So this might be a bit of a stretch, but I am looking for books, specifically written by English/ Irish/ Scottish authors (any period of literature) that have the same self-reflexive tone as Beckett’s prose or Flann O’Brien’s novels, particularly that feeling of reading a prose that unveils things about itself. Bonus points if it has something that I can only describe as ‘gaps’, those little rifts between paragraphs, chapters and even lines, when the narrative thread breaks and the reader can fall through an intermediate dimension of a text, where there isn’t necessarily a new story, but a confrontation with narratology.
Other books/authors that go with this idea, so that you can maybe get a better sense of what I’m looking for: Borges, The book of disquiet by Pessoa, maybe even Don Quijote, Artful by Ali Smith, Italo Calvino.
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They only have a pair of trunks.
-my grandfather, just 5 minutes ago.
"When everything had been said by Sweeny, said droning dark-voiced Finn, a glimmering of reason assailed the mad- man till it turned his steps in the direction of his people that he might dwell with them and trust them. But holy Ronan in his cell was acquainted by angels of the intention of Sweeny and prayed God that he should not be loosed from his frenzy until his soul had been first loosed from his body and here is a summary of the result. When the madman reached the middle of Slieve Fuaid, there were strange apparitions before him there, red headless trunks and trunkless heads and five stubbly rough grey heads without trunk or body between them, screaming and squealing and bounding hither and thither about the dark road beleaguering and besetting him and shouting their mad abuse, until he soared in his fright aloft in front of them. Piteous was the terror and the wailing cries, and the din and the harsh-screaming tumult of the heads and the dogsheads and the goatsheads in his pursuit, thudding on his thighs and his calves and on the nape of his neck and knocking against trees and the butts of rocks — a wild torrent of villainy from the breast of a high mountain, not enough resting for a drink of water for mad Sweeny till he finally achieved his peace in the tree on the summit of Slieve Eichneach. Here he devoted his tune to the composition and recital of melodious staves on the subject of his evil plight."
(Pgs. 123-124)
A big loose man to my left drew himself together and braced his body for the ordeal of utterance. He wore on the upper lip a great straggling mustache and heavy tired eyes moved slowly as if belated in adjustment to his other features. He struggled to an attitude of upright attention.
So I'm a couple of months behind on the books! I noticed that At Swim starts with Chapter 1, but there's never a Chapter 2. I don't know what to make of this. Any thoughts?
Any help tracking it down will be appreciated.
In a 1939 essay When Fiction Lives in Fiction
> I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien, At Swim, Two Birds. A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitues of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student. At Swim, Two Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.
Give the word, said Shorty with a waving menace of his hand, or it's gunplay and gravestones. Come out of that tree, you bloody bastard you!
There was a prolonged snappling of stiffened rods and stubborn shoots and the sharp agonies of fractured branches, the pitiless flogging against each other of green life-laden leaves, the thrashing and the scourging of a clump in torment, a jaggle of briar-braced tangly-brambled thorniness, incensed, with a demon in it's breast.
Crack crack crack.
A small man came out of the foliage, a small man elderly and dark with a cloth cap and a muffler around his wind-pipe.
anyone know where I can find an ebook for this? It was written by flann o'brien (pseudonym).
OneTwoThree.
The Un-Deux-Trois cat sank.
