Lurching jauntily around Europe and the divided city of Berlin just before the Wall came down, this novel is a frenzy of inebriation, lusty manners and surrealistic high jinks. The author won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Irish Academy of Letters Award for Langrishe, Go Down.
Langrishe, Go Down traces the fall of the Langrishes - a once wealthy, highly respected Irish family - through the lives of their four daughters, especially the youngest, Imogen, whose love affair with a self-centered German scholar resonates throughout the book. Their relationship, told in erotic and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceeding World War II.
Here is the great Irish novel of Berlin, way back before the Wall came down. Dallan Weaver, a writer and professor who's been fêted and flattered but has seen better days, has come to the great divided city as a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Dienst Organization). On arriving, Weaver's life immediately begins to fall apart. Women fight over him. He is not always in the soberest state of mind. Moving from relatively conventional narrative to deliriously long lists, incorporating everything from children's drawings to minute recollections of dreams, Lions of the Grunewald is--in the author's own words--a "missionary stew," marvelously served up in Aidan Higgins's inimitable style.