A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers

This is a fine wicked knowledgeable book, and entirely readable, especially the beginning, which can be read aloud straight through without losing you your audience.I first met =A Colder Eye= when I was one of the editors of a literary criticism reference series. We were proceeding alphabetically, which meant that when we hit "O" we got half the Irish writers in one go, also alphabetic near neighbors like Mary Lavin. I found =A Colder Eye= on the shelf at Columbia University's main library, and went flipping through its index to see whether it had substantial sections on the authors I was researching. What I found was that all its index listings for authors had epithets attached: "O'Casey, Sean," it said, "ventriloquist." "?", I thought, and checked another. "O'Nolan, Brian," it said, "logician.""Right," said I, and put the book on my small and extremely selective "books to be checked out" stack. As I knew only too well after reading several small mountain ranges of literary criticism and rejecting most of it, a critic who can joke about his subject, and get it right, is to be cherished. Hugh Kenner knows his stuff. (It's one of the two great funny indices in English literature, the other being of course the index to =The Spotted Owl=; but leave that for another day.)You would be well rewarded for buying =A Colder Eye= in hardcover if you did nothing more than read the part about the charming unreliability of Irish recollections; and allow me to say that the ghost of Brian O'Nolan should be both ashamed and proud of himself for perpetrating the interview with James Joyce Senior.There's nothing else so good on its subject as this book. Enough. Go buy it now. (And if you like it? Hunt up a copy of Walter Bryan's (that is, Walt Willis's) =The Improbable Irish=. If you like both, you may need to acquaint yourself with the works of Brian O'Nolan. But start with Hugh Kenner.)

A deliciously funny and engaging look at the personalities and history behind Irish literature in a tumultuous time. The care and humor with which Kenner treats the subject of Yeats is just beautiful. Several times I laughed out loud while reading it on public mass transit, much to the dismay and confusion of my fellow riders, but I just couldn't help it. I can hardly wait to read Kenner's other works (and I wish I'd discovered him a long time ago).