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Title: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle ISBN: 0-14-023390-3 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.21 (92 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The rare gem that puts you in another's shoes
Comment: I can't relate to reviewers who say the book isn't emotional. On the contrary, it packs a wallop, but you have to see it through. The whole book is made up of little pieces, fragments, seeing the world as a boy does, including the often humorous (mis)understandings--old wives tales & presumptions filling in as knowlegde. I'd forgotten what it was like to lose yourself in time, the way you do in childhood, and the kind of thoughts you have in that state. This is what makes the book a valuable work of art (though never in a stuffy or pretentious way). It's a simple story & doesn't much kick in until the end (when it knocks you flat). Read the first several pages and you'll have a feel for the whole book. I had to push through the middle a bit but was well rewarded at the end.
The book is filled with psychological understanding that runs very deep--especially the dynamics of boys' cruelty to and friendship with one another (read to the end for the full benefit). The narration jumps back and forth a bit, but it's pretty easy to follow. Some of the slang challenged me at first (I'm not Irish), but I figured it all out by the end. (Here's a head start: eccer is homework, mitching is skipping school.) Some may want more plot, but I'd call this a masterpiece. If you like Virginia Woolf, you must read this. You'll get inside character more accessibly and just as deeply. The prose has just as much graceful style and far more humor.
Rating: 4
Summary: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Comment: This was an excellent book. I believe that it is one of the few that I have actually enjoyed reading front to back in an English class. Although the different stories were quite random, I enjoyed that aspect of the book the most of all because staying with one topic for too long can become rather dull. Roddy Doyle shares the thoughts of a 10 year old with the reader and there were many times in the story when I could definately relate with Paddy when I was 10. The ending is superb because you can really see how Paddy grows and changes with the book. The only thing that didn't seem realistic to me was the fact that Paddy had no friends in the end. His friends made fun of him, and although 10 year olds make fun of other kids all the time, they get over it fast, whereas in Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha, Doyle makes it seem like his friends will hate him forever. All in all, I recommend this work of art to high school students and above.
Rating: 2
Summary: A+ for style, C- minus for subject
Comment: One can't but help admiring Roddy Doyle's use of dialog and his tight control over the lengths of his passages to control the pace of the story. Doyle also uses no chapter divisions, jumps from anecdote to anecdote without strict regard to chronology, and stays tightly confined to the Dublin neighborhood of the protagonist. The effect is that beneath the childish and what seem to be trivial accounts of Paddy, there is an incredibly dense story with a colossal amount of detail.
However, for a country with as troubled a history and exciting a future as Ireland, I am truly puzzled why so many contemporary Irish writers tend to pick from a set list of, in my mind, soft topics. On the list of safe themes are progress coming to rural towns, the blue collar side of Dublin, changes to the blue collar side of Dublin, coming of age (marital problems are a must for exploiting this subject), or innocence lost. Paddy Clarke has the middle three. Unfortunately, none of these are uniquely Irish themes, and I for one get a little tired of rereading the same stories by different authors set in different places. You can find them even well outside the Anglophone world.
But I have to give Roddy Doyle some credit. These topics seem safe and seem to have an insatiable audience. He definitely won't have to worry about financial security.
Bottom line: This book is worth a read if you like to study what I like to call the architecture of a story. But I was so tired and bored with the subject matter that I found this easy read quite onerous. It's not a stretch to say that even with all the jumping around, the underlying story is pretty predictable. My rating would have been three stars, but I penalized Doyle one for squandering his stylistic originality.
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Title: The Barrytown Trilogy: The Commitments/the Snapper/the Van by Roddy Doyle ISBN: 0140252622 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle ISBN: 0140255125 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Easter, 1916 and Other Poems by William Butler Yeats ISBN: 0486297713 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 29 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: Early Poems by William Butler Yeats ISBN: 0486278085 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 23 December, 1993 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: Modern Irish Drama (Norton Critical Edition) by John P. Harrington ISBN: 0393960633 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: December, 1991 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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