The At Swim-Two-Birds Deathmarch End of the Road

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• So-Called Bill | October 4, 2005 1:50 PM | Reply

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  Say what you will about the ending, it was a lot more satisfying than "Gravity's Rainbow." But then I have a weakness for happy endings, which is pretty much what it was, though it got awfully dark on the last page.

  A worthwhile read, but I will probably put it away and think of it very little.

• cort | October 8, 2005 2:40 PM | Reply

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  I enjoyed the book actually. Lots of brillo and well worth the read. It was getting very real in the Deep Unhealthy Love of Beer and the Parodic Reconsititution of Irish Mythology departments, and there was true lift and lilt in the Lifelike Dialog Department, and—why not!—I’d like to step up and nominate it for a Prescient Invocation of the Airy or Airless Architectures of the Future Award for its crudely beautiful post-modernism. But perhaps it could be said to have faltered in the Organic Cohesion of Wellsprings and Overall Narrative Structure Department, leading to an Unseemly Reliance on a Leitmotif fault, referring (of course) to the odd/even good/bad fairy/pooka business, which really wasn’t equipped to handle the stress put on it by the sudden conversion at the end, and good Lord, if this comment is annoying you, imagine how much it is annoying me, would anyone be interested in traipsing along with Beckett at some future point, Malone Dies perhaps, might be fun?, Cecil?, OK, I’ll shut up.

• Dr. Vitz | October 14, 2005 11:42 AM | Reply

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  Quick note - I lost the internet at work for the past 3 weeks and with it, my only high speed connection. As a result, I dropped out of this conversation. I really enjoyed the book and found it a truly worthwhile read. OTOH - it has problems that keep it from greatness, IMO.

• Dr. Vitz | October 17, 2005 9:08 AM | Reply

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  Quick note - We had massive system failures here at work, leaving me without a high speed internet connection for the last few weeks and taking me out of the discussion here.

  Anyway, I really enjoyed the book. I think of it as a flawed masterpiece. Flann writes wonderful scenes and is great on the big ideas. It's the details of getting from here to there that mess him up. That shouldn't be a disaster, but it renders the novel somewhat less of a success than it ought to be. For me, it was a consistently great read - I kept moving along just for the joy of the prose.

• other dan | March 7, 2006 8:07 AM | Reply

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  ok, maybe it's just me, and now i'm feeling brain dead, but i couldn't figure out how the stories merged. the parts of the story that were all description hurt my brain. those long sentences were killing me. there were parts however that i did enjoy, but i feel like i had been tricked and then it was back to the driving nail, right into my skull.