Böcker av Aidan Higgins

"Here is the great Irish novel of Berlin, way back before the Wall came down. Dallan Weaver, a writer and professor who's been fãeted and flattered but has seen better days, has come to the great divided city as a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Dienst Organization). On arriving, Weaver's life immediately begins to fall apart. Women fight over him. He is not always in the soberest state of mind. Moving from relatively conventional narrative to deliriously long lists, incorporating everything from children's drawings to minute recollections of dreams, Lions of the Grunewald is--in the author's own words--a "missionary stew," marvelously served up in Aidan Higgins's inimitable style."--

In addition to his novels and stories, Aidan Higgins--one of Ireland's most respected contemporary writers--has written a large body of criticism. Windy Arbours includes pieces written between 1970-1990 and is the first collection of his reviews to be published. Incredibly well-read, Higgins covers writers from around the world, from relatively well-known authors such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and Jorge Luis Borges, to more obscure writers such as Ralph Cusack and Dorothy Nelson. Serving as an informative guidebook about contemporary fiction, Higgins's criticism is always insightful, and oftentimes entertainingly acerbic.

Perversely, but perhaps appropriately, Aidan Higgins-one of the few contemporary writers worthy of comparison with Beckett and Joyce, now celebrating his 85th year-has chosen to wait until his sight has nearly left him to assemble this collection of visual treats. A commonplace book of anecdotes and cartoons-the latter never before published, though familiar to all of Higgins's correspondents from the margins of his letters and postcards-Blind Man's Bluff is a compendium of tart and comic insights into sight itself, as well as other varied indignities: personal, historical, and literary.

In this bawdy memoir, Irish author Aidan Higgins dissects the pretensions of a Catholic family in County Kildare. He examines the mystery of growing up, his rearing on a run-down estate, the decline of a family fortune, and the wide world that he discovered in London and South Africa.

'Tired of walking in the dream I have returned to the country where I was born half a century ago' - The Higgins family is now dispersed; ' he finds this problematical peace, sharing a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward two year tenancy with a school mistress with back back trouble.

This spirited and quirky penman has always set himself apart form the general grind of Irish writing and its set themes, to run along the line of the exposed nerve-system.No other Irish writer has been so obsessed with the terrain inconnu of lost or thwarted love as this odd-man-out.

Considered to be one of the best Irish writers of the twentieth century, Aidan Higgins has earned a reputation throughout Europe as an unusual and astringent prose stylist. This omnibus of selected short fiction is the perfect introduction to the talents of this Irish successor to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (although Higgins's work is perhaps more reminiscent of his Welsh contemporary Dylan Thomas), and displays Higgins's warmth of language and character. From a melancholy tale of suicide in "North Salt Holdings" to a colorful depiction of J. J. Catchpole's escapades in "Catchpole, " Higgins builds his characters into touching failures who both attract and repulse the reader.

THE BOOK: Flotsam and Jetsam is a selection of prose, some previously unpublished, written over the last thirty five years by one of Ireland's greatest writers. It includes work adapted from earlier novels, short stories and radio plays.