Flann O'Brien's brilliantly inventive and witty novel satires many things, including Irish literature and folklore, the nature of narrative, and Modernism itself--of which his novel is, incidentally, a fine example. This comic masterpiece features a young, confused student narrator who lives with his uncle in Dublin and is writing a novel whose characters gradually take over. The novel-within-a-novel is about the exploits of the legendary hero Finn MacCool and the disruptive Irish fairy known as the Pooka, and is an exploration of Irish culture and of the nature of fiction. O'Brien was greatly influenced by Joyce's literary experiments and claimed that "a measure of bewilderment is part of the job of literature."


