A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Classics and the Western Canon

Aug 19, 2013 Wendy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, memoir-biography, blooms-western-canon, 1001-books, classics

It's interesting how the writing changes as he grows, and his own consciousness changes. I especially like the parts about him as a young schoolboy, such as opening and closing his ears with his hands to make the sound of a train. And later, his constant wavering between blind faith and blind sin probably ring true to many (former) teenagers, especially those of us who went to Catholic school. Even nowadays, after the Second Vatican Council when the church was hugely modernized and the Hellfire ...more

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Jul 19, 2011 Benji rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-morocco, nonsequential-rereading, important-in-my-life, 2011

Joyce to me is similar to Keats, in the way that each book is worlds more improved and interesting, and he embodies his era so fully, even its excesses. There is not a great quantity to his oeuvre, but each are totemic works. DUBLINERS is so different from this, and then FINNEGAN's... wow. My experience with him is only limited to that, and seemingly each book he spent ten years working on. SO, My impression with Joyce is that of a very deliberate, cerebral and theoretical figure, and those face
Joyce to me is similar to Keats, in the way that each book is worlds more improved and interesting, and he embodies his era so fully, even its excesses. There is not a great quantity to his oeuvre, but each are totemic works. DUBLINERS is so different from this, and then FINNEGAN's... wow. My experience with him is only limited to that, and seemingly each book he spent ten years working on. SO, My impression with Joyce is that of a very deliberate, cerebral and theoretical figure, and those facets and contributions of his outshine the entertainment value of the work.

For that reason, possibly, I still prefer Beckett, his life long friend. Because there's the intellectual and the excitement. Maybe I've been lucky to save ULYSSES for last. With these others, Ive gotten glimpses of what he is capable of, but without any big payoff. Maybe that one will fulfill that promise, in a big culmination with all the pieces in perfect place. Though, at this point, FINNEGAN'S is my favorite, and a whole lot of fun, the 40 pages that I read so far of it.

I feel the Hell section was interesting, in the fact that if you look at it as ''religious works as literature'', it's really amazing the amount of depth and energy (and extremes) to which people take these ideas. Sheer exuberancy and creativity while simultaneously holding these extremes, perfected over centuries of people trying to glean some new factoid previously overlooked by the other zealots. In my mind, as a nonreligious person, that part spoke to me in the same way as the Musee d'Art Bruit does, in Lausanne Switzerland, a place full of the artwork of mental asylees and prisoners. But then to see that level of neurotic fixation be inseminated in the national consciousness is a moving experience. Joyce brought that alive in an impressive way, especially coming from a region of the US and experiencing a more lean version of that (lean, as in: not fancy). That it takes up 15 percent of the novel is nothing to snear at, and that fact to me demonstrates how vital Joyce felt it was, how he went to such great lengths to bring that alive for us. And then the later doubts and falls, maybe not as well done--it happens very fast and he never wavers so much as he abruptly changes and doesn't look back. Nor are the reasons exremely clear, other than watching the girl bathe and wanting desperately to possess her.

I didn't get much feel of this book being very representative of Stream-of-Consciousness. IT's more like a representative of ''jump cuts'' that you see in movies today. Other than the first two pages I don't feel much to be living inside the character's head and watching the spigot of half-thoughts shoot out. THAT is more like Finnegan's Wake or parts of Gaddis.
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Jul 20, 2017 Roger Burk rated it liked it · review of another edition

The ordinary agonies of childhood and adolescence are elevated to cosmic importance. We are treated to rather too much terrors-of-hell preaching and adolescent theorizing about aesthetics. And yet I can't deny the originality of the concept, or the fascination of watching a budding poet mature from child to self-absorbed young man. I enjoyed it more when I read it in high school. ...more

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