A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

Rating:
Summary: The Artificer
Review: _A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man_ by James Joyce marks the conception of one of the most famous characters in literature. Furthermore, it is the first of three novels that James Joyce published.

Simply put, this is: pure art. Nothing is written on a whim. It is obvious that every word has been carefully constructed to reach Joyce's ultimate purpose of drawing a portrait of a young man on the brink of artistic genius. Joyce succeeds with flying colors.

Stephen Daedalus has been an outsider all of his life. As Stephen listens to his father recall his own memories from childhood he finds that he is incapable of living out his youth with the same fervor and zest that his father was able to. His church cannot satisfy his unrest, and he refuses to serve "that in which [he] no longer believes." He reaches the bottom of the abyss and he then has an epiphany that gives his life direction. He will "forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race."

The prose throughout the novel is beautiful. Joyce is truly the greatest writer of English prose I have ever read. His characters are wonderfully conceived and executed. While some readers might scream "overkill," I found the discussions of art to be some of the most interesting, though a bit didactic, passages in the novel.

This is the second time that I have read this novel, and as is always the case with great literature it was better this go around. It is not nearly as good as _Ulysses_; however, it would seem to me that one should read this before jumping into that labyrinth.


Rating:
Summary: On the Nature of Beauty and Life
Review: The perennial work of the great master of the 20th century, James Joyce, beginning his revolution in the form of how a story is told. The book shows us the adventure in growing to think for oneself, avoiding the snares of the culture one is raised in, discovering the very nature of beauty and it's relationship to the meaning of life. It gives a rememberance of sin and experience as well as the purpose of art not to provide an escape from life, but as a means for the honest expression of it.

Some people will never like this book and think it too ponderous, but for those of us who love this book, we hold it all the more dearly in our hearts.

Rating:
Summary: The smithy of the soul of the master artificer Daedalus
Review: This spiritual autobiography contains within it the themes which Joyce would expand and elaborate in his masterwork ' Ulysses'. But this work too is a masterpiece which gives us a portrait of an artist in development , and a picture of the society, the church, the family he would go into exile from . Joyce's center is in his consciousness of language, and his creation and recreation of it. He begins the autobiography in the baby language of beginning, and throughout adjusts styles to the situation and level of life he happens to be in. But the fundamental portrait is of the young artist in development, a development of his knowledge and artistic skills but also a development toward knowledge and estrangement from the world which he comes from. He will leave his family, and his native land and his church not so much for the exile of Trieste or Zurich or Paris or any place in particular but for that situation in which he can be wholly alone to shape in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Joyce master of ironies sees perhaps the vanity of his own vaunted ambition but nonetheless is true to it to the end. This work is filled with remarkable and beautiful passages, interesting meetings and in a way memorable characters. It opens us to a new world the world of a great artist whose epiphanies on oval leaves will tell of the great transformation and development of his life- in which the spiritual realm is no longer the Catholic and conventionally religious but is usurpred by the great truth telling and beauty- creating realm of Literature. This work is in parts difficult to read, but even if with the help of some kind of crib it should be ventured . For it is a great work indeed.

Rating:
Summary: An autobiographic novel
Review: Although the hero of James Joyce's novel is called Stephen Dedalus, the events and characters depicted in it parallel the author's own experiences. In his early childhood, at the very beginning of the 20th century, Stephen was sent to Clongowes, a Jesuit boarding school near Dublin. He disliked the place because his classmates bullied him, because he was taught religion in a dogmatic way and because he was flogged unjustly by his prefect of studies. After that he spent a summer with his uncle Charles in Dublin. Stephen was then sent to Belvedere college, which he disliked as much as Clongowes. The spirit of quarrelsome comradeship couldn't turn him away from his habits of quiet obedience. He mistrusted the agitation and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship, which he felt was an awful anticipation of adulthood.
Stephen was by then aware that he didn't belong. He also felt more and more estranged from his father after having accompanied him once to Cork and witnessed his drinking habits, a journey which ended in Stephen's first experience in love making - a sordid one.
More disappointment followed as Stephen went to university, thus becoming a disillusioned young man - a disillusionment caused by academicism, love and sex, his parents, religion and perhaps also his own country, Ireland...