A Bestiary
Aidan HigginsBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Originally published as three separate volumes—Donkey's Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog—A Bestiary relates the life and times of one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. As in his fiction, Higgins's writing exquisitely captures sights, smells, and emotions, detailing his life from childhood in County Kildare before his family's economic decline, to his mother's slow, agonizing death; from his travels in England and South Africa, to his two years spent living with a schoolmistress after the end of his first marriage. In writing his memoirs Higgins exposes the sources for many of his best novels, from Scenes from a Reading Past to Langrishe, Go Down, giving the reader a rare look into the "story behind the story." But A Bestiary is more than a factual expose—this collection of memoires is constructed in a novelistic way, creating a work of literary art out of a life.Synopsis
"A bloody marvelous book."—Harold Pinter
Publishers Weekly
Higgins is an Irish novelist, highly regarded in the 1960s, whose work had, until recently, been entirely out of print in the U.S. The first American publication of his three memoirs, an omnibus edition published in England between 1995 and 2000, launches a major restoration effort, which includes the concurrent reissue of Higgins's most famous novel, Langrishe, Go Down-the story of four sisters who, he reveals at the end of his first memoir, Donkey's Years, were based on himself and his three brothers, with the setting barely changed from their family home in County Kildare. In recreating his past, Higgins freely admits he's retrieved material from other works as well, though the tone is more often experimental than novelistic. The prose gets even more disjunctive in the second volume, Dog Days, which returns to his first adolescent love affair, then advances to the breakup of his marriage. Higgins's sexual misadventures become more explicit in The Whole Hog, which revisits the time periods of both preceding volumes from different angles. This overlapping is occasionally repetitive, but Higgins keeps things fresh by finding new aspects to share in intensely descriptive prose. The overall effect is less like a memoir than a glimpse at a novelist's notes as he transforms the raw material of his experiences into fictional set pieces. (July 15) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.