Flotsam and Jetsam

Times Literary Supplement

Flotsam and Jetsam offers a vivid illustration of Higgins range and eclecticism, his outstanding control of atmospheres, his literary development and his importance in the history of twentieth century Irish literature, in which he can be seen as a missing link between the modernist period and contemporary writing

Penelope Mortimer

His characters, eccentric, tattered, inconsequent, slowly and powerfully burning up their lives, are unwieldy and magnificent....Aidan Higgins is a writer of great originality and strength.
— Sunday Times (London)

Bernard Share

Langrishe, Go Down is clearly the best novel by an Irish writer since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett.
— Irish Times

Frank O'Connor

Aidan Higgins is a born writer, in love with language and what language can do.
— Sunday Independent (Dublin)

Spectator

Higgins writes with genuine Irish bitter poetic intensity....He reminds me of novelists who used to write for the sake of writing, to achieve what Nabokov called 'aesthetic bliss.' Higgins helps to revive language.

Publishers Weekly

This collection of short fiction by one of Ireland's intransigent modernists follows, roughly, the chronological order in which the works were written. "Asylum," a novella from the early period, is an Anglo-Irish tale of a mad Englishman fallen on hard times. Eddy Brazill is the son of a manager of an estate in Ireland. He's one of the many who eventually make the crossing to England, taking a series of starvation-wage jobs in London until he is saved from utter starvation by an old acquaintance, Ben Boucher, a deaf, alcoholic toff who proposes that Eddy become his personal servant while he dries out at a sanatorium in Stye, an English coastal town. Boucher's type eccentric, sexually tormented and pathetic seems attractive to Higgins. In "Catchpole," the eponymous hero is a very odd married man down on his luck on the south coast of Spain, telling the narrator his life story, which mainly consists of sundry degradations involving a polyglot rough trade. His wedding is emblematic of his career: "The reception was rather grand, the house full of the most proper people.... Later that night the mother-in-law unexpectedly came upon the best man under the groom on the grassy verge of the front drive." Late in his career, his stories become more autobiographical. Such texts as "The Bird I Fancied" and "Sodden Fields" combine opaque personal references and a tumble of images connected by suppressed transitions. In "Sodden Fields," the most successful of these stories, this results in paragraphs that sometimes startle with Brueghel-like images. Determinedly odd and aesthetically uncompromising, Higgins's fiction is not for everyone, but this collection will amply satisfy the discerning few who savor his work. (Mar. 15) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This book brings together 18 pieces of short fiction, originally published between 1960 and 1989, by award-winning Irish author Higgins. These works, most of them novelistic in their scope and ambition, are characterized by a poignant yet sinister lyricism. From the suicide in "North Salt Holdings" to "Catchpole," which relates the picaresque exploits of its title character, Higgins explores the dense, dark underbelly of desire and memory; each story turns on a set of key images that gather density as the writing builds in layers of metaphor and allusion. Whether the subject is race relations or sexual intrigue in post-World War II Germany, themes of guilt and the disruptive force of desire are apparent. Recommended for collections with especially large or complete holdings in contemporary European or Irish literature. Philip Santo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A sampler spanning four decades of eminent Irish stylist Higgins's work, these 18 selections (all but two previously published, some under different titles) offer a multifaceted, melancholic view of Europe, past and present, in which skewed passions figure prominently. The title story, an earlier effort, features a middle-aged husband on holiday with his dotty in-laws who, long frustrated by his corpulent wife's coldness, resorts to raping the black maid. "Asylum" throws together an Irish workingman who's lost the will to work and the alcoholic son of a landowner, taking a cure in order to claim his inheritance. The two play winter golf at a frigid seaside resort, while at night the scion tries to instill his vast education into his companion's thick head. But that head is full of a young chanteuse glimpsed at the local theater, leaving the intellectual talking to himself-which drops him right off the wagon. The aging rake Catchpole, vacationing in Spain in the story bearing his name, recounts endless tales of his gay love life, while eyeing the tight-jeaned prospects from his cafe table and all but ignoring his wife and infant. More recent writings are even more in the travelogue vein, with the sights of Copenhagen the scene for the fractured romance of "Helsingor Station," and the mood of Munich as Israeli athletes are killed by terrorists during the '72 Olympics central to "Black September." While shaped with consummate skill, the sun doesn't often shine in these stories, making an already hefty tome seem that much heavier.