The Comps Reading Project part 5

I was up in Lake Arrowhead, CA this past weekend for the gf's family reunion.  While a merry time was had by all, the combo of 4th of July festivities, Irish jet lag, and 10 hour drives across the Southwest meant that I got far less reading done than the week previous.  I still averaged 4 books a week, but only just barely:

Collected Stories, Frank O'Connor [Michael Francis O'Donovan]

No not Flannery, Frank--you know, the other mid-century Irish-Catholic master of the short story who goes by F. O'Connor.  Now, I have nothing against Flannery; "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" sticks with you for a reason, and it's not her fault that every last MFA student in America has been trying to ape it for the past half-century.  But in terms of sheer warmth, pathos, humor, and humanity, Frank is not only my favorite, but who I wish all these aspiring writers would imitate instead.  Go give "First Confession" another read, it is as hilarious and wonderful as you remember!  David Lloyd makes a big deal about the centrality of the mouth and orality in Irish literature, and I think that is what separates Frank from the rest: his tales feel less like texts than like recorded conversations with a close friend.  He's an all-too-rare reminder of how, despite the profound tragedy of Irish history, this people possess a grand sense of humor.

Collected Stories is his best known collection, and even that one is over 700 pages.  If you're pressed for time (as I am) but still would like to get the gist of his style and variety, here's what I have found to be his most essential stories:   
"Guests of the Nation," 
"The Bridal Night," 
"The Luceys," 
"The Babes in the Woods," 
"The Frying Pan," 
"Don Juan's Temptation," 
"First Confession," 
"Darcy in the Land of Youth," 
"My Oedipus Complex," 
"Freedom," 
"The Majesty of the Law," 
"A Sense of Responsibility," 
"Counsel for Oedipus," 
"The Study of History," 
"The Ugly Duckling," 
 "Fish for Friday," 
"Public Opinion," 
"The Mass Island," 
"There Is A Lone House," 
"The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland," 
"Ghosts". 

Tarry Flynn, Patrick Kavanagh.

Patrick Kavanagh is a great poet--and a terrible novelist.  Tellingly, this novel only found a publisher after his poetry became popular.  I mean, seriously, how many Künstlerromans does the world really need, especially since his countryman James Joyce had already deconstructed the genre so expertly clear back in 1916?  The novel's titular protagonist is Kavanagh with the name changed in the most insufferable manner possible--a sensitive young aspiring poet and farmer who sees the beauty in the very grass and stones, who is uncommonly handsome and attractive to the ladies, blessed with an intelligence that the rustic rubes who surround him are too crude to appreciate, who in the end leaves his poor Mother to care for the farm alone while he runs off with his Uncle for greener pastures.  Maybe Kavanagh was parodying the Künstlerroman as well, maybe I'm supposed to be exasperated by the protagonist, maybe this is yet another example of how the Irish Modernists sought to deconstruct the tyranny of narrative at every turn--doesn't matter, this book was still a chore to get through.  

No Other Life, Brian Moore.

This novel was a much needed palate cleanser after Tarry Flynn.  Moore is Irish-Canadian, and this 1993 novel focuses upon a French-Canadian Catholic Priest, Paul Michel, who narrates his role in the rise and fall of a Caribbean ruler on the fictional, former French colony of Ganae.  The title comes from a conversation he has with his mother in Montreal mid-novel; she had guided him towards the Priesthood, but as he arrives to comfort her in on her deathbed, she urges him to leave the Priesthood, that there is in fact no God, that "There is no other life."  The book does not delve too deeply into questions of religious doubt, focusing more on how Jeannot, this fictional president who was once a parochial student of Michel, seeks to rally and inspire the oppressed poor despite being beset by attempted coups by the military, and the suspicions of the Vatican against this latest manifestation of "Liberation Theology" (which gives this Irish text our most explicit connection to Latin-America).

Though focused upon the Franco-Americas (both Canadian and Caribbean), this text can be considered a variation of the other Dictator novels important in Latin-America, and does have a minor Irish character late in the text, who is a Catholic Priest unambiguously supportive of Jeannot--this feels important given how much Michel waffles back and forth on his duties, and even towards his very faith.  Given Ireland's long historical connections with France, the French settings feel more than merely incidental.  As for Jeannot himself?  He becomes the very Messiah figure the Vatican (and the military) fears in a highly ambiguous ending that you won't see coming.

::

(I keep mentioning Samuel Beckett--who is also on my reading list--in other posts, so it might be useful to here list the Beckett I have actually read for reference):

Prose:

Molloy
How can you tell if you haven't just been sucking on the same stone all along?  Just how small can a man's world shrink?  And just why is that man and his son hunting this poor cripple on his bicycle?
Mallone Dies
A death scene stretched out to novel length.
The Unnameable
The novel that opens by refusing to answer the three questions every novel must answer: "Where now?  Who now?  When now?"  The remainder then destabilizes your very sense of ontological continuity by morphing between multiple narrators, then finishes with "I can't go on, I'll go on," but doesn't.
How It Is
Bursts of text that can be read aloud in one oral breath, narrated by a man crawling through the mud.  The. Entire. Book.
The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989

"...and oh for it all to end."

Plays:

Waiting for Godot
The one work of his that requires no introduction.  Knock off the last 2 letters of the title character, and you understand why it's so blackly comic that he never arrives.
Endgame  
(Pause)
Play
Three melodramatic figures spout cliches and aphorisms while sitting in funeral urns.  (There's a killer version with Alan Rickman from 2001).
Breath
His shortest play.  A disembodied breath breathes in and out over 30 long seconds.

Not I
A single disembodied mouth on a stage, speaking alone.  Interrogated.  

Did I mention Beckett served in the French Resistance, so was often crawling through mud in the dark, waiting for indecipherable messages from contacts codenamed Godot, and under constant threat of being captured and interrogated by the Nazis?  Goodness, I wonder if that had any influence on his art...