Will I love At Swim-Two-Birds?

In the summer of 1968, I was 20 and spent the summer pretty much banally in Israel and Europe. Around me, the world was on fire, but I was inside my own head.

Eventually, I washed up in Dublin, where I walked in a cold rain to Dorset Street, there to recreate Leopold Bloom’s pork kidney purchase from Dlugacz, the butcher. There was no Dlugacz on Dorset, but there was another butcher who stuffed into stiff pink butcher paper something that glistened and oozed. My plan was to fry it up, as Leopold had, on the hotplate in my rented… show more.

O’Brien was a brilliant, groundbreaking writer who blended humor with literary experimentation to create stories that were both original and highly pleasurable to read. At Swim-Two-Birds is his most epic creation, published in 1939. I would credit O’Brien with being the inventor of what became post-modernism. At Swim-Two-Birds blends metafiction and literary fantasy with an onion layer of stories within stories in a way that no book ever had before. And yet O’Brien manages to exceed the common self-serious tone and disconnection from lived human emotion that can plague post-modernism. His writing balances experimentation with a sense of our shared… show more.