Дъблинчани/ Портрет на художника като млад

by James Joyce, Джеймс Джойс, Асен Георгиев Христофоров (Translator)

Widely regarded as a great stylist of 20th-century English literature, Joyce deserves the term 'revolutionary'. His literary experiments in form & structure, language & content, signaled the modernist movement & continue to influence writers today. His two earliest, most accessible, successes--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man & Dubliners--are here brought together in one volume. Both reflect his lifelong love-hate relationship with Dublin & the Irish culture that formed him.
In the semi-autobiographical Portrait, young Stephen Dedalus yearns to be an artist, but 1st must struggle against the forces of church, school & society, which fetter his imagination & stifle his soul. The book's inventive style is apparent from its opening pages, a record of an infant's impressions of the world around him--one of the 1st examples of the stream of consciousness technique.
Comprising 15 stories, Dubliners presents a community of mesmerizing, humorous & haunting characters--a group portrait. The interactions among them form one long meditation on the human condition, culminating with 'The Dead', one of Joyce's most graceful compositions centering around a character's epiphany. A carefully woven tapestry of Dublin life at the turn of the last century, Dubliners realizes Joyce's ambition to give his countrymen 'one good look at themselves.'

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Literature, Short Stories, Irish Literature, Ireland, Novels

672 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum

Reviews

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can a first time reader of Joyce say about a master who has more than a fair share of critical and analytical studies racked against him? He's a heavy weight in XX Century fiction. Time to start Ulysses.

[B. P. Rinehart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book collects Joyce's first to professional prose works. I have already reviewed Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so this will be about this book.

The appeal about this Barnes & Noble Classics edition is that it not only combines Joyce's two early classics, but it comes with commentary and notes (always welcome with Joyce) and maps of turn of the 20th century Dublin that gives you a visual where all these events take place. I also enjoyed the introduction by Kevin J.H. Dettmar. In the end you're getting two major works by one of the great 20th century writers for the price of one (or in my case, $1, since I brought this in a used goods store), so no complaints on my end.

[Annalise Kraines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to my dear friend Jonny for forcing me to read some James Joyce. Dubliners was an absolute delight-- Joyce has an excellent sense of place, his stories are rooted firmly in Dublin. He also understands the human emotion and psyche in a unique way. The problem is that sometimes he gets lost in that psyche and emotion and those moments totally lost me. That's what happened in Portrait of the Artist-- Stephen was melancholy and philosophical, confusing, self deprivating. The narrative jumped all over the place and I had approximately no idea what was going on. So all that is to say that I'm giving Dubliners 4 stars, and low-key ignoring Portrait of the Artist.

[SurDiablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, I can say without hesitation that this is the most challenging book I have ever read in my life so far ( Not that I have read many at this point 😅 ). My feelings are all over the place and I am positive that half of the references flew over my head as I am neither Irish nor Christian, to be well-versed in the historical events and policies mentioned in this book, except for a vague understanding deriving from the footnotes and some Wikipedia research. I'm unsure if I am articulate enough to express my thoughts regarding this, especially considering my lack of familiarity with the setting and the fact that it's one of the most eloquent writings I have ever come across, but I will give it a try.

So Dubliners, the short story collection is what I really enjoyed. They offered glimpses into the lives of several middle class families in the 1900s, reminding me how stagnating or frustrating life can be, especially under the clutches of politics and religion. Most of the stories may seem anti-climactic or futile by the end at first glance, but I was able to appreciate them once I understood it's all about the characters and their realizations about certain matters, or the lack of it in some cases. They were bleak or depressing for the most part and explores several themes like love that never blossomed, abusive households, effects of nationalism and urbanization and sometimes just plain old lollygagging. My favorite short-stories were 'Eveline', 'A Little Cloud', 'A Painful Case' and 'The Dead' as I found them mentally devastating. What I appreciated most regarding the short-stories was how interesting they were to read, even when the characters are mundane and it's not plot-driven at all.

Now 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' on the other hand, I struggled immensely to push through. We see the growth of Stephen Dedalus, the author's alter ego, from a little boy who doesn't know what to follow, confused about the division within his family based on nationalism and Catholicism, to a near adult who decides to become an artist without compromising his values. We see him question the corporal punishments in school, partake in debaucheries, become extremely pious as he fears damnation, have epiphanies about what he truly wants in life, etc. The prose itself is nothing short of excellent and we see the voice of the character slowly maturing as he grows up. It also had one of the most immersive and vivid descriptions I have ever read concerning imprisonment in hell. However, it's also very dense, mostly aimless and sometimes disjointed. Of course you could say it naturally would be, considering that we are following the mind and thought process of an individual as he reaches adulthood for the majority, but it just wasn't interesting enough for me to make up for how meandering it was. Regardless of my struggles, I wouldn't say it's not my cup of tea for certain as there were several moments that had me engrossed. It's just something I would probably appreciate more when I am much older and experienced with a widened taste when it comes to literature. While I am interested in reading the remaining works of Joyce, I don't think I will try them anytime in the near future.😅

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edmund Wilson said that “no two persons ever read the same book”, and in my present fascination with revisiting books I read as a young man, unsurprisingly I find I am reading different books. Indeed, if a book, a mere sentence, can change you, then in some true sense your interpretations of the text will always be changing too. In any case, as with music, poetry, or any art, the interpretations and pleasure open slowly and in new ways with every encounter.

Joyce’s novel, in part, can be seen as a detailed and intense grappling with the struggle for form in expression that mirrors a reader’s work, for work it is to be rewarded more fully with ‘difficult’ texts. As a young man, the book was a ‘good read’ and I retained its ‘atmosphere’, wit, irony, humour, although I have to say that the central irony passed me by so intent was I in discovering anguish in young men with which I could identify.

Stephen is remarkably educated and sensitive in many ways (despite his misguided despair that he will never be able to do more than graze upon the mountain of ‘culture’), but he is also, like I was, an emotionally labile, self-centred and overly serious prig (all of the latter qualities I have the misfortune still to thwart my project of self realisation).
There is one thing I want to do separately from here which is to take the remarkable section which intertwines Father Arnall’s sermon with the tortured internal responses of the young man who wanders in a separate maze of narratives, all of which lead him from listless despair to, say, fury or utter shame, and back again to self-loathing and despair. Not least among my reasons for wishing to do this is the desire to examine the rhetorical excellence of the sermoniser, its watertight coherence and consistency which enable such Hellish discourses to add to the many (obviously, various Irish voices would be included here) vicious modes in which language ensnares and opresses the vulnerable.

It’s in the attempt to escape vulnerability, woundedness, that Stephen attempts to find the still point, the omega point provided by his own aesthetic theory. In a twist of double irony, what attributes of such a mathematically envisaged simple point to overcome the complex mush of being human may be salvaged are provided by the formal control of Joyce. There can be no doubt at all that the author is well distanced from his own biography, and memory’s constructive nature enables him to, layer upon layer, take many different approaches, angles – as many as the streets in Dublin, the intense stopping points of a heavily described single building or meeting point yet making the City itself a spectral identity (of course, much fog, mist, rain, darkness too) that is so many fragments. The self so ‘portrayed’ is the very opposite of a portrait with its neat frame and carefully controlled construction that makes claim to be a representation of ‘the truth’, ‘the real’, an arti-fact bulwarked against time. So too the rhetorics of the sentimentalists who are like extras in a play, or masked effigies an a grotesquerie:

Near the hoardings on the canal he met the consumptive man with the doll’s face and the brimless hat coming towards him down the slope of the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate overcoat, and holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him as a divining rod.


The gross sentimentality Joyce depicts, most clearly in relation to nationalism and religion, but spilling into the pathetic memories of illusory halcyon pasts, epitomised most sadly by Stephen’s stark account of his drunken father’s behaviour in Cork, is coterminous with language itself. That mean, mercantile, dull register of the market place all around Stephen makes his soul dry, shrivel; it is always in danger of overcoming him, this dead weight of the quotidian world, “His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain.” “He walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language”. Dead language: it is the death of language that causes the death of the soul and catachresis which is the precise enemy of the creative act (although, of course, the dead language in quotations is exactly part of the power of the novel, and Stephen’s eventual rejection of the heaps of dead language that plagueed him that provide redemptive vision; also in particular, his, our, struggle to find away of saying ourselves, feeling, being, is doomed if all we have available are the linguistic strategies of sentimental cliché).

The authorial distancing is crucial. Between Joyce and Stephen there is a space that varies, and sometimes Joyce needs to be almost in a different realm. Take this evocation, if only for its beauty, as a removing in total of the young man’s self-centred universe:

The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.

Like musical motifs, much, as in this quotation, will be scattered through the novel repeated or refined, modulated. In a most sensuous novel, the resonances, repetitions, modulations are more often psychologically image based rather than pictorial or correspondent, iconic. In refracting Stephen’s emotional turmoil, for instance, it’s important for Joyce that the grossly dead and sentimental images of the Church’s penchant for horror are counterpointed with secular, mundane equivalence, as below to suggest what a Father Confessor may diagnose accidie, a qualified Doctor more likely to term mild depression, the rest of us as vague disgust and boredom:

A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lat battered cannisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggled upwards from all the ordure through the bristling greygreen weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the cannisters and from the stale crusted dung.


I’ll end by taking aa an example a passage that is important to the novel thematically, and also throws light on how Joyce worked his distancing. The latter, I think is crucial, for it was Joyce’s intention to call on a new nationalism, or citizen or free individual to take on and oppose the tyraany of dead ideas and dead language. At the point where Stephen is being left by “Ellen” after the party:

It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor taled with the driver, both nodding often in the greenlight of the lamp. On the empty seats of the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells.
They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down.


This is a beautiful piece of writing, pure author. It’s part of the theme which will bring together Stephen’s sexual longings, desire for innocence, love of his mother, shame over his time with a prostitute, the shifting identity of Ellen/Emma and so on. It is intense, and the young artist is preoccupied by find form to express the maelestrom. His dreadful poem, the contents of which we are mercifully spared from reading, ornaments itself with Byronic pretension, dispenses altogether with the actual scene (so gorgeously described by Joyce) and “told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon.” It is amusing, of course, but the dreadful sentimentality shown here is crucial to the theme of how in a dead culture, in a cyclic pattern, dead language creates dead emotions, dishonest ones, untrue ones, stock response ones. How tempting for Stephen to show off and put himself above the crowd by a pallid exhibition of unconscious parody: he does thereby place himself most firmly in the crowd!

Towards the end of the novel, the author and Stephen have become more closely identified, two opposing people have come closer to the one reading, the one person: closer, not completely so, but sufficiently to mark the beginning of the artist proper. Recalling the tram incident we have:

He had written verses for her again after ten years. Ten years before she had her shawl cowlwise about her head, sending sprays of her warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot on the glassy road. It was the last tram; the lank horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in a dmonition. The conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. They stood on the steps of the tram, he on the upper, she on the lower. She came up to his step many times between their phrases and went down again and once or twice remained beside him forgetting to go down and then went down.


But this is Stephen’s recalling, encountering, remembering afresh, seeing things lighter, less clouded by the weight of dead language and thought and feeling. To that extent, the reader too may unfix the portrait of themselves as once they were and, lighter, move on.

[Aaron Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dmind this one either, I read it in college I just remembered.
Still counts

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read Portrait before so this time I started with Dubliners. Dubliners is a collection of short stories centered on what it is like to live in Dublin in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. They are stories of pain and dissatisfaction, and a lot of characters feel lost. They are unhappy in their jobs, marriages, even friendships. Alcohol has a big place in Dubliners. Even though the stories could be considered depressing I enjoyed them. There is an ironic humor in most stories that reflects real life. At our darkest moments there is often something darkly humorous that gets us through it. Joyce's characters however are paralyzed, none of them do anything to better their situations either because they are pessimistic that there is no change, or that they just don't know how. Joyce is a master of the English language and could probably write about the most dull thing imaginable and still I would be enveloped by his prose. Dubliners was written around the same time as Portrait, an entirely different kind of book. This is an autobiographical novel. It follows the emotional, spiritual and artistic ideal development of young Stephen Dedalus. Joyce does not beat around the bush by picking a metaphorical and mythic allusion of a name like Dedalus. Stephen draws a connection to his own sense of isolation among his fellow Irish students and himself. He wants to fly away from Ireland and its religion, its intellectual colonization by the English and his own dissatisfaction in life. He feels that he must get away if he will ever truly discover what it means to be an artist, and what it means to be Irish. He is blinded by the revival of the Irish language, sports, literature and other things that his compatriots are embracing, as if they can bring back their true Irishness that was subjugated by the British. But he fears that maybe the construct he is building as an escape from all his anxieties, will fail just as the mythological Daedalus built his son wings to fly from his trap, which ended up failing because of his son's arrogant attempts to fly too close to the sun. Is Stephen going to fail upon leaving Ireland? Is his search for truth in art flying too close to the sun? Language is another discussion in Portrait. Earlier I claimed Joyce to be a master of the English language, but the English language and its meaning on put-upon Ireland is central to Stephen's moral anxieties. He both loves and dreads the language, but he doesn't want to reclaim Irish, which should have been his natural language. I wonder if Joyce became such a beautiful prose writer by struggling with every word? The introduction to this book, by Kevin J. H. Dettmar is a great essay that expounds upon the stories and the novel. I recommend this to anyone who loves dense writing and is patient.

[Michael H. Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ha vuelto a pasar y sólo pasa con los grandes libros. La galería de personajes de estos cuentos están todos en mi habitación, han vuelto y conversan, se pelean, tocan el piano, se lían con la letra de unas arias, danzan alegres por el whisky que beben caliente y finalmente mueren para retornar de nuevo como se retorna a una capilla familiar.
Joyce dejó dicho que quiso escribir "un capítulo de la historia moral" de su país, un país paralizado y en el que Dublín era el centro de esa parálisis. En cada cuento llueve el alcohol y hay un sacerdote o alguien se ha ido al convento o se debate entre lo que trae ser jesuita y lo que quita ser protestante o al revés. La literatura es un sacerdocio, también lo dejó dicho Joyce. Todo lo que aquí está escrito es el resultado de una muerte pensada. "La historia de una frustración", dice Harry Levin.
Son cuentos realistas, pero en ellos el realismo adquiere otras carnes, otro espesor. Se viste, lo notamos desde la página uno, sin pompa ni luces firmes, toda luz es opaca, titilante, nevada, para despojarse de la tradición decimonónica que exigía una transparencia, un candor, una completitud. Todo sucede como a medias, los personajes flotan, contemplan la nieve caer, esperan por un coche, los amores no se consuman, un cáliz roto ha sido el detonante de una muerte.
Qué bien leyó Faulkner estos cuentos. En ellos hay una violencia contenida (excepto en uno), una catástrofe está siempre por suceder, justamente lo que hizo grande a la novelística del autor de Mientras agonizo: hacer vibrar el nervio de la pulsión destructora que hay en lo rutinario, en lo cotidiano, que ciertamente demora en llegar, pero nos hace saber de su irremediable presencia.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners for the “new to you author” space for a classic reading BINGO challenge I’m doing this year.

James Joyce’s books had been on the sidelines for me for a very long time. My rating is purely based on my reading enjoyment of the two books, not based on the quality of the writing. They were okay but there’s absolutely nothing truly memorable that I’ll be taking away after reading these. No doubt - quality writing is there and his other books might be interesting, but I very likely won’t be wanting to read any more of his work. I tried (and miserably failed) Ulysses a while back but just didn’t comprehend it at all.

These two books are said to be a starting point/introduction to James Joyce and now I can at least say I’ve finally read them. James Joyce is not my cup of tea though.

[lexi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise to close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand out against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone—come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.”

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

понял странную вещь. раз в десять лет нужно перечитывать Джойса. это легендарное и героическое издание 82-го года с гордой надписью в конце: Printed in the USSR - и корявой надписью на клапане супера, которая заслуживает приведения полностью: The book is accompanied with the map of Dublin. In the design are used the views of the city (редактор К.Атарова была известно какой редактор). аккомпанирует, это это правда. и виды используются. и стоила она бешеных денег - аж 3 руб. 20 коп. но все равно я к ней, зелененькой, с большой нежностью, хотя советский набор читать уже невозможно, а опечаток, как выяснилось, в ней столько, что даже как-то неприлично при двух "коррректорах"

предисловие Гениевой, при всем должном уважении, написано в традициии советского литературоведения: много нанизанных друг на друга слов, до обидного мало смысла. градус осмысления задает дебильная цитата из Ленина о Парнелле (к чести автора, она там единственная, но и этого много). комментарии небрежны и произвольны, ценного в них мало. колоритные речевые обороты толкуются тоже вполне кондово (хотя что это я? в том, вероятно, и есть смысл комментариев - довести до понимание до уровня общего идиотизма). по ходу заглядывал в перевод ("Портрета", по крайней мере) тов. Богословской-Бобровой - и он, я должен сказать, вполне отвратителен: прососанные насмерть шутки, пересказ своими словами, которых, к тому же не очень много, иные грехи против автора. не очень понятно, в итоге, что же читают русскочитатели, но несколько не то, что писал Джойс (поэтому его, видимо, и не запретили совки - они просто не знали, насколько он "неприличен", чего стоит один пассаж с queer|suck|cocks, где все слова могут значить несколько не то, что подумала переводчица).

по ходу всплыла занятная маргиналия (пишется под рубрикой "наши маленькие велосипеды"): "исследовать" параллели у Стивена Дедала и Холдена Колфилда, как выяснилось, давно стало общим местом (я проверял - их сравнивают все, кому не лень), но вот занимался ли кто-то компаративистикой вообще? потому что "Catcher in the Rye", такое ощущение, весь построен на последнем эпизоде второй главы "Портрета" (после того, как Стивен просаживает премию, после разочарования в отце), а ключевая сцена разыгрывается у Сэлинджера чуть ли не дословно. т.е. такое ощущение, что весь "Ловец" написан как экзерсис на заданную тему, как вариация, и ключ ко всему образу Колфилда (который через Джойса восходит, понятно, к луне Шелли) - уж не "swoon of sin" ли? вообще да, будет полезно прочесть "Ловца" через призму "Портрета", но это задача для молодых и пытливых академиков (оксюморон?).

...хотя нет, конечно, это я слукавил. понятно, зачем я вдруг взялся перечитывать Джойса именно сейчас. Стивен в "Портрете" - примерно ролевая модель для ХХ века, олицетворение разборок не просто индивида, но художника со своей страной, ее историей, религией и политикой. И вывод о невозможности жить в ней - он же не из личных лирических причин, а потому что само пребывание в этой стране становится формой коллаборационизма с отвратительным и эстетически безобразным - нет, даже не режимом, ВСЕМ (недаром же Стивен отталкивается в последний раз от эстетики: у него с Ирландией тоже "эстетические разногласия" (с)). Выполнение своих внутренних (творческих, среди прочего, но, само собой, не только) задач всегда важнее какой угодно национальной/политической/иной аффилиации. Тут же не просто вопрос климата или семьи, тут даже не просто родина из-под ног уходит - у нас такое бывало и раньше, - это тотальный обрыв связей с опостылевшей культурой, с народом, предавшим личность. И вопрос тут далеко не только в "религиозном воспитании", как любили задумчиво посасывать палец совлитведы. Стивену - как, надо думать, и самому Джойсу - в переломный момент кристаллизации творческой личности просто-напросто стало стыдно быть ирландцем.

Цитат приводить не буду - сами все знаете. Но вот уже больше века, как стало понятно еще раз, его тексты - по-прежнему отличная прививка от всеобщей экскрементальности.

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with these two books. Neither of them held my attention very well and my desire to comprehend the plot by the end was questionable.

Joyce's style made it difficult to keep straight the trajectory of the plot, and I had a hard time differentiating when a scene took place in the main character's head and when it took place in reality. I found the writing very fragmented and jumpy.

I also didn't think Stephen as a character was really brought to life throughout the work. Don't get me wrong - there were compelling scenes that revealed a deep humanity inside Stephen (the scene of the spiritual retreat is particularly moving), but they seemed sporadic and even non-sequitur at times.

I'll be the first to admit that maybe I'm not well enough educated to read Joyce. Maybe I need a primer course on Irish culture and history to fully appreciate the story. I'd be fully willing to concede those things. I'm also not so naïve to think that Joyce was a terrible writer and nobody should read him. He's a world-renown author, so maybe I just need some blanks filled in from my own reading. As of today though - wasn't really a fan.

[Nils Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have such mixed feelings about Joyce. On the one hand, I love his writing style. His use of stream of consciousness is so intriguing, he bounces around like you are in a dream, which reflects what memories are really like, and his prose feels, at times, like poetry. But, at the same time, he is just so underwhelmingly boring. I took me until about half way through Portrait of the Artist to realize that I simply wasn’t excited to pick up the book. I love when a story captures my heart, and this story just doesn’t do that for me. With that being said, I did enjoy Dubliners, maybe because each story is succinct enough to not drag on like Portrait does. But that’s just it; he is really interesting to read for a bit, but only for a bit. When Joyce goes on too long, he loses me.

In conclusion, read Dubliners, don’t bother with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

[Jack]

I hesitate to rate two of the most important books in English. But here's my take:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I didn't like reading this. This is really a book about a guy being raised Catholic and educated by Jesuits, and how that influenced him. The description of the terror of hell was horrible to read. I had to read this in high school, and now I see why I retained none of it. Why this is a masterpiece of Modernism is beyond me. Virginia Wolf is more accessible.
Dubliners is accessible. The stories cover a cross-section of Dublin society. The characters a very well done and unique. These stories are important in the world of short stories. I'm glad I read them.

[Ata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try reading Joyce every once in a while. This time, however, his first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, fascinated me in a queer way as if it's the story of myself growing up in a religious family within a conservative society facing lots of existential challenges when I was struggling to look adult to the eyes of others. After all, quite on the contrary to Stephen Daedalus, unfortunately, I was entirely incapable of taking these challenges serious, as a ladder for bringing up one's soul making a creative future out of a difficult past.
This novel made me think about my past and present.

[Benita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually listened to an audiobook version, and part of the attraction of it was the narrator's (John Lee) lovely Irish accent though the Lee is English. The book is so very Irish that it just seemed appropriate to hear it with an Irish accent. This had been sitting on my "to read" list for many years. The prose verges on poetry, and I loved hearing it, but now wish I had read it, so I could have lingered over some of the passages. It seemed to me a realistic portrayal of growing up, and the main character's musings on aesthetics, while they seemed a bit artificial, also were thought-provoking. I can see why it is a classic, and why it was controversial, and hard to get published.

[Max Sinclair · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful exploration of consciousness and the coming of age of the artistic soul

[S Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Anguish of Growing Up Irish and Catholic

For many readers this “autobiographical” novel may be their introduction to Joyce, and for a student/scholar who wants to understand Joyce’s longer, more abstruse works, it may provide helpful insights into those novels’ actions and language. However for the general reader, it is a tortured, often long-winded, jargon-laden recitation of the multiple, mainly negative, influences the author experienced growing up with an alcoholic, impoverished father, who had wasted his inheritance and makes Stephen attend Jesuit secondary schools because “Those are the fellows that can get you a position…they’re a very rich order” (318). Compounding these issues are bitter controversies among family members about the Catholic Church’s treatment of the Irish national hero Parnell, Stephen’s wakening sexual urges, and his schoolmates’ often abusive camaraderie, poorly tolerated by the physically weak, timid, insecure, naive boy, so sensitive he fearfully distorts reality and is happier in his imaginary worlds. As a very young boy he struggles to understand the words being used by adults because he knows they are key to understanding people and the world (308). “By thinking of things you could understand them” (286), but he is so hyper-imaginative that after reading The Count of Monte Cristo he lives through adventures as “marvellous as those in the book itself” (308), which is easy when living in a comfortable house in Blackrock. With a romanticized approach to life, he dreams that one day he would meet “the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld…and he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes…Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment” (311). However, soon the family is forced to relocate to a “bare cheerless house” (312) in a poor district of Dublin, which was “a new and complex sensation” (312). After fruitless attempts to make Dublin into Marseilles and continue his romantic fantasies, the unpleasant realities of his situation caused him to “chronicle with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret (313)…His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin…[which] filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts” (326). When his school friends asked him to pick the best poet, he proudly selected Byron, whom they considered “a poet for uneducated people….a heretic and immoral” (329). In fact, “nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys” (346). By now words call up visions of forbidden sexual activity that upset him emotionally and physically, “He cared little that he was in mortal sin….the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes” (459) ultimately drove him to seek sexual relief with Dublin prostitutes.

Sexual activity outside marriage is a major sin, and although he is emotionally tortured fearing the eternal damnation promised continually by his clerical teachers, he is also fascinated to explore the church’s writings on guilt. Thus when he attends a religious retreat set up by his school in honor of its patron saint, Francis Xavier, after a day filled with detailed description of the tortures of hell reserved for sinners who die without being in a state of grace, Stephen experiences a religious crisis, goes to his room, and collapses after seeing a vision of hell. Finally he goes to confession, but again the power of words becomes critical for his confession, “To say it in words! His soul, stifling and helpless, would cease to be” (399). However, he receives absolution and goes home “conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs…God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy” (402). Now he goes in the opposite direction and tries to make his life follow extremes of “canonical penances” (404). “He saw the whole world forming one vast symmetrical expression of God’s power and love…The world for all its sordid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality” (407). To counter the dangers of this “spiritual exaltation” (407) he uses “constant mortification to undo the sinful past…Each of his senses was brought under a rigorous discipline” (408) which involved doing the opposite of what would please that sense, i.e., smelling the most horrible odor he could find. The school’s director notices this apparent piety and asks him if he would like to join the order. “No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God…the power to bind and to loose from sin…He heard in this proud address an echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen himself…with the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence! His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire” (417). In addition the priesthood attracted him because “the vague acts of the priesthood… pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it” (417), which is similar to his imaginative retreats when faced by unpleasant reality and ultimately the imaginative world he creates as an artist. If he became a priest he would know about sin and be sinless, but he looks at the priest’s “grave and ordered and passionless life…a life without material cares…At once from every part of his being unrest began to irradiate (419)….The chill and order of the life repelled him” (420). He realized “a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom…He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world…He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul” (421).

For his art “he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose” (426). His school-friends call him “an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself” (438) because he is more an observer than a participant, but he muses on his classical name “Daedalus,” the boy who dared put on wings and fly to the sun, “a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being…His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes (429)…This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain…His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes” (430). He appears to forget Daedalus’ disastrous fall and flees to the seaside where he sees a girl also enjoying the beautiful location: “Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy…Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory” (433). The novel ends on the same ecstatic note with the departing Stephen exclaiming, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (525).

Such ecstasy is in inevitable conflict with the reality of his own inhibitions towards women and his impoverished life, from which he escapes into his schoolwork, where he is torn between the Elizabethans’ earthy vitality and the “spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas” (437), whose aesthetic theory he ends up assimilating, creating what a teacher called “applied Aquinas” (475). When his schoolmates encourage him to be more Irish, he says that “This race and this country and this life produced me…I shall express myself as I am” (467). But “when the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets…Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow” (468). Joyce is said to have wanted to find “the universal in the particular,” which is perhaps an inversion of Aquinas because it implies the universal exists in the real world and not in an abstract world. Using a pedestrian, pseudo-Socratic dialog to analyze Aquinas’ classical forms of literature, Joyce chooses the dramatic as most appropriate for his art because the personality of the artist (which is prominent in both the lyrical and epical modes) “finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (481-2). As an ideal such detachment is attractive for its implication of Godlike supremacy, but rarely does an artist work without being personally involved and showing that involvement. Indeed, throughout this novel Joyce presents minutiae of his experiences that shaped his personality and artistic vision, making the book closer to an epic than a drama. His final vision of himself as “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everylasting life” (488), is a brilliant mutation of a priest’s function.

His college experiences continue his dissatisfaction with religious constraints, and his fellow students are crudely boisterous and simple-minded. Some are attracted by a Tsarist peace proposal that promotes social revolution, but Stephen refuses to discuss this or sign the petition. He rejects the idolatry of socialism (462), and is scornful of these students’ attempts at individuality. A comrade points to Stephen and says, “he’s the only man I see in this institution that has an individual mind” (465), which provokes jealous banter and the counter retort that Stephen’s “pride is too powerful” (467). Only Davin, “the peasant student” (441), who is immersed in Irish myth, patriotism, and still speaking fragments of Elizabethan English, provides unique stimulation (459), along with Cranly, who comes from Dublin’s seafront with its impoverished vitality and is the student to whom Stephen speaks most freely about his spiritual torments and aspirations. Cranly, however, is too fearful of being alone to dare to be different and suggests hypocrisy as a way to exist in an unfavorable environment. Stephen replies, “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning” (518). Ultimately, going into exile to make a complete break with his Irish environment is necessary for him to freely express himself and achieve his artistic goal.

His religious upbringing takes up the majority of the novel and is explicated in great detail, while the background of Irish national figures is missing and has to be discovered through history (which is one of the book’s shortcomings), so the bitter family arguments about national heroes are vague as are the scattered references while Stephen is walking through Dublin. When schoolmates try to convince him to speak and write Irish, he resists, yet both the clerical and Irish national influences are critical in his development. While he rejects the church for its autocratic, mentally abusive approach, is dismayed by demands that he reject all forms of English influence, and ashamed of his father’s typical Irish behavior as a friendly, ne'er-do-well drunk, in the end Joyce’s major works are about Ireland’s heritage and national character, and Catholicism.

In comparison with Joyce’s short stories in the Dubliners, this novel is repetitive and overly detailed about everything from incidents in his childhood to his subsequent sexual and religious quandaries, followed by his intellectual and aesthetic awakening, amid the rude, childish banter and crude horseplay of his school mates and the repressed, gloomy, self-denial of his clerical teachers. Using a chronological format as a unifying framework, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness series of impressions of incidents and his emotional and intellectual responses are often jumbled in a chaotic fashion making them hard to analyze (or sometimes even understand), as they may contain schoolboy slang, un-introduced characters, references to previous experiences, or arcane Catholic references. The sharp focus and illuminating epiphanies that are Dubliners’ hallmark are missing (except for the episode at the seaside). Perhaps to understand and exorcise these youthful experiences Joyce had to write about them in excruciating detail, including lengthy sections that recite Catholic versions of hell and the torments reserved for sinners, at points sounding like a recap of Paradise Lost. While it is clear that visions of hell had a serious impact on the impressionable boy, for the mature reader they cause wonder that an intelligent person would follow a religion based so heavily upon fear of a vindictive God’s punishment and submission to a priest because of his ability to absolve one of sin. Certainly, implicit in Joyce’s description is a critique that Catholic clergy used such methods to control believers, who were never expected to challenge any statement by a priest (exactly the nature of the quarrels Stephen experienced in his own family), which caused his father to exclaim in exasperation the Irish were “a priestridden Godforsaken race!” (280). Indeed, this absolute clerical power is Stephen’s temptation when the school’s director asks him if he would like to join the order, but it is also an important reason why he rejects the offer because he realizes it would require his rejection of life’s reality and acceptance of a repressed existence based on self-denial. His desire to become a writer is ultimately more important, and his love of words requires him to understand the experiences words try to communicate, so that his artistic vision can be accomplished.

[Miles Jaffee · Rating 4 out of 5]

What am I supposed to say about James Joyce? Entire careers, entire college departments' worth of people much smarter and more perceptive than me have been spending their entire lives analyzing every letter out of these stories for the past hundred years. All I can do is parrot, and try to express what he tried so hard to make inexpressible. But parrot I must. ("Parrot I must?" He's fucking getting to me, I would never write that under normal conditions...)

Portrait

This collection really should have started with Dubliners. It's shorter, punchier, leaner, meaner, and it was written earlier (meaning Joyce's in-house style is less developed, so it's marginally less impossible to read). Well, I guess the title "A Portrait [...] / Dubliners" reads better, and the opportunity to end the whole physical book with the last page of "The Dead" was too good. Anyway, I plunged into Portrait expecting the widespread cultural picture of Joyce - the long incomprehensible sentence fragments and such - and (after the bit with the moocows) was faced with what seemed to me a shockingly normal, everyday, if a little dry piece of writing. The real point of the book didn't hit me until I thought about this beautiful paragraph (also pretty early on):

O yes, Stephen said. But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.

In an indescribable, vague emotional state, the ten-year-old Stephen (a stand-in for Joyce) is doing something I myself did as a child - the thing where you open and close your ears in a crowd? For me, it was a weird-smelling elementary school gym with a lame magician show going on; for him, it's a stone room in the bowels of an ancient countryside castle repurposed into a boarding school. I've never seen that experience reflected in anything else - a book, a song, a meme - and certainly not with that kind of poetic beauty.

That's the whole idea of the novel, to bring out into the light what had previously been unexpressed or implicit in literature. Dubliners is also obsessed with this (I'll get around to that), as is Ulysses, and really, it was an aspect of the entire modernist movement to be drawn to experiences, thoughts, and feelings that previous generations of artists saw as too minor, ignoble, or unwholesome to be let onto the page. I mean, it was originally published in full in 1916. Fifty years before, the height of literature was Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy. Imagine going from that to the fucking moocows?

In the modern day, it's easy to miss how revolutionary this stuff was, because it invented the modern. Or at least solidified it. It's like those episodes of Seinfeld or Friends where they seem to be repeating tired sitcom cliches - no, they invented the cliches! The prose style was pretty revolutionary compared to the stuffy European literature Joyce was brought up on, but it made such a permanent impression on the English-language novel it now feels almost samey (if somewhat more poetic and melodic).

One of my favorite moments was the bit with the English deacon in chapter 3 who insults Stephen for using an Irish provincialism, "tundish." It's another small, little, unnoticed moment, but Joyce makes it huge in several dimensions. It's turned into a tearjerking passage about 'his language not being truly his own' that seems to predict or influence future de-colonialist literature; it's used as a new facet/direction in Stephen's development as an incredibly complex and human character; and most importantly, it's just written really well. The prose is deep and complex, coughing up new ideas on every re-read of each sentence. These little gems of moments happen only a few times in the book, but they're so unique they make the entire thing worth reading. Other favorites were the bit in chapter 4 when he goes down to the shoreline and the bit in chapter 5 where the villanelle with repeated lines springs into his mind fully formed in a dream, a breathtaking and incredibly real dramatization of the creative impulse.

Of course, these moments of genius are few and far between. I found myself strung out, waiting for the next hit through incredibly dull blathering (the sermons in chapter 3, which were interesting but overstayed their welcome, the horribly stodgy and stiff "witty" banter between Stephen and his college friends in chapter 5, etc). It's mostly a guy sitting around thinking about stuff, and the good bits come when another person (such as the mysterious love interest) disturbs that lonely equilibrium.

Portrait: 3.5 stars. It's good, but not as good as...

Dubliners

Dubliners, Joyce's first book, was completed in 1904, but not published until 1914 because no self-respecting publisher wanted to put their hands on it. It was groundbreaking in its realism. Again, we think nothing when a modern-day author uses coarse language or dark themes in their work, but Joyce was on the vanguard. Multiple publishers refused his manuscript because of the use of such hoooorrifying terms as 'bloody' (admittedly, it was a bit stronger back then than it is to modern day Irish and Brits). They had no idea what was coming down the pipeline in his next three books, of course.

It's a collection of short stories which all tick together like gears in a watch. It's very precisely laid out. I forgot to mention, but I strongly suspect Joyce was autistic, or at least on the spectrum. (By that I mean I see myself in him.) Both the sensory stuff and how he describes not being fully able to be "part of the broader group" in Portrait, and now all this precise ordering and repetitive theming...?

Each story follows a Dubliner of older and older age, from the immature schoolboys of "The Sisters" and "Araby," to the young adults setting out in the world for the first time of "Two Gallants" and "After the Race," to the old people past their prime of "A Painful Case" and "A Mother," and finally, of course, to The Dead. Each story ends with dissatisfaction, paralysis, an awkward break-off or implication. This ranges from out in the open ("Eveline" has the most obvious and literal paralysis, and is a good intro to Joyce for skeptical readers) to subtle and implicit ("Clay"'s ending, in an extreme case, depends 100 percent on a footnote or a Google search, but when you finally find the second verse of that obscure opera song...). There are lighter dissatisfactions (the lady from "Clay" and the guy from "After the Race" don't seem to really be *that* sad about their situations, just not thrilled) to more crushing ones (the guy from "Counterparts" losing his job, friends, and all his money and shit in the space of like four hours - gosh, but there is a little piece of him inside anyone who's ever done boring white-collar work, a yearning for the softer and more human things, and more directly to insult your little-headed boss to their face).

A few stories seem relatively positive, but when placed in the context of the collection, they make powerful statements about the Dublin of Joyce's day. "Grace" seems kind of positive - the last thing we see is the old guy going to church and apparently starting to be won over from his alcoholic ways - but on a reread, giving a good look to the sermon, it's cheap and treacly and does not look likely to stop him from biting off even more of his tongue. "Ivy Day" closes on the clearest expression of hope in the whole book, Dubliners plus Portrait, an ode to Irish separationist Thomas Stewart Parnell that places him among the very greatest heroes of Irish history, but as explored further in Portrait (another reason to order it after Dubliners!), he was forced out of his office in disgrace after an extramarital affair and later died in obscurity, lending an implied sour taste to the proceedings.

And I just have to highlight "The Dead." The ultimate dissatisfaction. The last three paragraphs - well, I don't know about the people who count them among the greatest ever written in the English language, but they are certainly incredibly profound. They turn the end of the book into something that, if not actually hopeful at all, is at least a little more Zen. Gabriel may have squandered his grand epiphany, but being an intelligent and aware man, he at least knows what he's lost.

All these stories offer a previously untouched lens into the inner life of people from all walks of life. Joyce claimed arrogantly that it would slow the progress of Irish civilization if his book was taken off shelves since it taught Dubliners a lesson they needed to learn - that they were paralyzed, stuck in place on the island he himself had left so long ago. That's the most important reason I wish Portrait was ordered after Dubliners. It offers a positive contrast, and the ending where Stephen finally leaves, escaping the stultifying stasis of Ireland, makes much more sense against the stories of those who could not do so.

Dubliners: 4.75 stars

Overall rating: 4 stars (but, like, upper echelon, there's so much here...)

Oh my god, Ulysses is going to be the fucking best thing I've ever read.

Important note: Get an edition with footnotes if you can find one! I would have been so lost without the reminders as to who X obscure historical poet/nun/saint was and the explanations of fin-de-siecle Dublin slang. The Barnes & Noble Classics edition with the enlightening introduction by Kevin JH Dittmar had particularly good ones, though it omits a key piece of info at the end of "Clay" I had to look up :P

[Tim Stafford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe this is a prime example of avant garde writing from the early years of the last century but I found it slow going. Joyce was maybe more interested in the sound of words than in the human beings who spoke them.

[Miguel Soto · Rating 4 out of 5]

¿Quién es este James Joyce del que tanto se habla y al que tan poco se lee? Casi año y medio duró nuestro fragor, él insistía, yo me resistía. Y eso que no me enfrenté a la que -dicen- es su obra capital, sino a parte de lo que hasta se puede definir como fácil, fácil dentro de su estándar.


Retrato del artista adolescente:
Evolución, desarrollo, ¿progreso? No lo sé, algo similar. Caminar, tránsito sin duda. Creo que eso es el retrato del artista adolescente, el caminar lento, reflexivo, pensado, de Stephen Dedalus. Es difícil percatarse de los momentos de transición, del instante en el que Stephen deja de ser infante y pasa a ser un jovencillo, y de cuando deja de ser un jovencillo para empezar a ser Stephen Dedalus. Pudiera ser el tránsito que hemos pasado otros también, por otras rutas o por las mismas, ajenas o propias...

La mejor parte es algo así como el último tercio, que me recordó muchísimo a un grupo de jóvenes que discutían profundos asuntos. Las últimas páginas son deliciosas. No diré más, igual no creo poder hacerle justicia al texto.


Dublineses ("Gente de Dublín"):
Cada relato es uno, pero todos son más que la acumulación de cada uno. Son la ciudad, son Dublín, ese que puede sernos tan familiar a los que compartimos algo con estos dublineses: la crianza, el origen, los fantasmas.

Los personajes son casi paradigmáticos: el ebrio invariable, las damas de buena extracción, las señoritas jóvenes, las jóvenes no-señoritas, y las no-jóvenes señoritas, los artistas, los talentosos, los ordinarios, los bajos, todos los que conforman la vaga red. Las calles, las casas, el teatro, la iglesia, están todos, los vivos, y también, los muertos.

4.5/5

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

So basically this book is amazing, especially A Portrait...This is the most recent book that I have finished and I just love James Joyce's writing style - seriously - that man can do no wrong. The character Stephen really grows (obviously) but unlike other bildungsroman types - it was actually interesting to read about and understand the growth of not just a person, but an artist. The stream of consciousness writing was also just great and it really gives the effect of not only just reading and absorbing the thoughts and words on a page, but it feels as if you are in fact thinking them yourself. Reading this book is an experience in itself, and it was really just great.

[Ava · Rating 4 out of 5]

I strongly recommend the Barnes and Noble version of this book for the Non-native speakers of English. I loved the fact that this book had the meanings of some of the words. It was quite helpful.Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the book as much as I thought I would. However, I liked the comical parts, the Ironies, and the sections where religion was discussed. Joyce's use of stream-of-consciousness was not satisfactory to me.

[Cara · Rating 3 out of 5]

widely regarded this, canonical that...don't tell me i'm required to give this four or five stars, okay? i mean, i'm glad i've read it and all, but it just wasn't my complete cup of tea. it was hot, steamy and fragrant, but without a touch of sweetness and a soothing caress of cream. i'm just sayin'.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK, I have long wanted to get through at least one book by Joyce so after a false start trying to read Finnegan's Wake (impossible to read) I went for this one. I have so far nearly completed Portrait and feel that it is not very good. It seems that Joyce focuses on pointless details, leaving you trying to figure out where the actual story is. We'll see how Dubliner's goes when I get to that.

[Alex Mai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una raccolta di racconti scritta oltre un secolo fa... interessante, ma a mio avviso sarebbe stato meglio leggerla in inglese, come ho visto fare a una ragazza sul bus giorni fa. L'italiano della traduzione è piuttosto arcaico, e rende le cose più pesanti di quanto magari possano risultare in lingua originale...

[Antonio Meola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stilisticamente eccelso, vario, e uno dei primi scrittori a servirsi dello stile in toto per raccontare.
Ritratto dell'artista da giovane è stato paragonato alle Confessioni di S. Agostino, al Vita Nova di Dante... E questo libro è una confessione un po' insolita della vita di Joyce, sotto il nome di Stephen Dedalus (Dedalo, l'artista per eccellenza. Coincidenze?).
Consigliatissimo.

[LauraT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mamma che fatica!!! Non linguistica, ma proprio di lettura: da italiana sono scappata dalle messe e dalle prediche fiume, dai sensi di colpa e dalle interpretazioni filosofiche sull'esistenza o meno di Dio. E poi me le ritrovo tutte qui. Pfuuu

[Arianna · Rating 2 out of 5]

due stelle perchè sono buona e per il discorso sull'estetica dell'ultima parte perchè sennò due palle perpetue.

[JuanmaSumi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una obra costumbrista de relatos que se producen en la sociedad dublinesa de principios del siglo XX. En especial remarcar el relato titulado "Un caso doloroso", muy muy bueno.