Author(s): Aidan Higgins

Novel | Ireland | Dalkey Archive Press

An eminently poetic book, Langrishe, Go Down (Higgins's first novel) 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 lush, 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 preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down, which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."

Review: "The ferocious and dazzling prose of Aidan Higgins, the pure architecture of his sentences, takes the breath out of you. He is one of our great writers."-Annie Proulx "Langrishe, Go Down is a wonderful piece of writing . . . Faulkner never listened more carefully to every creak of a decaying mansion than Higgins does to Springfield House."-New York Times

Author Biography: Aidan Higgins has written short stories, novels, travel pieces, radio plays, and a large body of criticism. A consummate stylist, his writing is lush and complex. His books include Scenes from a Receding Past, Bornholm Night-Ferry, Balcony of Europe, and Langrishe, Go Down, which was adapted for television by Harold Pinter.