The Hard Life

Flann O’Brien is one of my favorite authors by far, so when I saw this at a book store for cheap I snatched it right up. This is one of the last books of his that I hadn’t read. At-Swim Two Birds is one of the best novels that I’ve ever read and stands out as something I often recommend to people alongside The Third Policeman.

Those are his most well known texts, and I have read both multiple times. They are just all around 10/10 surrealist works, some of the best and most engaging surrealist novels ever written.

This on the other hand is not a great novel by any stretch of the imagination, and even as a fan of his, I have to admit this is probably the least interesting of his works. There are other texts such as The Dalkey Archive that do not stand up as well but are still of a high enough quality to be worth recommending.

This text on the other hand is sadly not of a similar caliber at all. I would not recommend this to anyone except diehard fans of Flann O’Brien. It is by far one of his least surrealist works, and is much more of a straightforward story written with goofy dialog in his signature style.

It definitely got several laughs out of me particularly the plotlines about the brothers mail based schemes. The bulk of the book is kind of tepid jokes making fun of Catholics and Christian faith more generally.

Again, I would point someone interested in this kind of religious humor to his other book Dalkey Archive instead. The parts I did like, such as the brother plotline and his scams did not make up for the fact that the book as a whole was boring and wasn’t something I will probably ever want to recommend or return to.