The Poor Mouth: Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life (Irish Literature)

Two young orphans, Finbarr and Manus, are taken into the household of the eccentric Mr Collopy where they grew up surrounded by the smells of good whiskey and bad cooking. Manus proves to be a business genius, and this talent takes him from teaching people to walk the tightrope by correspondence course to the Vatican. The greatest satirical Irish writer of the twentieth-century turns his attention to the garrulous Irish and vividly captures the wit, extravagance and glory of their talk. 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. The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on narratives of Gaelic Ireland, this work brought down on the author's head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941. "The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on the Irish, this work brought down on the author's head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941."--BOOK JACKET. Two young orphans, Finbarr and Manus, are taken into the household of the eccentric Mr Collopy where they grew up surrounded by the smells of good whiskey and bad cooking. Manus proves to be a business genius, and this talent takes him from teaching people to walk the tightrope by correspondence course to the Vatican.
The greatest satirical Irish writer of the twentieth-century turns his attention to the garrulous Irish and vividly captures the wit, extravagance and glory of their talk. Ralph Steadman, artist, writer, sculptor, political cartoonist, & designer of labels for vintage wines, is the author/illustrator of, most recently, the novel Doodaaa, as well as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's Alice, George Orwell's Animal Farm, & Hunter Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. His work appears regularly in such publications as the New Yorker, the New York Times, GQ, Esquire, & the Los Angeles Times. Presents the 1941 novel about Bonaparte O'Coonassa, an Irish peasant who shares a life of abject poverty with his family and neighbors in the village of Corkadoragha, one of the most beautiful places in the country A textbook for courses in industrial and organizational psychology.