Scenes from a Receding Past (Irish Literature) by Aidan Higgins


Scenes from a Receding Past (Irish Literature)
Title : Scenes from a Receding Past (Irish Literature)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1564783871
ISBN-10 : 9781564783875
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 204
Publication : First published January 1, 1977

Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan--"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning"--Scenes from a Receding Past constructs the adolescence and early adulthood of Dan Ruttle out of a variety of scenes and reminiscences about his life in Ireland, his time in a Catholic school, his first sexual experiences, and his brother's mental breakdown. The second half of the book centers around his relationship with his future wife Olivia, her past, and her former lovers. Calling to mind Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Dan Ruttle's love-hate relationship with Ireland and the stylistic innovations employed by Higgins, Scenes from a Receding Past is a masterpiece from one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers.

Scenes from a Receding Past (Irish Literature) Reviews

  • MJ Nicholls

    Aidan Higgins’s fourth novel is a trial run for the three volumes of lauded autobiography he would publish in the ‘90s and ‘00s, a fictional whirlwind through memory, reinventing and reconstructing pivotal scenes from childhood and young adulthood in a blitz of flouncily descriptive staccato sentences, like a series of extremely literary brain-farts coming in sequence of furious recall. The act of autobiography, as Christine Brooke-Rose ably punned, is more like the act of autobifography, as the memory is an utterly unreliable, seriously disreputable narrator, making novels like this a more honest effort at truth than a straightforward memoir. The stylistic swagger and erudition of the novel is impressive, although the tone is clinically removed from the various family miseries that befall the narrator-author.