At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression."

So begins Flan O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), an outrageously unusual book, breathtakingly different and daring. I am sure there are Master's and Ph.D. theses dedicated to the novel and googling the title yields numerous hits with serious literary analyses of the work. The Guardian lists it among the 100 greatest novels written in English. Time magazine placed it on its list of 100 best English-language fiction books since 1923. Being totally unskilled in the craft of literary analysis, I will just say that it is probably one of the three most unusual books I have read in my almost 60-year reading career, a remarkable and completely unforgettable novel.

I had not known Flan O'Brien - a pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan - until I read his The Third Policeman , a phenomenally hilarious, unconditionally five-star book. At Swim, not that funny but deeper, is an extremely ambitious exercise in the literary art. Many critics consider Flan O'Brien to be an early representative of post-modernism in literature, although others classify him as a modernist, along with, say, James Joyce.

At Swim is clearly intertextual and metafictional - two of the main characteristics of literary post-modernism. It contains three separate beginnings and three endings (antepenultimate, penultimate, and the ultimate one). The narrator - a student of University College in Dublin - is writing a novel in which a certain Dermot Trellis writes a novel which borrows characters and motifs from ancient Irish folk tales and legends. One of the characters in this novel is Trellis' son, who writes about his father at the suggestion of other characters from the novel. Since Trellis' literary powers disappear while he is asleep, the characters in his novel conspire against him: they use his periods of rest to have a good time. In fact, they arrange to simulate the actions that Trellis wants them to perform in his story rather than actually carry them out. We have four "levels" of authorship: Flan O'Brien creates the narrator who creates Trellis who creates characters among which we have his son who writes about Trellis. So who really writes the story?

The novel - a set of loosely connected stories and vignettes might be a better term - is written in a wide variety of styles. It contains an abundance of pomes (i.e., poems), staves, and verses. and it includes figures of speech followed by their identification, for instance

"[I expressed] my whole-hearted concurrence by a figure of speech.
Name of figure of speech: Litotes (or Meiosis).

There are passages of utter hilarity: for instance (note the ſpelling):

Horſe, with a round fundament, why does he emit a ſquare Excrement? Happineſs, what is it? Lady diſturbed in her Bed, your thoughts of it? Light, is it a Body?

Perhaps my most favorite passage of the book begins with "There is nothing so important as the legs in determining the kangaroolity of a woman" and goes through ascertaining that a deceitful kangaroo can shave the hair of her legs, assuming she is a woman, and then - by the way of the mathematical concept of geometric progression - proceeds through truth, which is an odd number, to the fugal and contrapuntal character of Bach's work

And what about a breathtaking passage that seamlessly (and intertextually) combines quotes from John Milton, "What neat repast shall feast us light and choice of Attic taste" with "What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?" by Keats. And the unforgettable monologue by Finn MacCool about the sweetest of all music - the music of nature, a passage that incorporates calls of various birds of the Irish landscape.

While I suspect not every reader will be amused by At Swim I am in awe of the sheer audacity of the author's undertaking, and I am rounding the rating up to - yay! - five stars.

Four and a half stars.

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