Thirteen of my friends have read Skippy Dies with a consensus average rating of 4.5 stars. Two friends read An Evening of Long Goodbyes and gave it, on average, 2.5. This says two things: 1) I have clever, discerning friends, and 2) Paul Murray got better -- appreciably so, in fact. There may have been hints of the greatness to come in Skippy, but this, his first attempt, was honestly pretty uneven. Charles and his sister Bel are twenty-somethings living in the well-to-do part of Dublin. She is

Re-read in July 2013.Names: Amaurot:"the shadowy or unknown place," the main city in the centre of the island Utopia.Hythloday:"expert in nonsense", the voyager who travels around Utopia.Telsinor: The name of the fictional phone company, obvious reference to Hamlet.Such fun!Original review:Part of my haul from Waterstone's in Dunfermline.Slurp snort chortle pwaaaah! This is just so much fun! And sad! And zippy to read! But rich and complex at the same time! And I think I’ve used enough exclamati...

The Shortest Ian Graye Review in the CosmosBog Irish Lad Lit takes a turn for the better.But Wait There’s More!Yeats meets “Ulysses” meets “The Cherry Orchard”.YeatsPaul Murray quotes Yeats liberally throughout.I don’t know Yeats well enough to comment on the significance of his poetry to the themes of this novel.That would require research rather than "sprezzatura". (1)"Ulysses"There is a subtle affinity with James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.Just watch me make my case.There are 18 Episodes in “Ulysses”

This book sucked me down into an abyss, and I’ve barely just now escaped. It’s certainly set my Goodreads challenge back weeks. I kept going and going; five pages before bed, sometimes three. A streak of 20 while dividing my attention between it and Grey's Anatomy. Talk about inertia in a plot!! Plot? Where?After the brilliance of Skippy Dies, I was expecting so much more - or at least, given this was Murray's first novel, some parallels. Some of the complexity; the careful and clever layering o...

"An Evening of Long Goodbyes" is that rare character-driven novel rich in wit and humor accompanied by periods of endearing poignancy and an engaging story line. Paul Murray can really write and his themes seem to come from his own experience in Ireland as a TCD man and impoverished as an English tutor, like Joyce, in Barcelona to blend his life among both the upper and working classes. Charles is a man born into the upper-class of Dublin in a family whose financial fortunes are currently in a s...

The quickest way to thin out a shelf of great novels is to restrict yourself to the funny ones. Instead of alphabetizing the bounty that pours in every year, you'll be left casting about for a small vase to hold up the two or three contenders from each decade.We've got plenty of good humorists in America, but looking for a really substantive comic novel could turn the National Book Award into one of those obscure mathematics prizes that grows dusty waiting for someone to find the last digit of p...

An absolute mess of a plot--especially near the end--and generous helpings of melodrama do not outweigh the fact that Murray's picaresque novel is wildly funny at the sentence level and in several whole sections as well. Some of the best parts are those in which the layabout wastrel Charles is ejected from his stately home and, in an exceedingly improbable move, takes refuge in a hovel with his sister's loutish ex-boyfriend. Naturally the lout turns out to have a heart of gold etc., but luckily

I've finally learned to put a book down when I don't like it, but I have not yet learned to immediately cull it from my shelves. As a result, I'm hit with pangs of guilt whenever I walk by. Until this past weekend, this one was still politely clearing its throat at me any time I said, "Hmm, what should I read next?" It's finally out of my house and on its way to seduce and disappoint the next reader. There's promise here, there really is, but the rest of it was so hard to enjoy that had to give

Another compulsively readable novel from Paul Murray! As in Skippy Dies , Murray pulls you in with comedy before surprising you with poignancy. This book, being more frequently humourous, doesn't have quite the emotional punch of Skippy Dies; the conflicts have lower stakes, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing—the darkness seeping into Charles's life doesn't have the oppressive grimness of the horrors affecting the characters in Skippy Dies. Indeed, the problems that Charles encounters,...

This book is hilarious. Its only problem is it took me twice as long to read as it might have...because I had to read each paragraph 2 times, once to myself, once to a friend.What's fascinating is that about 1/2 way through it, the book starts to deconstruct itself. It starts out hilarious, fun, brilliant, with an incredible love of language. . . and then, what do you know? It becomes realistic. Fabulous. It was one of the three-four books that made me realize that if I read fiction, I prefer un...

What a great book. The endpaper likened it to A Confederacy of Dunces, but this is the FAR BETTER book. The style and construction are similar, as is the main character's rather loose connection to what the world at large calls "reality". Though far from being actually idiotic, Charles is much more of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. There is no Jeeves to constantly put Charles right, so he makes his own mistakes and learns important lessons in life. At times you can get lost in the nonsense, but tha...

This isn’t even close to Skippy Dies. If you’re here because you loved Skippy, don’t come expecting it. It’s like if you read Infinite Jest and expect Broom to be some comparable marvel. Sorry. Not happening.An Evening of Long Goodbyes is nice though. It’s pleasant, relaxed, silly. Charles’ narrative vision is so obscured we hardly get a clear picture of the horrible conflict underlying this meaty novel. Instead we get quips! It’s a tremendously uneven novel. Murray said he didn’t want to shoeho...

Murray is a fantastic writer, and this first novel of his is an incredible accomplishment--made me laugh, cry, all that. The thing is...I read it after I read his second novel, "Skippy Dies," which is just about one of the best novels I've ever read (made me both laugh and cry harder). So I think reading "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" made me both more charitable toward Murray but also a little disappointed that his first novel isn't as good as his second. No real surprise there, though. This nov...

Astonishingly good - perhaps even better than its much-praised successor, Skippy Dies. Charles Hythloday is the cheerfully oblivious heir to a declining mansion outside Dublin; a modern Bertie Wooster, except not quite so oblivious as to be unaware of the barbarians at the gates. Except that Bertie and co. never had that distressing meeting with the bank. And so Charles, for all that he is perfectly aware "People don't get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to,...

A young aesthete finds himself destitute after his grand family’s fortunes fall through. However, his unwillingness to abandon his life as a cosmopolitan flâneur drives him towards ironically great deeds as he attempts to recover the one great love of his life: his family’s impractically decadent ancestral mansion. After so many dreary and cheerless books lately, I’ve finally fallen upon a genuinely hilarious and heartwarming tale. Murray’s wit is on par with (and echoes the works of) Wilde, Woo...

Update July 2021. I've finished the 4th reading of this book. I love the whole book, however. the last chapter or two are touching and sad and make you smile at the same time. I'm still hoping Bel comes back, and Charles and Patsy get together. Please PAUL MURRY write a sequel. I read this book twice, I just finished the second reading. There is just something about this dysfunctional family and above all Charles that draws me to this story. The house is just as much a character in the story as

I’m not the first to compare the narrator, Charles, to Bertie Wooster, the spoiled ignoramus of P. G. Wodehouse books. By paragraph two, I had him pegged as a Wooster clone, when he confessed, “I’d been out the night before with Pongo McGurks and possibly overdone it a little, insofar as I’d woken up on the billiard table with a splitting headache and wearing someone else’s sarong.” I don’t suffer fools gladly unless they’re the stuff of comedy, but this novel is hilarious, ranging from wry, ver...

It's springtime and I over-optimistically fell for the first gushy low-cut blurbs that came my way. How my head spun while admiring the abundant heaving decollette which guaranteed an "original, rich, satisfying... and supremely well-written..." ahhh, you don't want to know the rest. "An Evening of Long Goodbyes: A Novel" is supremely well-written, I'll give it that much. Paul Murray has crafted a supremely well-written but mammothly over-long script for a sit-com pilot starring that snobby guy

This book was very funny and poignant at the same time. I found the beginning in particular very amusing, although toward the end the book took a more serious turn. After the first sequence of events concluded, I wondered where the book could go from there, and was pleasantly surprised that it kept me engaged. I thought the descriptive writing was excellent -- very good at evoking particular images without becoming boring or overinflated. Also, I liked the way the ending tied together and summar...

Didn't know how to rate this - loved the writing, found bits absolutely hilarious, but got irritated finally by the clueless hero and gave up halfway. I have personal issues with heroes who are that out of it - the reason why I was irritated with A Confederacy of Dunces as well. But I would still look at anything Paul Murray offers us. Loved Skippy Dies. Another short broken arm review.

Hilarious narrator. I thought the total cluelessness of Charles might start to grate, but no. Loved it. Paul Murray is a genius!

Not as good as "Skippy".

As a debut novel, I suppose one has to commend this for attempting a high degree of difficulty. Set in late 1990s Ireland, the author has explicitly taken some of the plot and themes of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" and remixed them in the surprisingly spot-on pastiche of a Wodehouse farce. And while Chekhov's play also mixes tragedy and farce, the combination here didn't quite work for me. The protagonist is a Bertie Woosterish 24-year-old college dropout, who lolls around his family's large c...

Well, I have a new favorite author and his name is Paul Murray. This man can certainly write. I would actually term this classic literature. There are loads of big words so if you're like me keep your dictionary app available. Some might not like this wordiness, but I like it. It's one of my favorite things about reading, style and grace. He's got it by the bucketloads.The story is very funny and sad, but not terribly sad. The characters jump off the page and I found everything believable. And I...

This is a lovely tale and a heroic effort by Paul Murray in his first outing. Parts of the book are hilariously funny and the characters, particularly Charles and Frank are very well drawn. Paul Murray's father was the professor of my postgraduate course in Modern Drama, and much love (and satire) of Chekhov and others is passed down to his son. Yeats is prominent too, and this may be the only novel in the English language where Ozymandias has been suggested as a name for a dog!There are some we...

As a Skippy Dies superfan, I approached this book with a lot of excitement. I was disappointed for the first half of the book (hence the 3 stars), although Murray found his stride in the second half, and brought things together in powerful ways that would warrant 4 or 5 stars. However, I went with the lower marks because it was such a slog to get to that part that I was tempted on several occasions to put it aside.Despite my lower review, there is a lot to love. There are several passages that a...

Like Murray’s more recent book, The Mark and the Void, An Evening of Long Goodbyes is deeply witty, incisive, astute both human nature, original, brilliantly written and completely original. An Evening of Long Goodbyes is a longer, lusher book that centers on a family and an unlikely circle of friends. The characters start off by engaging the reader’s sense of humor—the protagonist/narrator is particularly so, a near double for P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster—yet end up transformed into deeply s...

This book took me a bit to get into. You either like the beginning or you like the second part of the book. I am the latter. The first part is the main characters rendition of the world as he sees it. Which I know was meant to be humorous. But made it hard for me to like the character. Second part puts him in the real world. Please don't disregard this book because of my spin. You could have a different sense of humor then I. I did enjoy the second part. Takes place in Ireland close to Dublin wh...

Gosh I had such high hopes for this book. Described as a combination of P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, "with a cantankerous dash of A Confederacy of Dunces' Ignatius J. Reilly", I didn't think how it could possibly go wrong - expect I wondered how could it pull off that sort of out-dated language? And in fact that might be the weakness of the book. It just doesn't. I laughed out loud right away, as it happens, and yet it didn't sustain. It was a DNF for me. I just didn't care about the charac...

Hmm. This one didn't quite do it for me. I expected a highly funny read like the blurbs and quite some reviews here promised, but I felt it all fell a bit flat. Charles, the main character / narrator, was too much of a caricature to me, which would have been fine had the rest of the book not been quite so serious. Still, 3 stars for writing, originality and helping me read Frank in an Irish accent.