Dubliners

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Summary: Turn of the Century Ireland
Review: James Joyce had begun "Dubliners" in his early twenties. He wanted to satirize the problems of Irish culture. The book itself is an assemblage of smaller tales. They seem to involve drinking abuse, violence, money problems, and escapism.

My own professor, Dr. Richard Greene of the University of Toronto, had noted the prevalance of railing and fencing in the stories. There are, all over the place, imagery of rails and fences. Accordingly, says Greene, these imply constriction, entrapment. And, the characters are ones who want to 'escape' the difficulties of their lives. They want more money and a new place to live. In one story, "Eveline," the woman protagonist reflects on her abusive father. She wonders how things will change if she leaves to marry her boyfriend. Another story, "the encounter," has a pair of boys who retreat from school to an open field. They rely on their imagination, as the real world is to gross for them. Here, there are no physical restrictions. They have freedom. But they come across a perverted old man who reminds them again of the 'real world.' Also, the story "counterparts" deals with a father who loses his job and beats his son.

Now these stories are controversial. They are designed to shock us. They were meant to give the Irish "one good look at themselves " (Joyce). In due course, the book was denied publication for many years. The Irish resented the book.

The stories are easy to read. They have instances of humour, even. They have to do with the middle and lower classes of turn-of-the-century Ireland. We might call them 'labouring' classes. The reader will be interested to know how hard working people, who struglle, react to 'life.' Are the happy to be alive? Do they feel a sense of purpose? What is life to them? The existentialist, then, wants to know how the average working man tallies up 'life.'

I did not want to give the stories a full 5/5 because some of them were weaker than others. Some were boring, uneventful, and awkwardly narrated. Others, however, were emotional and blunt enough. Powerful relationships unfolded in only a few pages. They made me want to be there, in Ireland. After all, the tales convey a sense of culture.

The most famous of them, 'the Dead' involves a man who discovers that his wife may still be in love with a boy who died years ago. Of course, the story is of more than that, but I haven't the indecency to ruin things for you by telling anything more.

Rating:
Summary: speaks to the soul
Review: James Joyce has a way of stringing words together that brings life into his characters and tells poignant stories in just a few pages. He does this throughout Dubliners and his stories are like a string of pearls bound into a book.

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Summary: The pure pleasure of reading
Review: If you ever walked around Dublin streets maybe you felt the same atmosphere that Joyce described in "Dubliners". The author describes a provincial and conservative city and people, but with a big content of poetry, humanity and an incredible combination of love and contempt.

"The Dead" it's been one of my bedside table readings since I read it for the first time. I don't know how many times I've read it, but I feel like I am right there every time I do.

Summing up, I recommend you to read this classic (my very first one in English) and also, of course, to take a flight to Dublin!

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest works of fiction
Review: In his early twenties, Joyce composed this avant-garde collection of short stories which--and this is merely a suggestion at the complexity of the work--may be considered a novel. It is comprised of 15 tales that exhibit the Joycian "epiphany," a moment of clarity or insight for the character and reader alike. The reader, beginning with "The Sisters," is a pre-10 year old boy walking past the window of a dying priest and by "The Dead," the end of Dubliners, has gradually become a 45+ year old man staring out the window overlooking a snow-covered landscape contemplating the essence of his existence. This is the beginning for Joyce, who would later pen what most consider to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, Ulysses before completing his career as a writer by constructing the enigmatic tome of Finnegans Wake.

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Summary: A perfect record of humanity
Review: Joyce's "Dubliners" is a collection of fifteen short stories that present snapshots of the lives of common people in Dublin around the beginning of the 20th Century. The stories are subtle commentaries about Irish attitudes towards nationalism, religion, morality, life, and death. Each explores a distinctive, dramatic theme, such as sexual perversion ("An Encounter"), infatuation ("Araby"), the frustration of personal unfulfillment ("A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts"), self-imposed loneliness ("A Painful Case"), hubris ("A Mother"), and Catholic/Protestant conflict ("Grace"). Overtones of Irish nationalism, remembrance, and piety permeate all the stories.

The stories are neither depressing nor uplifting, but rather open-ended in their denouement; no conflicts are resolved and no moral conclusions are reached. Joyce depicts the characters and scenes so sympathetically that the reader understands clearly why the dejected boy in "Araby" leaves the bazaar feeling like "a creature driven and derided by vanity" and the events that drive Farrington to beat his young son at the end of "Counterparts." And why, in "The Dead," Gabriel, after giving a dinner speech in which he makes respectful reference to the dead, feels his dignity knocked down a notch when his wife reveals to him the tragic fate of her past love.

After nearly a century, "Dubliners" remains one of the best crystallizations of humanity bestowed upon the world.

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Summary: Great Stories, and a good story
Review: Dubliners is a story in itself. The book was rejected by various publishers because of its "political contents" and Joyce wasted time and money before finally seeing it printed. The misadventures of its publication is an excellent story in itself. But what about the booi? Granted: The Dead, Counterpart, Two Gallants are wonderful, but, being unbiased (mainly because of Ulysses) something is missing from this book. The simple, yet cunning descrpition of provincial Dublin is magnificent, but I miss Dedalus inner voice, or the remarks from the guy at SandyCove. Nonetheless, if you find Ulysses difficult, start with Dubliners, and enjoy Joyce

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Summary: One of a kind!
Review: I first bought James Joyce's "Dubliners" for the story 'The Dead'. I read this story over and over before finally looking at another story. I was quickly hooked and read the book from cover to cover in a matter of days. (That is incredibly fast for me) The amazing thing about "Dubliners" is that you can pick out a story, read it and be more than satisfied, but then read the whole thing and get a completely different, but equally gratifing, expierence. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

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Summary: And to think he got even better later on
Review: I've read Ulysses all the way through twice (bits of it over a dozen times), A Portrait three or four times, Finnegans Wake once, all the poems, most of the criticism, many of the letters...well, you get the idea. Why do I always forget about Dubliners?

I just reread it again, and once again I marvel at the total assurance of the man's writing. So many bits to savour and shake your head at - the pathetic Farrington in "Counterparts", slipping out for his midday glass of beer; the gold sovereign at the end of "Two Gallants"; the oblivious Maria in "Clay"; the offhand bitterness of Lily, the maidservant in "The Dead". (The film is a travesty, IMHO.) And to think that most of these stories were written by the time Joyce was 25! It'd make you spit, if they weren't such a gift to the reader.

This is certainly the best edition for those who want background material. Textually up to snuff, lavishly but not needlessly annotated, and with an introduction by one of the best academic critics in Ireland (Terence Brown is not the illustrator but the editor; get with the programme, Amazon), it's one of the very few Joyce editions that can be recommended without reservation. (It restores Joyce's favoured hyphen for direct speech, rather than the inverted commas that the original publisher insisted on.) It's often forgotten that the pervasive atmosphere of most of the stories is that of stifled mean-mindedness; this book is largely populated with losers, cadgers, snobs, bigots and the pathetically weak in spirit. Only in "The Dead" does Joyce relent and show some of the crack and hospitality that most people (well, most foreigners) associate with Ireland, and then he undercuts it by turning it into a tragic love story. Ah, well.

It all started here. My favourite book of short stories (close seconds being Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find", Donald Barthelme's "Forty Stories" and John Berger's "Pig Earth"). Modern Ireland starts to kick in the womb. Fantastic.

Rating:
Summary: An engaging work and small masterpiece
Review: This collection of short stories shows Joyce's writing style at its best. All stories are interesting for their own sake, and they provide a varied overview of Irish society shortly after the turn of the century. The book is enjoyable at many levels, from the stories themselves to their inner meaning. You can come back to one or more stories again and again, and still they will not become boring, and I think that that's the hallmark of any great work. Highly recommended as an appetizer to the other work of James Joyce.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful short stories
Review: James Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of short stories, is simply amazing. The language is the most beautiful of English prose. The stories are morality shorts about life in Dublin; the tales capture the imagination so completely as to paint a picture in the mind. The book will make almost anyone a James Joyce fan.