Transit

by Bernard Share

Overview

Two men meet in an airport men's room ("Excuse me. But you're pissing on my foot.") sometime in the early 1990s in the Arabian Gulf. From this meeting, they proceed to get a bit drunk on bad liquor, discover a magical hidden room, get transported back to the Ireland of the late 1940s and '50s, rummage through memories of their days at Trinity College (though they apparently never knew each other), and fumble about like Laurel and Hardy trying to make a degree of sense of what's happening (or did happen) to them. As oblique and deliciously Irish as Joyce and Beckett, and drawing upon the time warps of Flann O'Brien, Bernard Share has composed an hallucinatory and comic romp through Ireland past and present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564785428
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	05/19/2009
Series:	Irish Literature Series
Pages:	135
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Bernard Share is a distinguished critic, writer and teacher. He is a former editor of Cara, the Aer Lingus in-flight magazine; the author of many books, including the bestselling The Emergency, a popular account of Irish life during World War II and the hilarious Inish, a novel originally published in 1966 and re-issued last year: Spike Milligan said on more than one occasion that it was the funniest book he had ever read. Bernard Share has been a lecturer in modern literature both in Ireland and Australia. The previous editions of Slanguage appeared to critical and commercial acclaim.

What People are Saying About This

Spike Milligan

Inish is the funniest novel I have ever read.

Editorial Reviews

A quirky, colloquial time-traveling novel by Share (The Emergency) carries two men back to their days at Trinity College circa 1949. Two aging salesmen run into each other at an airport somewhere in the Arab world; disoriented by passing through numerous time zones and unsure whether they have met before, they have drinks and fall into a familiar banter before one of them, known by his school nickname, A N Other, discovers a secret chamber in the men's room. There, the clothes and currency are throwbacks, the clocks have stopped and the inhabitants are discussing the declaration of the Irish Republic. Other and Rimmer, as his companion is called, travel to 1949 and 1950 and wander about Trinity, where they recall their student days and learn how one of Rimmer's romantic mishaps later turns out to be quite the opposite for Other. It's quaint and fun, though the oddballness sometimes comes across as too orchestrated. (May)

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Publishers Weekly

'Perhaps if you fed into a sausage machine the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and a couple of years of The Irish Jeweller & Fancy Goods Journal (which Mr. Share has edited along with his more literary pursuits) and turned the crank, you'd create Inish. Having gone that far, I'd continue cranking to see what came next. For Inish is a very funny book.

San Francisco Chronicle

I find that my admiration for Mr. Share's imagination, originality, and control is still rising . . . I am ready to go on record that Inish puts Bernard Share on the map as one of Ireland's leading literary craftsmen.
— The Irish Times

Grattan Freyer

Fairly glitters on the page, bouncing and careening in a dozen different directions at once . . . Influences? Joyce, probably; Robbe-Grillet, possibly; Flann O'Brien, most likely of all. But far stronger than any of these surely are the thousands of pub talks from which Bernard Share wove these wild fantasies—not to mention the stout he drank working at the loom.
— Catholic World

Bruce Cook

Two aging Irish raconteurs take an unexpected tumble through their halcyon days. Best known for the 1966 metaphysical comedy Inish, Share (Slanguage, 2008, etc.) runs wild with an equally surrealist notion in this slight but whimsical tale about time travel and the perils of revisiting the past. The novel opens in an unnamed airport in the Middle East circa 1990. Two Irish expats meet during a bathroom run-in and immediately go looking for the closest spot to drink. The stouter of the two is a Latin-spouting rake who professes to using the performing name "A N Other"; his slimmer and decidedly more cautious companion recalls his writing pseudonym as Meniscus but is quickly dubbed "Rimmer" by Other. After downing an unusual bottle of Jordanian plonk, the unlikely duo find themselves transported back to the Dublin of their younger days, bounding back and forth from 1949 to 1950 and revisiting their younger selves at Trinity College in Dublin. Share's prose, while economically literate and entrenched in the characteristics of Irish drama, borders on nonsensical much of the time. Yet his protagonists nevertheless convey a witty, antique charm as they mutter Beckett-like asides to themselves. "To travel is, hopefully, better than to arrive," Other says as he tries to ferret out their whereabouts at their first tumultuous intersection. In a later chapter, Rimmer, who suddenly finds his elder mind couched inside his younger self, frantically tries to make sense of a moment from his own past: "If I was not here then I cannot be here now." Ultimately, the men find their histories are far more connected than they first realized. "Two hands, perhaps, patting the same dog," Other observes of theirlinked experience. Students of Irish literature, Trinity College alumni and postmodernist playwrights will find a few small joys here and there, but more casual readers are likely to find themselves lost.

Kirkus Reviews