Irish memories, leavened with wit and absurdity

Now Dalkey Archive has republished all three of Higgins's memoirs -- ''Donkey's Years" (1995), ''Dog Days" (1998), ''The Whole Hog" (2000) -- in one hefty yet effervescent volume titled ''A Bestiary." The autobiography takes us from Higgins's infancy in the late 1920s to the close of the 20th century; a meandering journey that repeatedly loops back into history or sideways into reverie but always rejoins the main current, flowing toward loss.

Influences reverberate, chief among them James Joyce and Flann O'Brian, but Higgins's voice is his own and as natural as that of a man who has forgotten nothing telling everything. Not everything, of course.

Toward the end of ''Donkey's Years," the writer refers to ''this bogus autobiography, bogus as all honest autobiographies must be."

The first two volumes forgo honesty for truth, a fair literary trade that produces recollections of unparalleled grace, humor, and compassion. Higgins's portrait of himself and of his people, embedded in the boggy terrain of history, class, and collective memory, is one of the finest in Irish literature. As such, it relies on wit, absurdity, and the certainty of comeuppance.

The family fortune, made by an ancestor in California, supports idle Bart, Lilly, their four sons, a few servants, and a couple of delinquent tenant families.

But class lines are not as rigid as Higgins's highly strung mother wishes or insists. The family is Catholic; 75 acres is hardly an estate; Higgins talks like a local, plays with the filthy Keegans, and is happiest in the kitchen, sitting on the butcher's lap listening to his First World War stories.

Kildare's flat landscape and flatter accent are brilliantly evoked. ''He was whipping everting outta me," Bowsy the butcher recalls of the brisk Dublin surgeon who cripples him. Meanwhile, Higgins's three brothers cultivate the individual eccentricities that he later describes in their full-blown state to hilarious effect.