by Aidan Higgins
Publication Date: 07/01/2004
ISBN: 9781564783578
"A bloody marvelous book." Harold Pinter
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 Receding 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 memoirs is constructed in a novelistic way, creating a work of literary art out of a life.
--Aidan Higgins is one of the most highly respected Irish writers of the past fifty years, heir to such master stylists as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The short prose and fiction collected here spans Higgins's entire career, and provides American readers with a compelling introduction to a major international literary figure.