Dubliners
Written: Mar 03 '00 (Updated Jun 09 '01)
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Pros: A good descriptive account of Dublin in the early 1900's
Cons: Joyce is in his journalistic phase, the best is yet to come.
The Bottom Line: The introduction to Joyce's illustrious literary career. In reading this first book, the reader will see the tremendous growth in his writing style from literal to associative.
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| Stloraine's Full Review: Joyce James |
Dubliners, Recorded Books, unabridged version, 9.5 hours, 7 cassettes, narrated by Donal Donnelly. James Joyce first attempted to publish Dubliners in 1912, but the publisher changed his mind, citing impropriety. It was published successfully in 1914, the same year in which Ulysses was born. Joyce first conceived of Ulysses as a short story for inclusion in Dubliners, but changed his mind and eventually wrote it as an extraordinary twenty-four hour excursion through Dublin. Joyce's literary development is just beginning. Until the final story in the book there is nothing to portend the poetic word creativity that culminates in Ulysses.
Dubliners is a collection of stories, all beginning and ending within a short period of time in a defined locale, the characters present throughout each story from beginning to finish. His word imagery does not give any indication of what is to come. The author is starting out, following the rules of narrative story telling, depicting characters and scenes concisely, trying to create a complete picture for the reader. Rather than short stories, they are vignettes of the middle class, comfortable side of Dublin life, with references to a guttering candle, donning galoshes which are the newest rage on the Continent, and the horse drawn cabs.
"A Mother," is a vindication of the psychological mechanism where a parent insists she is doing the best thing for her child, while actually sabotaging her chance for success. In this instance the daughter, a pianist who has been hired as an accompanist, quits in the middle of the performance because of her mother's insistence she not play anymore until she is paid. Short sighted, inasmuch as the committee offered her half at the time, and the rest a few days later. But the mother had failed in her musical career not because of lack of talent, but of an unattractive personality, and we can see she has already stamped her failed life on her daughter.
Joyce always seemed to have a hard time to express people's feelings, he was much better at describing their outward reactions, and their thoughts, but not their feelings. He succeeds in giving us the picture of the mother controlling her daughter so that she loses her first chance to perform as a pianist, because of her mother's inability to get along with the other musicians, but the narration is cold and the reader has to generate in her own mind the feelings that the daughter should have had. Instead, disappointingly, she does not reflect and only does what her mother tells her, losing her first chance to burgeon artistically. He seems to see people like Emerson-- "For a cap and bells our lives we pay...."
The last story in the book,"The Dead," is I think his best. At last he goes beyond the descriptive detail of the Dublin setting and the conniving depictions of its inhabitants, as he closes with the eternal triangle of Greta, Gabrielle and Michael Fury, and their inner sorrows because of their helplessness in the human world; so helpless that at only seventeen, Michael would tearfully tell Greta he no longer wanted to live..."and the snow softly falls all over Ireland, the crosses and the graves of the cemetery where Michael Fury lies buried."
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Stloraine
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Location: Star Town, Milky Way Galaxy
Reviews written: 158
Trusted by: 74 members
About Me:
Writer, pianist, mystic. Pisces. Love to see movies, swim, study paleontology, astronomy and ancient history.
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