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The Hard Life

Flann O'Brien

3.63 · Rating details · 853 ratings · 68 reviews

Subtitled An Exegesis of Squalor, The Hard Life is a sober farce from a master of Irish comic fiction. Set in Dublin at the turn of the century, the novel does involve squalor illness, alcoholism, unemployment, bodily functions, crime, illicit sex but also investigates such diverse topics as Church history, tightrope walking, and the pressing need for public toilets for la ...more

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Paperback, 179 pages

Published September 1st 1996 by Dalkey Archive Press (first published 1961)

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Sep 05, 2016 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

Shelves: flannobrien

I have to admit to indulging in some blasphemous thoughts while reading The Hard Life.
I don't think anyone could really blame me given the amount of irreverence I've come across this summer while making my way through the works of Flann O'Brien and François Rabelais, both of whom enjoy satirising the religious practices of their day in outrageous fashion. And being an ambitious pair, they aim their jibes not just at the lowest ranks of the clergy or even at the middle ranking ones but also at th I have to admit to indulging in some blasphemous thoughts while reading The Hard Life.
I don't think anyone could really blame me given the amount of irreverence I've come across this summer while making my way through the works of Flann O'Brien and François Rabelais, both of whom enjoy satirising the religious practices of their day in outrageous fashion. And being an ambitious pair, they aim their jibes not just at the lowest ranks of the clergy or even at the middle ranking ones but also at the very top - the most recent books I’ve read by both authors have long digressions on the papacy. However, they take different approaches to their religious satire; while Rabelais is cleverly ambiguous, Flann O'Brien is more outspoken in his criticisms and seems determined to provoke every religious institution in the Ireland of the sixties. There was even a rumour that he tried to have the newly published Hard Life brought to the attention of the Censorship Board by writing to the papers under a pseudonym and complaining about the sacreligious content of the book. He clearly believed that in order to join the ranks of other leading Irish authors, he needed to have at least one book banned and The Hard Life was to be it.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review having had some blasphemous thoughts while reading the book. Those thoughts were not about religion so perhaps blasphemy isn’t quite the right term to use since it tends to be reserved for serious religious matters. Disrespectful might be better. Incidentally, disrespectful is a word that might be generally applied to our two irreverent authors, and which of them is the most disrespectful would make for a good debate. Some might rate Rabelais higher in terms of audacity, others might think Flann is the most audacious - and especially in this book where he spins a seriously slim yarn into a full-length novella. Of course there are no fixed rules about the length of a novella, and Flann was never famous for paying attention to rules in any case:
(view spoiler)

So we’ll set aside the issue of whether The Hard Life is a novella or simply a long short story, or even a couple of shorter stories cobbled together… But we’ve set that aside. I won't insist further on the ‘literary form’ into which this book doesn't slot.

Long or short, we're all used to stories having a beginning, a middle and an end. In At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien decided that a book could easily have more than one beginning and he successfully demonstrated that theory. In The Third Policeman, it was the middle of the story he concentrated on, liberating it brilliantly from the beginning and the end. When he wrote The Hard Life, I suspect he may have been experimenting with the the notion of endings. It seemed to me that where this book was concerned, he opted to give it no ending at all - he just allowed it to fizzle out in a feeble sputter.
Perhaps O'Brien was challenging our sense of expectation, reminding us that the author doesn't have to obey all the conventions, that he can disregard the rules. I'd support him in that theory if the overall creativity of the book justified the experimentation, as I felt it did in his other novels. In the case of The Hard Life, and though it's difficult for me to admit it having been a confirmed Flann fan until now, I have to concede it didn't.

So I don't need to finish explaining those blasphemous thoughts I mentioned at the beginning...I think...

...more

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Mar 13, 2014 Agnieszka rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2014, reviewed, own-a-copy

Growing up in Dublin at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries for sure was not the easiest thing . Joyce knew something about it too -see Portrait of the artist ... . Certain themes , to mention Irishness and Catholicism , are common here . Albeit , there where Joyce had thundered , O'Brien has just mocked .

Novel , starting in truly Dickensian way , very soon transforms into a grotesque satire launching an attack at all the Irish holiness. O’Brien’s Dubliners , in the haze of alcohol , waste ...more

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Sep 24, 2010 MJ Nicholls rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: pogue-mahone, novellas, dalkey-by-proxy

Flann's return to novels since The Third Policeman was no-noed. I've often wondered how many publishers turned down the manuscript: I get the impression if he'd had a thicker skin and shopped it around the country or abroad, we'd have a fatter body of work.

Well. Never mind. The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor is dedicated to Graham Greene, responsible for At Swim-Two-Birds being printed (and, to an extent, Third Policeman being passed over). This novella is a humorous piece involving a schemin ...more

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Feb 23, 2013 J.M. Hushour rated it really liked it

Orphans Manus and Finbarr are sent to live with their uncle Mr. Collopy. Collopy is obsessed with his secret scheme to have women's restrooms and toilets installed around early 20th century Dublin. His co-schemer is the German Jesuit Father Fahrt. Manus, in the meantime, begins ransacking scientific works and republishing them as his own under various pseudonyms and selling them to the gullible by mail-order (How to Tight-Rope Walk, Cultivating the Sours, Dentistry, etc.) Finbarr hates school, l ...more

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Feb 05, 2014 Adam rated it liked it

Shelves: i-laughed-out-loud, ireland

If this is one of O'Brien's lesser books (as other reviews seem to say), then I am eager to read the rest of his work. I liked the brother's mail order scams. The revelation of the nature of the half-uncle's work with women was clever (and the one-sided transcript of his interview with the Pope was hilarious). ...more

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Apr 08, 2016 Cody rated it really liked it

The problem with comparisons is that they innately position things as superior/inferior to other things. So the ‘reviewer’ is tasked with deciding which benchmarks they want to arbitrarily choose this time around to judge the merit of something (as if our opinions mean shit). Do you judge a given book against all books that you have ever read? Keep it internal and judge the author against their other works? By doing the latter, you run the risk of making a book seem insubstantial by proximity to The problem with comparisons is that they innately position things as superior/inferior to other things. So the ‘reviewer’ is tasked with deciding which benchmarks they want to arbitrarily choose this time around to judge the merit of something (as if our opinions mean shit). Do you judge a given book against all books that you have ever read? Keep it internal and judge the author against their other works? By doing the latter, you run the risk of making a book seem insubstantial by proximity to relative greatness. The former requires a mindtrap memory that far exceeds my own. As such, I’m saying ‘fuck it’ and going back to stewing on the fact that I’m sunburned and sore (which may end up being the name of my autobiography).

The Hard Life is likely the least ‘substantial’ (by whose criteria, I’ll never know) of all the books published under the O’Brien name. That’s like saying it’s the worst cigarette in the pack: they’re all pretty goddamn scrumptious. Think of it as the straight-faced sister novel to The Poor Mouth; they’re both thematically concerned with deflating Irish nationalism, this time with an extra dose of piss-vinegar for the Catholic Church.

“The brother” is the real hero of the book, an early precursor to Gaddis’ J R Vansant. His moneymaking schemes, and his espousing of their greatness, are fantastic and canonical O’Brien:

“Every day you meet people going around with two heads. They are completely puzzled by life, they understand practically nothing and are certain of only one thing—that they are going to die. I am not going to go so far as to contradict them in that but I believe I can suggest to them a few good ways of filling up the interval.”

So here was the way I ranked if you need my frazzled reasoning to proceed and read one of the most celebrated and critically recognized authors of the 20th century: 3 stars against other O’Brien; 4 stars within the largesse of literature/fiction that I have read. Going with the 4 as I am God of all and sundry in the inconsequential tierra nueva of the self-fellating universe that is the GR review-o-sphere.

Back to the sunburn and being fanned by my Frond Boys.
...more

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Sep 28, 2008 David rated it really liked it

Hilarious, as usual, but not at quite the insane level of greatness as The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds. What, you haven't read either of those yet? Go do it! (Start with 3rd P.)

As funny as The Hard Life is, it's more... familiar than those early works, which is a little tragic. AS2B didn't sell well, and 3rd P wasn't published until after his death. One can't help but wish 3rd P had been recognized for the genius work it was. What other mad gems might he have produced if he'd received ...more

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Dec 23, 2016 Sahar added it

Shelves: ditched

I miserably failed at finishing this book. It is from one of my all time favorite authors but I believe my unfamiliarity with old street Irish English was too much a burden to take while reading the book. I'll attempt to redo it in near future. ...more

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Mar 24, 2007 Geoffrey rated it liked it

The best irish author no one has ever heard of. It may seem at first another romantic vision of the wisdom of the Irish poor, turn on your irony detector when reading.

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Jun 21, 2015 Alison rated it it was amazing

Every time I finish a Flann O'Brien book I become immediately depressed that I can't read it again for the first time. Very, very funny in all of the best ways. ...more

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Sep 06, 2016 Jim rated it liked it · review of another edition

In his article in The New Yorker marking the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Flann O’Brien, Mark O’Connell talks a little about all his works and then slips in…

The less said about “The Hard Life,” though, the better.

…without explaining himself. An odd thing to say about a book that sold out in Dublin within two days, and reviewers, especially in England (Anthony Burgess amongst them), praised with gusto.

The story’s a simple enough one:

Two orphans, Finbarr and his brother Manus, are sent t

In his article in The New Yorker marking the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Flann O’Brien, Mark O’Connell talks a little about all his works and then slips in…

The less said about “The Hard Life,” though, the better.

Two orphans, Finbarr and his brother Manus, are sent to live with their half-uncle, Mr Collopy, his second wife (who is always referred to as Mrs Crotty) and his daughter by his first marriage, Annie. They are fed, looked after and given an education so really there’s very little hard about their lives but then neither is there anything very interesting. Page after page, however, is devoted to (humorous if you know what they’re talking about) alcohol-fuelled exchanges between Collopy and his friend, the Jesuit priest Father Kurt Fahrt. Suddenly the two boys are grown, the intervening years clearly being unworthy of detailed description.

Manus, the older of the two (whom Finbarr tends to refer to as “the brother”), discovers an entrepreneurial streak within himself and, with the help of a found printing press, has big plans for his future beginning with the production of a modest pamphlet teaching people how to walk the tightrope. Eventually he relocates to London…
—An Irish address is no damned use. The British dislike and distrust it. They think all the able and honest people live in London.
…and establishes the London University Academy offering a wide corpus of study including
Boxing, Foreign Languages, Botany, Poultry Farming, Journalism, Fretwork, Archaeology, Swimming, Elocution, Dietetics, Treatment of High Blood Pressure, Ju-Jutsu, Political Science, Hypnotism, Astronomy, Medicine in the Home, Woodwork, Acrobatics and Wire-Walking, Public Speaking, Music, Care of the Teeth, Egyptology, Slimming, Psychiatry, Oil Prospecting, Railway Engineering, A Cure for Cancer, Treatment of Baldness, La Grande Cuisine, Bridge and Card Games, Field Athletics, Prevention and Treatment of Boils, Laundry Management, Chess, The Vegetable Garden, Sheep Farming, Etching and Drypoint, Sausage Manufacture in the Home, The Ancient Classics, Thaumaturgy Explained…
all in pamphlet or book form the information being culled from existing texts. Finbarr sees no good coming of this…
—I have a terrible feeling that sooner or later the police will take a hand in that foundation.
—Nonsense!
—I don’t know. I feel the ice is pretty thin, smart and all as you are.
—I haven’t put a foot wrong yet.
…but whilst waiting on the other shoe falling Manus makes quite a bit of money enough to be able to pay for Collopy to visit the Pope when a treatment for pyorrhoea alveolaris (outlined in one of the Academy’s leaflets) goes awry and he ends up putting on a huge amount of weight.

On the whole not a lot happens in the book. Its humour is primarily linguistic and O’Brien delights in every sentence—from all accounts he thought his own book hilarious—but many of the Irishisms were lost on me (thullabawns, thooleramawns, looderamawns, pishrogues, crawthumpers, bookuls) and some of the sentences are a bit convoluted but no more so than Beckett or Joyce. It’s nowhere near as clever though as his better known books; the story is linear and mostly realistic.

Of course the book was designed to offend—the author hoped that his name for the Jesuit would be enough to “justify the thunderclap”—but on the whole it feels tame and, much to O’Brien’s disappointment, the book was not banned. On the whole I find myself struggling to say what the book is about. It’s not an especially hard read, the exchanges between Collopy and the priest aside (they can drag a bit), but I don’t know what the author expected me to take away from it. I feel like I’ve missed something. As fellow Goodreads reviewer Tom Bomp succinctly put it, “Feels like a shaggy dog story with a punchline that we're not privy to.” One for completists, I think. ...more

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Mar 10, 2019 Colton Sorrels rated it liked it

Probably the easiest Flann O'Brien novel I've read. There are some really interesting characters, but overall the story felt incomplete and the ending just dropped off. Still worth the read as he is probably the best when it comes to Irish Literature. ...more

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Jan 30, 2019 Erik Schoning rated it liked it

Flann O’Brien is a funny writer. He has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and Irish dialect; in fact, most of this book takes the form of fireside conversations between a whiskey-loving old man and his Jesuit pal. What the contemporary American reader can’t make out in context turns out to be funny anyway, from sound alone. File under new insults: “poguemahone”, “thooleramawn”.

The Hard Life is a deceptive little novel. It begins, in the tradition of David Copperfield or Tristram Shandy, with t Flann O’Brien is a funny writer. He has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and Irish dialect; in fact, most of this book takes the form of fireside conversations between a whiskey-loving old man and his Jesuit pal. What the contemporary American reader can’t make out in context turns out to be funny anyway, from sound alone. File under new insults: “poguemahone”, “thooleramawn”.

The Hard Life is a deceptive little novel. It begins, in the tradition of David Copperfield or Tristram Shandy, with the birth of its narrator, Finbarr, and you assume you’re going to get the story of this person’s life. In fact, Finbarr very soon becomes a secondary character, whose primary function is to relate the exploits of his entrepreneuring older brother, Manus, whose schemes include mail-order courses on everything from ancient history to curing cancer. Actually this narrator-as-secondary-character thing works well; Finbarr’s relative sanity, compared to his brother and his alcoholic caretaker, allows us to see their absurdities all the more clearly.

No spoiler: the main thrust of the novel is the old man’s mysterious quest to perform some sort of public service for the city of Dublin. What he’s after isn’t revealed until the last chapter, and it’s funny. My issue with O’Brien’s opacity here is that he holds out for the punchline, the big reveal. It can be taxing to read 100+ pages without knowing what anybody is talking about, but I’m also a reader who’s used to being force-fed narrative information. Maybe a little bit of mystery isn’t the worst thing. And actually this sort of vagueness, given the novel’s consistent skewering of Catholicism and religious practice, can be read as a sending up of the willful obscurities and repressions of the religious life.

Words like “punchline” are relevant to a novelist who so explicitly aims to make us laugh. Most of the time he is successful. The dialogue is hilarious, Manus’s charlatanry so outrageous. O’Brien is totally uninterested in a story with a moral, and how unwelcome one would be in the book’s closing pages: we would reject it. Instead, like a joke, The Hard Life ends abruptly, begging for our laughter. It’s not the sort of artful poignant close we tend to expect in literary fiction; Then again, a term like “literary fiction” is exactly the sort of thing O’Brien would bristle against. I will say that The Hard Life is enjoyable while reading, but once you close it, it tends to leave you, to lose any sort of foothold in your memory. Since finishing it I’ve reopened my copy twice, and both times I’ve come across scenes I enjoyed, both on first and second reads. It makes you smile, this book does.
...more

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Apr 13, 2008 le-trombone rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction-general

Very dryly humorous; possibly so dry that I missed much of the pointed commentary.

The story is told by the younger of two orphaned brothers, Finbarr and Manus, who are brought to Mr. Collophy in the south side of Dublin, about 1890. We follow their life over the course of about twelve years. Mr. Collophy is a loquacious know-it-all who, we gradually learn, has a solution to the plight of the women of Dublin (we don't really know what this is, as Finbarr is too young to understand). The only pers ...more

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Jan 11, 2017 Jeff rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-literary

Here are some new insults I learned (in order of appearance) while reading this book:
► bloody young gurrier
► thooleramawn
► looderamawn
► bold rossie
► thullabawn
► bosthoons
► rodomondario*
► sons of gobhawks
► pultogue
► fat country rozzers
► poguemahons
► pinkeens
► bloody gawms

* Google's only result for this word is the Google Book's search for text within this book itself. I'm starting to think Flann O'Brien made some of these up! This list alone is reason enough to read The Hard Life.

Kidding aside, i ...more

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Mar 04, 2013 C. A. Powell rated it it was amazing

A young lad tells you the story from a very naive point of view. You get to look out at the world through his eyes but see things more realistically and very different from his fledgeling innocent take on life. You, the reader, are equipped with adult perception against the young lad's less mature and comical perspective. This is how you enter and see the delightful story unfold. The style of writing makes this comedy novel so charming and compelling. The presentation to the reader is crafted in ...more

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Jul 15, 2009 senator jensen rated it really liked it

a humor difficult to discern until i got to page 138, for some reason. in any case, i laughed until the end. flann o'brien was a genius writer that anyone who hopes to write funnily should read all the time. ...more

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Oct 02, 2013 David Hogan rated it liked it

I'm a Flann O'Brien fan and have read all his other novels. Though still interesting and intermittently funny, this novel felt slighter than some of his other works ('At Swim-Two-Birds' and 'The Third Policeman' especially) and lacking their sharper humor/satire. ...more

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Dec 01, 2007 Colleen Patten rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: fans of Irish Lit

Flann O'Brien has the richest trove of Gaelic expressions. How can you not like a book where the priest is named Father Fahrt? ...more

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Feb 14, 2008 King rated it it was amazing

Relentlessly test-driven in the pubs of Slovenia, there is no better compliment for your third pint of Guinness than this. Even the Pope makes an appearance. How can you beat that?

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May 12, 2009 Shelby rated it liked it

pretty funny stuff - more straightforward than earlier flann o'brien books, and very slight at about 100 pages. might be a better entry point for new flann readers than two birds or policeman. ...more

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Aug 04, 2009 Clodagh rated it it was ok

a lot of this is going over my head... fairly funny none the less. I would very much like to include words such as thallabawn, bastoon and segocia into my daily vocabulary.

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Nov 13, 2009 Robt. rated it really liked it

Fourth of the five in the Complete Novels.

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Aug 20, 2013 Gar rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites

Good humor. A nice short story to read

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May 13, 2014 ML Character rated it liked it · review of another edition

It's fine. Full of Irishisms. Not jawdropping like the Third Policeman though. Slightly disappointed since I've loved other O'Brien so much. ...more

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Nov 14, 2015 M. rated it liked it

A diverting little read, as enjoyably written as any O'Brien/O'Nolan but without too much plot. It's full of fun Irish Catholic-ness, but I felt like it unraveled a bit... ...more

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Mar 17, 2017 Katrinka rated it liked it

3.5. Pretty good, but nowhere near the brilliance of The Third Policeman or The Dalkey Archive.

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Jun 06, 2017 mytwocents rated it really liked it

Great wit

...if you're a fan of 'Withnail and I'... ...more

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Jul 18, 2017 Geoffrey rated it liked it

Very odd indeed. Not at all what one expects from O'Brien. Sort of quirky, but too "normal," I feel like, for it's own good, and in the end you sort of wonder, huh. Was there a point to all that? ...more

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Oct 01, 2020 Bradd Saunders rated it really liked it

The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor, by Flann O’Brien is intelligent and funny. A true Irishman, O’Brien’s works are a time capsule of perfectly crafted Irish vernacular and descriptions of turn-of-the-century, Irish life. It’s a world that barely exists now but still resonates because, while times have changed, people haven’t. And though his books often have difficulties with construction and theme they more than make up for it in their imagination, intelligence, insight, and sheer charm.

The ...more

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About Flann O'Brien

Flann O'Brien

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Pseudonym of Brian Ó Nualláin , also known as Brian O'Nolan.

His English novels appeared under the name of Flann O’Brien, while his great Irish novel and his newspaper column (which appeared from 1940 to 1966) were signed Myles na gCopaleen or Myles na Gopaleen – the second being a phonetic rendering of the first. One of twelve brothers and sisters, he was born in 1911 in Strabane, Count ...more

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“well merciful martyrs in heaven.. did you ever hear the likes of it?.. drinking whisky in a first class carriage and us on a pilgrimage to kneel at the feet of the holy father” — 1 likes

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