carnevalemanfredonia.it » Literature » Oh, Play That Thing

eBook Oh, Play That Thing download

by Roddy Doyle

ISBN: 0676976883
Author: Roddy Doyle
Publisher: Vintage Canada; paperback / softback edition (July 26, 2005)
Language: English
Pages: 384
ePub: 1679 kb
Fb2: 1854 kb
Rating: 4.1
Other formats: docx azw lrf mbr
Category: Literature
Subcategory: Genre Fiction

Download ePub Download Fb2

More..

Home Roddy Doyle Oh, Play That Thing. Published by alfred a. knopf canada.

Home Roddy Doyle Oh, Play That Thing. Oh play that thing, . Oh, Play That Thing, . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40. By the same author. Published in 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House Group Limited.

Flip to back Flip to front.

Roddy Doyle has also written the children's books The Giggler Treatment, Rover Saves Christmas, and The Meanwhile Adventures and contributed to a variety of publications including The New Yorker magazine and several anthologies. Библиографические данные. Oh, Play That Thing: A Novel The Last Roundup (Том 2).

Oh, Play That Things finds Doyle in improvisational mode. It's his jazz novel about Henry's experiences in America between the wars. The best thing that can be said about Play is that it's a page-turner - sort of in the Dickensian sense. Roddy Doyle's books both attract and repel me - in a good way. Stories of characters who face extraordinary hardships are unsettling, but the skills of the Author make reading them so rewarding.

Now Doyle, author of six bestselling novels, twice nominated for the Booker Prize and once a winner, turns his protagonist Henry Smarts rich observation and linguistic acrobatics loose on America, in an energetic saga full of epic adventures, breathless escapes, and star-crossed love

About Oh, Play That Thing. The sequel to Roddy Doyle’s beloved novel A Star Called Henry – an entertaining romp across America in the 1920s. Watch for Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Smile, coming in October of 2017.

About Oh, Play That Thing. Fleeing the Irish Republican paymasters for whom he committed murder and mayhem, Henry Smart has left his wife and infant daughter in Dublin and is off to start a new life. When he lands in America, it is 1924 and New York City is the center of the universe. Henry turns to hawking cheap hooch on the Lower East Side, only to catch the attention of the mobsters who run the district.

Oh, Play That Thing," is the followup to "A Star Called Henry" and is entirely complementary to the first part of this three part trilogy. Roddy Doyle has a great ear and ability to write dialogue fitting of places and time. I can't wait for part 3. The characters in these first two parts of the trilogy are unique but oh so fitting to the best (and worst) of Irish and American cultures and mythology. Love the tie in with Louis Armstrong, New York, Chicago, and other places (not to spoil the story before you read it).

Oh, Play That Thing (2004) is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle. It is Vol. 2 of The Last Roundup series, and follows on from Vol. 1, A Star Called Henry. Having fallen foul of his erstwhile comrades in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Henry escapes to America. In New York City, he becomes involved in advertising, pornography and bootlegging. After stepping on the toes of the Mob, Henry heads for Chicago, where he becomes the manager and partner-in-crime of Louis Armstrong.

The second in Roddy Doyle's Henry Smart trilogy, Oh, Play That Thing, doesn't quite convince Terry Eagleton. In Ireland, writers don't come much leaner than Roddy Doyle, who inherits the niggardly style of Samuel Beckett rather than the lavish manner of James Joyce. With his laconic Dublin-Northside realism, Doyle is a virtuoso of the sentence that travels no further than four or five words. But the fat novel inside him has now come bursting through - two of them, in fact, of which the first was A Star Called Henry, and the second is this fast-moving sequel.

Roddy Doyle’s last novel, A Star Called Henry, was chosen by the The New York Times Book Review as one of the eleven Best Books of the Year; The Washington Post said it was “not only Doyle’s best novel yet; it is a masterpiece, an extraordinarily entertaining epic.” Now Doyle, author of six bestselling novels, twice nominated for the Booker Prize and once a winner, turns his protagonist Henry Smart’s rich observation and linguistic acrobatics loose on America, in an energetic saga full of epic adventures, breathless escapes, and star-crossed love. Publishers Weekly says “Doyle just gets better and better.”Our Irish hero arrives in New York in 1924 to bury himself in the teeming city and start a new life; having escaped Dublin after the 1916 Rebellion, Henry Smart is on the run from the Republicans for whom he committed murder and mayhem. Lying to the immigration officer, avoiding Irish eyes that might recognise him, hiding the photograph of himself with his wife because it shows a gun across his lap, he throws his passport into the river and tries to forge a new identity. He charms his way into the noisy, tough Lower East Side, reads to Puerto Rican cigar makers, hauls bottles for a bootlegger and composes ads on sandwich boards, finally setting up his own business with the intention of making his fortune. But he makes enemies along the way among mobsters such as Johnny No and Fast Olaf. Henry hightails it out of Manhattan with a gun at his back and Fast Olaf’s hustler of a half-sister on his arm.This was a time when America was ripe for the picking, however, and a pair of good, strong con artists could have the world at their fingertips. The Depression was sending folks to ride the rails in search of a new life and new hope, and all trains led to Chicago. As Henry’s past tries to catch up with him, he takes off on a journey to the great port, where music is everywhere: wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet called Louis Armstrong. Armstrong needs a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.The bestselling A Star Called Henry followed Henry Smart from his birth in 1902 until the age of twenty, by which time he had already had a lifetime’s worth of adventures in his native Ireland. With these books, Doyle was trying in some ways to write a story like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, starting at the beginning of his life and following him through many years of adventures. To write the new book, he had to research the vanished world of pre-war America.“I went to Chicago, on the south side, to see if any of the old jazz clubs were still around. I was very keen to see what Henry would have seen as he’d stood outside, under the awnings. But all the jazz clubs that were along State Street, they’re all gone; every one of them’s gone. There’s one that’s still standing – it was, originally, The Sunset Cafe, where Louis Armstrong played, but now it’s a hardware store. The Vendome Cinema, where he used to play during the intermissions, is now a parking lot for the local college. That I found upsetting. But on the other hand it was very liberating because in its absence I can invent.”Music, often American soul or blues, is always important in Roddy Doyle’s work, often as escapism for the working-class Dubliners in the Barrytown books. Doyle grew up listening to American music and likes to write while listening to music. For Henry in America, Doyle says, “when he hears this music, he feels he’s being baptized. He’s new. He feels he’s gotten away from Ireland. He’s gotten away from the misery of it all and he’s listening to this glorious celebration.”From the Hardcover edition.

Comments: (7)

Lightwind

Extremely intense, just like the first volume of the trilogy, "A Star Called Henry," which I read and enjoyed, which is why I purchased the second volume. On the one hand, the story is entirely unbelievable, but the verve with which it is told carries you along. The hero, Henry Smart, is kind of a mythological figure who emerges alive, if not unscathed, from very close calls. He becomes Louis Armstrong's pet white man in the middle of the book, which explains its title. Doyle writes vividly, with a good bit of humor. His evocation of the poverty and displacement of the American Depression is more convincing than a lot of Henry Smart's adventures, and a useful reminder of the way things were for quite a few years. If you read the first volume, I don't see how you can resist going on to the second. I'm already on the third!

Gardagar

I love Roddy Doyle, and "Henry". But but but, this book was tough to get into and tough to stay with. It often rambled - and then jumped forward or back in time. Closer to stream of consciousness than the tight narrative of Doyle's other books. I'm glad I read it, but wish I had had to work so hard

Marilore

a disappointment after his previous book about the uprising. You can only absorb so much satchmo as great an artist as he was.

Hanelynai

Very confusing and unbeleivable sequel to the wonderful A Star Called Henry. I enjoyed the section when Henry was with Louis Armstrong, but the rest of the book did not live up to the quality of A Star Called Henry, and it was often hard to follow what was actually going on. I frequently had to back up a few pages because I thought that I had missed something. I made myself finish the book but honestly, I did not enjoy reading it and I was glad to be finished. I hope that the next book is more focused and that Doyle goes back to the style of prose that made me such a fan of Henry in the first place.

Elastic Skunk

This was an all-around good read, but not as great as "A Star Called Henry." Also, you have to have read the first book for much of the second to make sense. If you like Roddy Doyle it will still be an interesting read.

Ishnjurus

Book two of the Henry Smart trilogy, as silly and far fetched a good story goes it just gets better!

Awene

Was very impressed with this Author's first book, "A star called Henry", which contained historical value and a good plot. This book was rubbish in my opinion.

Years ago, I liked "A Star Called Henry," but I did not love it. The revisionist take on the Irish war for independence soured the plot, and contended against Henry Smart's smart-aleck narrative voice, which propelled the action even as Doyle's cynicism stalled its momentum. So, a draw? The vivacity of the concept clashed with the grating attitude.

I understood this project, but the dour memory of "Star" kept me from grabbing this sequel for a few years. I confess no interest in jazz; as Louis Armstrong is the supporting role here, I figured I'd have little enthusiasm for Henry as he enters The Jazz Age after he flees Dublin as a wanted man.

Luckily, the research (as with "Star") credited at the close of this novel enriches its contents. Doyle hammers down a staccato, tough-guy command of dialogue that's almost parodic of the hardbitten genre, but it fits Henry and his molls and mobsters and hobos and hucksters. It's very literary, even as it tries to convince you it's vernacular, full of "yare" and not so much slang as gnawed and clamped speech.

The picaresque adventures of Henry Smart comprise four parts. Without spoiling much, as we know Smart will survive to tell more tales in "The Dead Republic," it begins in Manhattan. "They were families, three and four generations of them; the Irish traveled alone." This in the second paragraph of a dramatic arrival at Ellis Island shows immediately Henry's exile and his defiant, but lonely among crowds, character.

His escapades as a sandwich-board toting, hooch-smuggling New Yorker take up the first section, which although wonderfully described and full of immigrant vivacity ends a bit confusingly, if intentionally so. He flees to upstate, where he for a while succeeds with his partner in crime, as a dentist-diviner of water, an odd combination surely, and this flim-flam exposure will serve him in good stead later on. For a while, they make a fine team. "We pawed and ate each other till the walls sweated and we lay back under the blankets and coat and listened to our moisture on the wall turn to ice and slowly rip up the wallpaper." What an image. The lively action in such New York scenes, the strongest in the novel, as we watch Henry drum up customers while staying ahead of his pursuers, energizes this section. Again, he has to skedaddle out of town suddenly.

In Chicago, where "Black and Tan" takes on a whole new meaning, Henry's brief period at the stockyards is followed by his friendship with a rising talent, Louis Armstrong. "The trombone now rode every woman in the house and stepped back for a rest and a wash." The sex appeal of jazz and the star attraction of Armstrong congeal and thicken, as Henry is drawn in but kept at a distance in his companionship of "Pops," a young Louis the same age as Henry.

This relationship is explained as Armstrong needing a white man to keep him protected from the other white men who want to claim him; Louis' fierce independence contending against his need for backup, a way into the larger society which adores him yet shuts him out is well-handled by Doyle. "His horn was the song of freedom but his life was a crazy jail. He needed control, but he hadn't worked it out. I was the start but he wasn't sure how."

Yet, a crucial character returns in a chance meeting that defies probability. This happens when Henry and Louis are burglarizing mansions in Chicago to get by, and their frequent escapes from the Mob and their ilk make this rather cartoonish. Later, Henry will be saved at the last moment in another scene that feels as if stolen from a melodrama, and even if we know neither he nor Louis will suffer mortal danger, Doyle's storytelling stretches the limits of how much plot contrivance, among a nation as wide as America, one can believe, compared to Ireland, where Henry had similar rescues, if on a far smaller stage for such derring-do.

The third section takes Henry back to Manhattan, where a past lover turns up in a Sister Aimee Semple McPherson (by another name) role, which overlaps with Louis' acclaim in Harlem and beyond as the Depression begins. "They've no memory here. It gets in the way of progress." Still, he's hunted, despite such assurances that he can blend into Harlem and elude those who shadow him. So, it's off to the Midwest.

The Dust Bowl's ravages loom, and the desolation of the West consumes Henry and his compatriots. At a hobo "jungle," he reflects. "The future and the past were one--grits, bacon, biscuits, gravy. Only the present got in the way, as we waited for the bits and miserable pieces in the pot to become a stew."

The wait here in this novel resembles its narrator's predicament. It's not that long a book, but this final section felt too compressed and perfunctory, as if Doyle along with Henry and his desperate, destitute companions melt into a summation of how legends are made, and the years begin to blur. Finally, none other than "print the legend" John Ford, no stranger to myth-making (he spouts one of his own from his life) provides a suitably climactic rescue one more time, but by then, the bravado and imagination for Henry's decades in the American heartland appear withered and washed up, despite his survival for the closing volume in this trilogy. (P.S. I reviewed "Star" here way back on Nov. 16, 1999.)

Related to Oh, Play That Thing: