Flann o brien the poor mouth wiki

Irish novel by Flann O'Brien

An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) is a novel in Irish by Flann O'Brien, published under the pseudonym "Myles na gCopaleen". It is regarded as one of the most important Irish-language novels of the twentieth century.

An English translation by Patrick C. Power appeared in Stan Gebler Davies wrote: "The Poor Mouth is wildly funny, but there is at the same time always a sense of black evil. Only O'Brien's genius, of all the writers I can think of, was capable of that mixture of qualities."^[1]

Background

The book is a kindly parody of the genre of Gaeltacht autobiographies, such as Tomás Ó Criomhthain's autobiography An t-Oileánach (The Islandman), or Peig Sayers' autobiography Peig, which recounts her life, especially the latter half, as a series of misfortunes in which much of her family die by disease, drowning or other mishap.

Books of this genre were part of the Irish language syllabus in the Irish school system an