and this layer was lost on me.  I read several reviews of the book and the consensus was that if you are intimately familiar with these stories you can really see Flann's genius come through.  Oh, well.  I guess I need to take their word for it.

I was really hoping that I would like this book.  But, my ignorance of the minutiae of Irish folklore and literature kept me from completely immersing myself in the story.  I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone unless they could prove to me that they are very familiar with Irish literature. 

BOOK REPORT: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Title:  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Author:    Mark Twain

Original Copyright Date:        1889

My Rating:   2 out of 5 stars  ( might be a good short story )

Backcover Description

One of the greatest satires in American literature, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court begins when Hank Morgan, a skilled mechanic in a nineteenth-century New England arms factory, is struck on the head during a quarrel and awakens to find himself among the knights and magicians of King Arthur’s Camelot.

What follows is a culture clash of the first magnitude, as practical-minded Hank, disgusted with the ignorance and superstition of the people, decides to enlighten them with education and technology. Through a series of wonderfully imaginative adventures, Twain celebrates American homespun ingenuity and democracy as compared to the backward ineptitude of a chivalric monarchy. At the same time, however, Twain raises the question of whether material progress necessarily creates a better society. As Hank becomes more powerful and self-righteous, he also becomes more ruthless, more autocratic, and less able to control events, until the only way out is a massively destructive war.

My Thoughts
Mark Twain wrote Connecticut Yankee as a satire on royalty, chivalry and other romantic notions of Arthurian legend (linking it occasionally  to the politics of the antebellum south transitioning to the postbellum reconstruction) However, I have to say he didn't execute it very well. It might have made an entertaining short story, but this went on and on, changing voices, direction, and sometimes bringing the story to a dead stop.

The premise behind this book is a common one now-a-days, but from what I understand, Twain was one of the first, if not the first to have a person bump their head or fall asleep only to wake up in another time. In this case, an intelligent, renaissance man who works in a arms factory wakes up in 6th century England in King Arthur's court.  Think of the Yankee as a nineteen-century MacGyver.

The problem is, the Yankee is too powerful.  He knows everything, from the exact moment in time a solar eclipse will occur over England 1300 years before he is born in Connecticut, to mining and metallurgy, chemistry, biology, politics, art, underwater basket weaving, and other magical skills which shock and awe the native royal ignoramuses.  He is not a likable character at all.  

Twain spends an inordinate amount of narrative having the unlikable yankee waxing philosophical on the mundane aspects of life beyond King Arthur's court, including economics, the politics of "freemen" vs. slaves vs. nobility and the churches motivation for keeping the royal status quo.  Twain will then gloss over years of time where he gains power and creates a network of educated lackeys which work diligently in the background setting up phone lines and creating an intelligentsia which will aid and support his goal of usurping this backward monarchy and setting up a proper republic. I would have found those details much more interesting.

Now, for all of its warts, Connecticut Yankee does have its moments.  There is a fabulous chapter where the Yankee is sent off on a noble quest to free 9 princesses from some evil ogres in which he describes life inside a suit of armor.  Then there is the way he uses the knights as riding advertisements for products for which there isn't a market yet (like soap).  But, these moments are sparse and I had trouble fighting through the doldrums to get to the next enjoyable scene.

On a final note, this story was MUCH darker than I was expecting.  In his quest to oust the nobility  and set up a republic, The yankee is absolutely merciless in its execution.  I've read a few  pieces on Mark Twain since finishing this book, hoping to find some reasoning for the way Twain wrote this novel, only to really find out that Connecticut Yankee is a transition in Twain's literary career, where he enters a very dark phase.  To borrow a section from the Wikipedia page on this Connecticut Yankee:

 It is possible to see the book as an important transitional work for Twain, in that earlier, sunnier passages recall the frontier humor of his tall tales like The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, while the corrosive view of human behavior in the apocalyptic latter chapters is more akin to darker, later Twain works like The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth.

BOOK REPORT: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Title:       The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Author:                           Stieg Larsson

Original Copyright Date:     2008

Translated to English by:   Reg Keeland

My Rating:         2 out of 5 stars  ( meh )

Would Recommend to a friend?: not really

Back Cover Description:

A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.

It is about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. 

It s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism, and an unexpected connection between themselves.

My Thoughts:

This book report is brought to you by Apple Computers, in association with Canon.

This was a crime drama that fell a bit flat.  It was a quick read, and had the potential to be a gripping thriller, but it  never materialized as well as I thought it could. It was fairly predictable, with a couple of decent twists.  Was I entertained?  Mostly. But I can't say I would recommend it without reservations. The crimes committed were gruesome, although most happened well before the two intrepid heroes are on the case.  The suspense doesn't really start until well over 100 pages in the book and the climax occurs with about 80 pages remaining and the denouement was cliche.  The whole thing came across as a episode of scooby-doo directed by Quentin Tarantino.  

On a side note, I was very annoyed with the product placement in the book.  It was like watching a movie where you can obviously see that Coke is the primary sponsor with the product placed conspicuously throughout scenes and the label always facing the camera. My ebook copy had to be returned to the library, so I can't dig up quotes to demonstrate it, but to paraphrase, "She stole his Dell pc laptop and copied the hard drive to her Macbook pro.  Salander then turned on her iPod, an mp3 player the size of a matchbook, and went to work on the images from the night in Photoshop, played with the contrast settings until she could make out the "Visit some place in Sweden" bumper sticker on the blue Volvo S90 Hatchback"

A few character questions remain, to be answered in the remaining books of the series.  I don't know if I will read them.  Maybe I will once I separate my self a bit from this one.  Like I said, it is a quick read and I was mostly entertained.  If I am getting close to the deadline, with my book count a bit low, I might consider it.