Word: behan
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...SCARPERER, by Brendan Behan. To "scarper" in Irish is to escape, and Behan runs off with some Dublin weirdos glorifying their past and dreaming their future. This short novel is vintage Behan (1953), when the mercurial writer wrote his best, ebullient prose...
...Behan wrote The Scarperer in 1953, at the height of his boozy powers. Published under a pseudonym as a serial in the Irish Times, it was rediscovered only after Behan offhandedly mentioned it to his London editor nearly ten years later. Light as a feather, compassionate, unsentimental, this high comedy about low life is the most artfully constructed thing the impulsive Behan ever wrote...
...SCARPERER by Brendan Behan. 158 pages. Doubeday...
...scarper is to make off, to run away, to escape, in Irish slang. And to scarper is what the young Brendan Behan must often have dreamed of doing in the six years he spent soberly behind bars, rather than convivially touring them. He put those dreams to good use in this merry and murderous mock-suspense story about a professional impresario of escapes at work in the underworld of Dublin, and Paris...
What makes the plot bubble is the Behan people and the Behan gab. There is Pig's Eye O'Donnell the bet runner, Tralee Trembles the wino and ex-poet, M'sieu Le Tramtrack, who spent 30 years abed in an effort to collect damages from a trolley company, and the vigorous old lady of the International...