Product Description

"Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own." —James Joyce, in a letter to his brother With these fifteen stories James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ("The Sisters"), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of "Two Gallants," or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ("The Dead"), Joyce takes narrative places it had never been before.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28124 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. Nonetheless, he was educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, where he gave proof of his extraordinary talent. In 1902, following his graduation, he went to Paris, thinking he might attend medical school there, but he soon gave up attending lectures and devoted himself to writing poems and prose sketches, and formulating an 'aesthetic system'. Recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the fatal illness of his mother, he circled slowly towards his literary career. During the summer of 1904 he met a young woman from Galway, Nora Barnacle, and persuaded her to go with him to the Continent, where he planned to teach English. The young couple spent a few months in Pola (now in Yugoslavia), then in 1905 moved to Trieste, where, except for seven months in Rome and three trips to Dublin, they lived until June 1915. They had two children, a son and a daughter. His first book, the poems of Chamber Music, was published in London in 1907, and Dubliners, a book of stories, in 1914. Italy's entrance into the First World War obliged Joyce to move to Zürich, where he remained until 1919. During this period he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Exiles, a play (1918). After a brief return to Trieste following the armistice, Joyce determined to move to Paris so as to arrange more easily for the publication of Ulysses, a book which he had been working on since 1914. It was, in fact, published on his birthday in Paris, in 1922, and brought him international fame. The same year he began work on Finnegans Wake, and though much harassed by eye troubles, and deeply affected by his daughter's mental illness, he completed and published that book in 1939. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he went to live in Unoccupied France, then managed to secure permission in December 1940 to return to Zürich. Joyce died there six weeks later, on 13 January 1941, and was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery.

Customer Reviews

An Absolute Masterpiece
'Dubliners' begins the work that was later to become 'Ulysses'. Although 'Dubliners' does not include the odyssey through language contained in the latter book (making it both more accessible and less groundbreaking), it is nevertheless a remarkable work. 'Dubliners' is a collection of short stories featuring single events over a few hours in the lives of inhabitants of the title city. Short story writing has traditionally involved sinuous twists or startling contrivances which create the feeling of a completed story, or in which the reader is invited to be thrown or amazed in the last few paragraphs (such as writers like Philip K. Dick or Borges). Joyce eschews this style. Instead his stories are snapshots in the Dubliner's lives, featuring relatively mundane events (a failed trip to the market, an afternoon skipping school) in which nothing remarkable happens. There is very little narrative here, and this may not appeal to readers that like a strong story.
Joyce described each story as an 'epiphany', an event in which a character within the story (and hopefully the reader also) is invited to re-examine the familiar, and re-assess their relationships with the events that make up their lives. Joyce is trying to show that the day that changes your life may not be any different than the one that precedes it, or the ones that may follow, and that the life-changing event may just be an alteration in the way you perceive something that you have encountered a hundred times before. Each story is impressive in its construction, and for most of them I was left amazed by the power of their impact when compared to the banality of their content. Joyce manages to observe human behaviour brilliantly and can seem to extract every drop out of each comment, each gesture. Each is short (with the exception of 'The Dead') and I read this book very quickly (unlike 'Ulysses').
'Dubliners' is a sort of abridged 'Ulysses' and fans of the latter, or anyone looking for a way in to the latter, should definitely read 'Dubliners', likewise anyone who is a fan of this sort of 'epiphanic' short story writing (Camus' 'Exile and the Kingdom' is the closest thing I have read to date). However the lack of a strong narrative and the occasional lapse into (for me) impenetrable archaic Irish jargon, means that this book probably isn't for everyone. As far as I am concerned, it is the archetype of its genre, and an incredible book to have read.

Now Listen to the Book on Tape
I have read this book dozens of times and i cannot add to what has already been said by other readers, However, someone once asked Joyce why his books were so hard to understand, he replied that if you read them out loud in a Dublin accent they would become clear. The penguin edition of Dubliners read by Gerald McSorley perfectly illustrates Joyce's point. I defy anyone to listen to the story 'A Painful Case' and not have a tear in their eye by the end of it.

Moving, Funny, never Boring
A newcomer to James Joyce, I was looking forward to reading a work by an author associated so closely with the modernist " stream of consciousness" style of writing.
Joyce was simply a poet, and some sentences and passages in this book are better than Shakespeare etc. the 15 short stories are all set in Dublin, and all contain a range of different characters with different emotions, feelings, and indeed outlooks on life.
" An Encounter" is beautifully written from a child's point of view. Encountering someone who is essentially a paedophile will be a strange experience for a child, and, through Joyce, the boy simply tells the reader what he sees. Yet, the story is still disturbing and haunting.
My particular favourites are " Araby", focusing on a boy who is infatuated with a girl, it also contains the best line in the book in " but my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like strings running upon the wires"; " A little cloud", about a man who realises his failed journalistic career, and indeed the loss of affection for his wife; and " a painful case", again, like " A little cloud" centring on a man who has wasted his life, and, once he finds his true love, lets her go from him until it is too late when she dies.
The 15 stories are all poetically flawless Joyce's real strength here is that he both manages to write archaically yet keeping the reader interested.
Thanks to this book I now intend to read Joyce's other great works " Finnegans Wake" and then, his classic, " Ulysses".