Advantages: Good reading Disadvantages: Using references a fair bit.
Dubliners is a collection of short stories by JamesJoyce, 15 in all, written about the people and places in Dublin.(Oddly enough)
JamesJoyce (1882-1941) was born in Dublin to a middle class catholic family, whose social and economic status declined during Joyce's youth and adolescence.
"Dubliners" Joyce himself remarked, was meant to reveal the paralysis at the heart of Irish society. Each of the 15 stories deals with a different aspect of Dublin life. Joyce claimed there was a structural progression followed, from childhood to adolescence through to adulthood and private life. (Though this is disputed by some)
If you know little about Joyce, as I did, this is an excellent place to start finding out. I wasn't really going to bother, I thought until my wife collected enough i Points to afford a trip to Dublin.
The ferry we went ...
Advantages: Among the greatest novels ever written. Disadvantages: You'd be best to take a few maps,
this end most every paragraph contains one or several or several dozen asides and remarks and insinuations related to - well, just about everything. Botany, history, biology, theology, philosophy, art, literature... One can easily skim over these things and still carry-on their way, but why would you want to? The richness of Ulysses lies in the minutiae, and the greater the lengths you go to get a handle on that, the more well fed you'll feel by the end.
The story - loosely based, as the title suggests, on Homer's Odyssey - concerns a day in the life of, principally, Stephan Dedalus (central protagonist of Joyce's earlier, and much much MUCH more accessible Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man) and Leopold Bloom, both of whom wander about Dublin both as it is physically lain out before them and as it is scrawled about the alleys of their ...
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by JamesJoyce, all of which are set in, you've guessed it, Dublin. The book was published in 1914 and is available in the Penguin Popular Classics range - you should be able to pick it up for Ł1.
My previous forays into Penguin Popular Classics have had mixed results - Treasure Island was very good, Robinson Crusoe was dire. Happily, Dubliners joins the very good category.
Joyce was only 25 when he completed Dubliners, which if I think about it too much makes me feel very inadequate. When reading the book you can certainly detect the genius present in such a young man.
It is difficult to generalise about the 15 stories - as I said before, they are all set in Dublin, and most have some sort of undercurrent of sadness that becomes evident by the end of the tale. Most of the early ...
