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Title: At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel
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Manufacturer: Scribner
List Price: $16.00
Our Price: $3.31
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| Customer Reviews: |
| At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel by Scribner Beautiful and Heartbreaking | It is a rare novel that allows one to run the entire gamut of human emotions. It is rarer still the novel that elicits such an emotional attachment to the characters that the reader not only feels for them but feels with them.
The love that is shared by Jim and Doyler is the kind of love that all people strive for, pure, passionate, undying and true. You feel their love grow and blossom through the beautiful images that O'Neill paints with his confident wielding of words and phrases.
True, this novel does not belong to one genre but the main themes of love, passion and reconciliation of self is what touched me the most. The love of Jim for Doyler, Doyler for Jim and MacMurrough's love for both boys. The passion that they share for the things that are most important in their lives and the slow but profound finding of the place where the were truly meant to be, and their life-changing coming of age, rang as truly with me as any of my own life experiences.
The ending is poignant, achingly horrifying and more than enough to make the stoutest of hearts break with overwhelming grief... more than once. (Believe me, I cried three times and for about twenty minutes all told)
This book is a must read for one and all. | | At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel by Scribner Searing, affecting, heart-breaking. | Despite its daunting length and (at first) unfamiliar vernacular, this book will creep steadily up on you, just like an old blanket would, as one gets swept into its compassionate core. Foremost it remains a love story, with every wrenching shred of angst one might expect - but like all great art it refuses a single category. Meditations on History, Politics, Religion, Family, Community, Friendship, and of course Love between Men are right at home beside a stirring narrative of events leading up to the 1916 Easter Rising, where Ireland begins its painful tumble toward independence.
But it's in the characters that a novel lives by (least thats what I hear), and it's in their brutal yet loving portrayal that this story really shines. The particular yearnings of Jim and Doyler for each other, of the wounded MacMurrough for a spirit at peace, of Ireland for her dignity, even of Jim's father for the 'good life' - ring as true for them as for any of us.
Reading 'At Swim' has made me believe that it is still possible a book can come along and change your life. For each to find a nation of one's own, is this story's great hope for its readers, and I'm inspired to find mine. | | At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel by Scribner Not just a "gay" book. | I rarely review anything on this site--not books, not movies, not CDs. I never feel that strongly about a product. But this book is different. When I bought it, I was skeptical about all the hype. Usually with a book that is so universally loved you are setting yourself up for a disappointment. Not so with this. It surpasses the hype in so many ways.
First of all--yes, the three main characters are gsy, but this is in no way a "gay book". It is a romance novel, a war novel, a coming-of-age. It is epic, and purely Irish in its nature. Don't give up after the first few chapters. This definitely isn't American English. It isn't even British English. It's *Irish* English. The prose is dense but lyrical, and reads like a song or a poem. Even if you absolutely hate the characters or plot, I can't imagine anyone who bothers to read past chapter two not completely awestruck by Jamie O'Neill's use of language. This book was ten years in the writing, and it shows.
You probably already know the plot, so I won't annoy you with that. But this book will break your heart into a million little pieces and haunt you for the rest of your life. So read it. Right now. | | At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel by Scribner rich, flowing prose and passion | It's always wonderful when an artist truly takes the time to let a work develop. This massive yet warmly flowing work of historic fiction is worth grazing through lovingly.
I needn't go into repeating the plot, which has been aptly written up in other reviews. Simply, if you want to enjoy a large and fully developed novel on a grand yet intimate scale. | | At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel by Scribner A Boyish Bond | Read about the bond between two boys in this historical fiction novel set in the suburbs of Dublin, Ireland.
| | At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel by Scribner Product Description | | Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916 -- Ireland's brave but fractured revolt against British rule -- At Swim, Two Boys is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O'Neill. Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son -- revolutionary and blasphemous -- of Mr. Mack's old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves. All the while Mr. Mack, who has grand plans for a corner shop empire, remains unaware of the depth of the boys' burgeoning friendship and of the changing landscape of a nation. | | At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel by Scribner Amazon.com | | You may have read the hype. Irishman Jamie O'Neill was working as a London hospital porter when his 10-year labor of love, the 200,000-word manuscript of At Swim, Two Boys, written on a laptop during quiet patches at work, was suddenly snapped up for a hefty six-figure advance. For once, the book fully deserves the hype. In the spring of 1915, Jim Mack and "the Doyler," two Dublin boys, make a pact to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter. By the time they do, Dublin has been consumed by the Easter Uprising, and the boys' friendship has blossomed into love--a love that will in time be overtaken by tragedy. O'Neill's prose, playing merrily with vocabulary, syntax, and idiom, has unsurprisingly drawn comparisons to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but in his creation of comic characters (such as Jim's pathetic but irrepressible father) and in the sheer scale of his work, Charles Dickens springs to mind first. But Dickens never wrote a love story between young men as achingly beautiful as this. In the character of Anthony MacMurrough, who is haunted by voices as he pursues his illegal and dangerous desire for Dublin boys, O'Neill has created a complex and fascinating center to his novel, rescuing the love story from mawkishness, and allowing a serious meditation on history, politics, and desire. For as Ireland seeks its own future free of British government, so Jim, Doyle, and MacMurrough look back to Sparta to find a way to live. As Dr Scrotes, one of MacMurrough's voices, commands: Help these boys build a nation of their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literature for words they can speak. In this massive, enthralling, and brilliant debut, Jamie O'Neill has indeed done just that: provided a nation for what Walt Whitman calls, in O'Neill's epigraph, "the love of comrades." --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk |
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