Product Review

The island of the Great Blasket lies three miles off the Kerry coast of Ireland, at the westernmost tip of Europe. Virtually unknown before this century, it was to produce a rich and extraordinary flowering of literature that has made it famous throughout the world. The newest in the series of native chronicles on the Blaskets, A Day in the Life is something of an epilogue, telling how, in the island's dying days, the islanders settled on the nearby mainland. O'Crohan provides vivid sketches of West Kerry after World War II, surveying the mainland scene with the ironical eye of the islander, and a robust humor and immediacy that derives from the oral tradition out of which he came.