A book a day: Spike Milligan: Bad Pinta

Original Language: English

Títutulu Original: Puckoon

Year of publication: 1963

Translation: Julia Osuna

Valoración: Between recommended and okay

In the irladrrous town of Puckoon, which for its picturesque, even greater than that of Innisfree, would have delighted John Ford, the advent of the Republic of Ireland was a joyful event, for obvious reasons, while disturbing, since the members of the committee in charge of drawing the border between the new Republic and the United Kingdom, An agreement and eager to go to the pub, decided to throw along the street of Enmedio, which coincidentally passed through the aforementioned town of Puckoon and, above all, by some of their most emblematic places, such as the local pub – which was divided between the Irish territory, majority but with the prices of the highest alcoholic beverages and a British, cheaper corner and, for whatever, more concurred or the Cemetery, which remained in the territory of his funny Majesty, with the consequent disorder for the living and even the Irish dead.

Has a rather long and somewhat abarravored parrophy left me, right? Well, but it is that a certain abarroidation, not to say a forced affectation, is precisely the predominant style in the novel, truffled with both expressions that mimic popular speech, as with surprising findings that we could consider poetic .. in addition to a “metaliterary” resource (perhaps it is excessive to use this term), with some other rupture of the “fourth Wall, “so to speak. All this, paradoxically (or not), at the service of an obviously humorous story that, without giving up any irony, tends to absurd, astracanada and slapstick Literary … Thus, we can find ourselves from the deceased that their passport must be taken to be buried or contrabing coffins to true cataclysms in which Ira members are dressed in Romans, British military retired and troops of granuugging Boy-Scouts are wrapped. Not to mention a certain black panther, of course …

Spike Milligan was an Indo-Anglo-Irondés humorist-“Indo” is because he was born in India, son of an officer of the British army, whose memory, by the way it gives rise to beautiful pages of this book-, very popular in the 60s, apparently (I say it because I did not know him), colleague of Peter Sellers-of fact, there are catastrophic moments in this novel The Guateque… or vice versa- and teacher, they said, of the very Mount Python, nothing less. I believe that, as his biographical note says, he was one of the great figures of, on the other hand, very busy British humor because this novel is full of peculiar characters, hilarious moments and even social criticism. Perhaps his only problem is that the author recreates both in the description of those peculiar characters and the hilarious moments that social criticism and, even more, the plot of the novel is somewhat dazzled … but go, at least the laughs are assured, which, as the things of the world are (and as they were when the book appeared, more than sixty years ago), it already seems enough.