Transit (Irish Literature) - Softcover

Share, Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564785424 ISBN 13: 9781564785428

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

Synopsis

Two men meet in an airport men's room ("Excuse me. But you're pissing on my foot.") sometime in the early 1990s in the Arabian Gulf. From this meeting, they proceed to get a bit drunk on bad liquor, discover a magical hidden room, get transported back to the Ireland of the late 1940s and '50s, rummage through memories of their days at Trinity College (though they apparently never knew each other), and fumble about like Laurel and Hardy trying to make a degree of sense of what's happening (or did happen) to them. As oblique and deliciously Irish as Joyce and Beckett, and drawing upon the time warps of Flann O'Brien, Bernard Share has composed an hallucinatory and comic romp through Ireland past and present.

About this title

About the Author

Bernard Share is a distinguished critic, writer and teacher. He is a former editor of Cara, the Aer Lingus in-flight magazine; the author of many books, including the bestselling The Emergency, a popular account of Irish life during World War II and the hilarious Inish, a novel originally published in 1966 and re-issued last year: Spike Milligan said on more than one occasion that it was the funniest book he had ever read. Bernard Share has been a lecturer in modern literature both in Ireland and Australia. The previous editions of Slanguage appeared to critical and commercial acclaim.

Review

"Inish is the funniest novel I have ever read." --Spike Milligan

"I find that my admiration for Mr. Share's imagination, originality, and control is still rising . . . I am ready to go on record that Inish puts Bernard Share on the map as one of Ireland's leading literary craftsmen."—Grattan Freyer, The Irish Times

"Perhaps if you fed into a sausage machine the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and a couple of years of The Irish Jeweller & Fancy Goods Journal (which Mr. Share has edited along with his more literary pursuits) and turned the crank, you'd create Inish. Having gone that far, I'd continue cranking to see what came next. For Inish is a very funny book." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Fairly glitters on the page, bouncing and careening in a dozen different directions at once . . . Influences? Joyce, probably; Robbe-Grillet, possibly; Flann O'Brien, most likely of all. But far stronger than any of these surely are the thousands of pub talks from which Bernard Share wove these wild fantasies—not to mention the stout he drank working at the loom." --Bruce Cook, Catholic World

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1564785424
• ISBN 13: 9781564785428
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 135