Breakfast on Pluto - Hardcover

McCabe, Patrick

3.49

2,466 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330352938 ISBN 13: 9780330352932

Publisher: Picador, 1998

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Originally published in 1998. Paddy Pussy is a juvenile transvestite from the small town of Tyreelin. A question is raised whether he is just a transvestite who longs to settle down in a loving relationship or whether he is a cunningly disguised IRA bomber ready to wreak destruction and death.

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Review:

Patrick McCabe hit paydirt with his third novel The Butcher Boy, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism". In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also Booker-shortlisted, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate; ventriloquising perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the fourth form, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story, and as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. -- Alan Stewart

Review:

""Breakfast on Pluto" may be the most successful book yet to be born out of the violence [in Northern Ireland]...Stunning originality."--" New York Times Book Review""Mr. McCabe is the lodestone of new Irish fiction, a writer capable of integrating the history and traditions of his country and its literature with the mad whirl of politics and pop culture." -- "Wall Street Journal""A screamingly funny look at a deadly reality."-- "Atlanta Journal-Constitution""By turns hilarious and pitiably lonely, Patrick ["Pussy" Braden] is an unforgettable hero."-- "Newsweek ""A surreal romp...An unsettling claustrophobic novel in which McCabe imaginatively distills Northern Ireland's public horrors as he compels us to inhabit Patrick Braden's private nightmare." -- "Boston Globe""[A] careening picaresque...antic debauch and sudden terror. Pussy's voice throughout is delightfully unhinged in its match of high camp and the poetic pretensions of the Irish barfly." -- "The New Yorker""An unsparing account of Irish realities. [A] moving, brilliantly told tale...full of human comedy and cruelty."-- "Washington Post Book World""Murderous whimsy...[McCabe] has pierced the heart of blackness with satire."-- "Chicago Sun-Times"

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