Kevin Cryan
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"What I'm Reading..." Clive James
« : 08.03.19 at 16:34 » |
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Clive James: What I’m reading, from Flann O’Brien to The Odyssey
The legendary critic on what’s been keeping him entertained
by Clive James / March 7, 2019 /
Published in April 2019 issue of Prospect Magazine
Quote:Thrumming discreetly in the deep regions of Addenbrooke’s Hospital here in Cambridge, the X-ray projectors continue to chase a dodgy little cancer from one of my facial cavities to the next, so I am still catching up with Christmas. One of my presents was The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long, who must have wondered, towards the end of her task, what kind of nut-bag she had taken on. Justifiably regarded as an adornment to Irish literature, O’Brien was a funny novelist who was even funnier as a columnist, but there is nothing funny about hearing a grown mind fooling around with the word “nigger.” In his later years O’Brien, in his correspondence, did so habitually, although we perhaps need to see his bad habit in the oblique light cast by the further fact that he never gave up on the idea that St Augustine might have been black.
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