A review by caterinaanna
The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life by Ralph Steadman, Patrick C. Power, Flann O'Brien

3.0

had I not read the introduction to this I would not have got it at all at all. Eeven having done so, I still feel I missed out on some of the joke. This repetitive tale of constant rain and rural poverty is full of exaggerated incident: misery memoir meets slapstick film in the Gaeltacht. Apparently O'Brien/O'Nolan/na gCopaleen's aim was to send up the nationalists' "woe is me" sentimentality and some of the stylistic conventions of the nascent gaelic writing fraternity. If he has done a good job I confess I am left with no desire to read it and wondering how a country with such a rich oral and musical tradition, as well as producing such writers as 'Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw' (name that tune), could lose its way so badly when at last given the opportunity to produce a written literature of its own.