The Best of Myles is a collection of O'Brien's columns for the Irish Times. These pieces are in English, in Irish, and some few are in a hilarious English written in the intrinsically absurd orthography of Irish. For those of us with but limited Irish, it's a bit of a slog, but worth it, because O'Brien's best wit was saved for the sanctimonious promoters of official Irishness. A short novel, An Beal Bocht, in English The Poor Mouth, trots forth every aspect of the "genuine" Irish folkways that the romanticizers celebrated and sought to preserve, and sometimes gently, sometimes raucously skewers both the wealthy Anglophones who celebrated rural Irish poverty and the rural Irish poor themselves. It's the humor of ethnic privilege; O'Brien, being a native Irish speaker, and a prolific contributor to the renewal and to the life of his native language, got away with it beautifully for decades. His humor indeed endures because it provokes outrage, and invites response, and even stimulates readers to learn Irish, the better to read more of him. My old teacher, the late critic Dwight MacDonald, was forever ridiculed by serious literary critics for having championed satire and parody, but in the case of Flann O;Brien, old MacDonald had it exactly right: it's the satirist O'Brien, the parodist Myles na cGopaleen, who enriches Irish literature beyond the canon. Read the Irish Times columns. Side-splitting stuff.

I’m in absolute agreement about both the Collected Myles and The Poor Mouth. I particularly enjoy the delicious satire of the moniker itself that sends up the tradition of the Anglophone saviors of Irish culture of the early 20th century who took on gaelizcized names. He mocks their inability to distinguish a pig’s grunts from Irish yet oddly acknowledges the accomplishment of the Irish Renaissance. Perhaps a descriptor of great literature is that it often reveals universal truths in the commonplace. Brian O reveals universal truth. As Keats said to Chapman, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

Maith an mhaith, Dearthair.

Ta se suille.

Go raibh maith agat. Nar lagai Dia do lamh.

Siochan