Eickhoff’s translations are fluid and easy, but this is a rarefied work that will appeal almost solely to scholars and...
New translations by veteran Celtic scholar Eickhoff (The Destruction of the Inn, 2001, etc.) of more than 30 early Irish tales and fragments.
Ancient Irish literature is an acquired taste, even for the Irish, and readers dipping into Eickhoff’s meticulously organized and annotated anthology may find themselves reminded on occasion of Frank McCourt’s recollections (in Angela’s Ashes) of little boys in Limerick combing through the folklore for descriptions of Cúchulainn winning his wife in a peeing contest. All of these tales date from well before the arrival of the English in the 12th century, and they portray a world of clans that is almost pre-agrarian and given heavily to the heroic arts of war and conquest. As the author puts it in his introduction, “Ancient Irish stories are categorized as Destructions, Cattle-raids, Courtships, Battles, Cave Stories, Voyages, Tragedies, Adventures, Banquets, Sieges, Plunderings, Elopements, Eruptions, Visions, Love Stories, Hastings, and Invasions.” Most of the selections here, in fact, are written renditions of much older bardic odes, and their content is usually aptly summarized by their titles (“The Battle of Etair,” “The Wooing of Luaine,” etc.). Like all heroic tales, they use a highly formal and ornate rhetoric (“A wrathful brown hero is there and a fair, splendid hero, and a valiant champion who could rival a king with thick, yellow-red hair that is like a honeycomb at the end of harvest”), but they also rely on comic antics and ribaldry (in “The Intoxication of the Ulster Men,” a tribe defends itself by having its women strip naked before the bashful Cúchulainn, knowing that he will turn his back on them) to a much greater degree than the Norse sagas. The “Fragments” collected at the end are a mixture of incomplete tales and miscellaneous proverbs (“Sufficiency is better than a multitude”).
Eickhoff’s translations are fluid and easy, but this is a rarefied work that will appeal almost solely to scholars and serious Celtophiles.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-87019-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
