At Swim-Two-Birds

by Flann O'Brien, 1951
239pp
12/22/07-12/31/07

For those of you keeping score, this is the third Flann O'Brien book I read in 2007. I never set out to do so. I don't pretend to 100% understand this phenomenon, which is fitting, because I don't pretend to 100% understand O'Brien.

I have this peculiar love of frame stories & metafiction. I can't justify it--really, I half-want to dismiss the stuff as gimmick & wankery--but it somehow thrills me to read a real head-trip of a book. Of course this was just such a book, one that might be easier to summarize with diagrams than with words. The outer frame follows an Irish student, more inclined toward drink & sleep than studies, who writes a book. In that book, a moralizing old man writes a book that draws on a variety of styles & characters: Celtic myth, medieval poem, and the improbable cowpunchers of Dublin. This "inner" author forces his characters to live with him, under his roof, until they conspire to hijack the narrative against him. Disparate literary styles are mimicked & mashed-up to comic effect, and with virtuoso skill.

For years the frequent mention of Joyce when discussing O'Brien mystified me. Over the past year this has made more & more sense.

A little after I read the book, this piece was posted on Slate, for some reason. It was really pleasing to read: I love to picture Nathaniel Rich saying "Y'know what? Flann O'Brien could fucking write," to which a cigar-chomping, green-visored editor must've replied, "Print it, my boy!" I of course anticipated Rich's comparison between O'Brien & Sterne, but it probably was never that original a sentiment to begin with.



This was also the third book from Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL) that I read in 2007. Whatever it says about me that I read three O'Brien books in '07, reading three Dalkey Archive books (The Dalkey Archive being one of them) probably says roughly the same thing.

"The Dalek Archive" popped into my head just now, which idea tickles the hell out of me. If you are similarly amused, you can rest assured that you're alright in my book.

amulet

by Roberto Bolaño, 1999
184pp
12/14/07-12/22/07

I'd probably never regret the act of reading, were it not for the certainty that there are so damned many good books out there I'd like to read. Every week the New York Times, Fresh Air, and the front table at Borders bring ten or twenty noteworthy new books to my attention; of these, a good three or four sound worth reading, at least until I forget about them, or they're revealed as massive hoaxes. So when I try out a book and don't like it, I'm keenly aware of the book I could've been reading.

I was taken in by some year-end hype when I picked up this book. Bolaño's The Savage Detectives appeared on NYT's "Top 10 Novels of 2007" list. That book was made to sound interesting, but its length made it a dodgy proposition. I decided to sample some of Bolaño's shorter writing.

Also of some relevance when I picked up this book: I've particularly enjoyed a few Hispanic/Latin American creators the past year or so: the Hernandez brothers, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Salvador Plascencia, even Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to a certain extent. I figured I was on some kind of kick, and thought I'd follow through with "[h]is generation's premier Latin-American writer."

To be sure, maybe I would've appreciated this book if I actually knew a thing or two about Latin American writers of any generation. This is the first-person account of the toothless, Uruguayan "Mother of Mexican Poetry." Though she writes no poetry herself, she cavorts with the artists and Bohemians of Mexico City in the late 60s. Kind of like A Moveable Feast, only the Mexican version. Despite my recent interest, I am entirely ignorant of Mexican writers (or Latin American, for that matter), so I'm unclear as to whether the writers & artists the narrator spends her time with are fictitious, or actual pillars of a genuine Mexican literary scene. I could quickly consult Wikipedia to clear this up, but am for some reason disinclined.

Further proof of my ignorance: this book largely centers around the apparently notorious political unrest of Mexico City, 1968. Eurocentric that I am, I was rather more familiar with Paris's troubles of that year. Apparently the University of Mexico was invaded by the Army, and it seems that this event was seared into the consciousness of the Mexican people. What next, Mexican Situationists?


So, I'm thinking an art director designed a really good dust jacket for this book, but on her way down the hall to her boss's office, she bumped into an art director who happened to be working on some homoerotic bodice-ripper, papers flew from the portfolio of the one art director into the portfolio of the other art director, and amulet ended up with this gay-ass cover.