the irish book of the dead: a review of máirtÃn ó cadhain’s the dirty dust
MáirtÃn Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust is not exactly well-known to Anglophone readers, though the novel is surely of a piece with the great literary works that emerged from Ireland in the 20th Century. It has Joyce’s linguistic ingenuity, O’Brien’s surrealism, and Beckett’s comic philosophy. But it is written in Irish Gaelic, and it had to wait until last year to be published in English, by Yale University Press.
Patrick O’Connor reviews The Dirty Dust by MáirtÃn Ó Cadhain.