No precis can begin to do justice to the surreal complexity and comic playfulness of Flann O'Brien's masterpiece. The overall narrator of the book is an idle, hard-drinking student in Dublin who begins to write a novel about a novelist, Dermot Trellis, whose own fictional characters rebel against his tyranny. In a series of bewilderingly interlocking narratives, one hidden within another like Russian dolls, O'Brien creates a cavalcade of comic incident and a portrait gallery of weird characters. Figures from Irish legend like Finn McCool and King Sweeney appear to make their own contributions to the story, as do two American cowboys named Slug and Shorty, mysteriously plying their trade on the banks of the Liffey. Trellis creates a female character so beautiful he falls in love with her and forces himself upon her. She gives birth to a fully grown son who becomes one of the ringleaders in the plot to overthrow his father. O'Brien's sheer inventiveness is astonishing but nobody expecting a story which begins at the beginning and travels smoothly to a conclusion should pick up At Swim-Two-Birds. Flann O'Brien was the best-known pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan, an Irish civil servant, journalist and novelist. At Swim-Two-Birds, his first novel, was so unusual and offbeat that it very nearly wasn't published at all. Rejected by a number of publishers, it was finally seen by Graham Greene who was working as a reader for another publishing firm and he recommended it strongly. When it was published, it won praise from other writers (James Joyce called O'Brien 'a real writer, with the true comic touch' and Dylan Thomas rather more bizarrely wrote in a review that the book was just the present 'to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl') but failed to sell well. Today it's rightly recognized as both a masterpiece of modernist fiction and one of the funniest books of the 20th century.

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