LIFE:

Flann O' Brien, pseudonym of Brian O' Nolan, is born in the western area of the Ireland known with the name of Gaeltacht from a middle-class family. From 1930 attend the University College of Dublin. After the university degree and a short stay in Germany begins to work as administrative officer. 
In those years begins his literary activity with the novel At-Swim-Two-Birds, 1939 that has poor success and with The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht, 1941) written in Gaelic. After these failures he begins to hold a satiric column on the "Irish Times", with the pseudonym of Myles na Gopaleen, in which he takes aim at politician, scientists, artists, supporters of the Gaelic Revival and other very well-known personages. 
His invectives against the political environment make him losing his job in 1953. In 1960 has a great success the new reprint of At-Swim-Two-Birds. In 1964 he publishes The Dalkey Archive that reutilizes many of the ideas of the Third Policeman. In 1967 exits posthumous The Third Policeman after having been rejected in 1940 by many publishers. In 1968 it's published a book that collects the best production of O' Brien when he were writing on the "Irish the Times" with the title The Best of Myles.

SUGGESTED WORKS:

At-Swim-Two-Birds, 1939
It's considered as his masterpiece. A Dublin student is writing a novel on a modern novelist named Trellis. This novelist wants to write a novel against sin, so he recruits many personages. He takes some on loan from an other novelist, others from ancient saga and Irish tales like the famous hero Finn McCool. Then he generates others himself. But Trellis is also someone who sleeps a lot, and while he sleeps his personages do not know what to do and talk of this and that, constantly interrupted by Finn who wants to tell the history of Sweeney over the trees. During the Trellis' sleeps happens that the personages decide to rebel because they think that Trellis has violated a feminine personage he has created. So they start telling stories where the poor novelist is beaten and tormented with magical means, and then he is sent on the tree where the crazy Sweeney is.

The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht, 1941)
The intention is a critic of the movement of Gaelic revival, or Gaelic renaissance, that was spreading a conventional image of life in some part of Ireland, known as Gaeltacht, an image made by stereotypes, in which are lost substance and spirits of a culture that, even if isolated, however was rooted in an ancient popular tradition. Through the story of Bonaparte O'Coonassa, we meet the inhabitants of Corkadoragha and we follow the main character in a long series of misadventures that are carried out in this world and in another, the subterranean or submarine of many Gaelic tales, in many episodes where bleakness and misery are filtered through a streak of pure comic spirit.

The Dalkey Archive, 1964
An Irish young person searching his own role in the world after many encounters and vicissitudes he decides, in manners that become, to marry his fiancée and with her grow many children. But the protagonist must save the universe from the intrigues of the notorious doctor De Selby, inventor of a method that can stop the time, meeting with, in this adventure, in Saint Augustine and James Joyce, who has never written Ulysses and secretly dreams to abandon his dreary bartender activity to enter in the Jesuits order "to expel the Saint Spirit from divinity and from catholic Church".

The Third Policeman, 1967
There is a homicide, then the search of the money of the murdered man. The main narrative character enters at night in the house of the dead man to recover his money, but he finds the dead man who seems alive, and starts with him a dreamy discussion. From here begins his perdition and he does not remember his name, lost on the road with all the rest. He arrives at a police station in opened countryside, in a parish he does not know, and become friendship with two policemen who live there. One of them speaks all the time about bicycles, and he thinks that there are molecular exchanges between bicycles and the men who ride them, and that some bicycles are so humanised to do little edifying exploits (a bicycle is in prison). The other policeman is always busy doing odd jobs: he has manufactured a series of smaller and smaller cases, like Chinese boxes. Exists that has been decided that exists. These two policemen are in charge of surveillance of the eternity. At the end the protagonist escapes the two policemen thanks to the bicycle that was in jail and with it he has a tender flirt. He returns to his parish and he meets a third policeman and that is the mysterious element of the novel. After this encounter he finally understands to be dead.

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