Finbarr and Manus are young orphans who are taken under the protection of the eccentric Mr Collopy (whose chief occupation is the extravagant discussion of the state of the world) and into his household, where they grow up with good whiskey and bad cooking. Manus proves to be a business genius, from organising correspondence courses in walking the tightrope to his creation of a cure for arthritis. When Mr Collopy’s health is endangered by this cure they embark on a pilgrimage to Rome, to meet Pope Pius X, where a miracle is the least to be expected.
Life in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth-century is hard: poverty and squalor are common, while public toilets for ladies are less frequent. In The Hard Life O’Brien celebrates the Irish genius for conversation while his use of language shows why he is regarded as the equal of his more famous contemporaries, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and one of the greatest comic writers of the twentieth-century. The Hard Life conceals its satire on the Roman Catholic Church and Irish education system through its uproarious comic energy.
Circa l’autore
Flann O’Brien was a pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he spent most of his life in Dublin, where he worked as a civil servant and died in 1966. Best known for The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, he is one of the most influential Irish writers of the twentieth century, regarded by many as its answer to Nabokov, and his books are dazzling works of farce, satire, folklore and absurdity.
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