Dubliners

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The workers, petty crooks and freeloaders, seamstresses, scullery maids, servants, scriveners, salesmen, union activists - the whole cross-section of Irish middle and lower-middle class. Some of them crave for money, some for other places, some for love while others for another times. And the more they’re yearning the bigger is their disillusionment and discontent. Outcasts from life’s feast. Bašić, Sonja (1991). "A Book of Many Uncertainties: Joyce's "Dubliners" ". Style. 25 (3): 351–377. ISSN 0039-4238. JSTOR 42945924.

For anyone thinking of putting James Joyce on your “must read this year” list for 2019 here are my suggestions. So, is The Dead the greatest short story ever written? I’ll add my two cents: I first read it 50 years ago in college. I’ve always remembered it as if I read it yesterday. How many of the hundreds of short stories I have read since then can I say that about? Muchos escritores sintieron una especialísima afición por su país: García Márquez por Colombia, Balzac, Hugo y Flaubert por Francia, Hawthorne y su naturaleza americana por nombrar algunos. And each time we recognize the narrow spaces, the sombre, the dreary, the faded, the routine, and the bleak prospects.And may be there is also an additional light in this kaleidoscope that makes these sorry elements shine through those inner reflecting mirrors. This collection of short stories was really rough. Between the (at times) very long sentence structure of Joyce to some of the archaic language to the many unneeded characters in a short period of time to the extremely subtle symbolism to the uniquely Irish words (like stirabout), I didn’t really understand what was going on, and I didn’t enjoy the experience of reading this. The drabness of many of these hovering elements is however transformed by a play of incantation. The desolation is perplexingly denatured into elegance and the stark absence of sentimentality blooms because what it renders is so very genuine. There is a magic wand in the form of a pen of wizardry that by the clothing with words, precisely chosen words, carefully written words, encapsulates the dreariness and creates tales that captivate and enchant us.

Dubliners, published in 1914 (after nearly ten years of his trying to get it published!), is short, as story collections go. I have my favorites: “Eveline,” about a young shop girl conflicted about leaving her widowed father to live life with a sailor: Araby" – A boy falls in love with the sister of his friend, but fails in his quest to buy her a worthy gift from the Araby Bazaar. I was put off by reading James Joyce because I was scared of reading him — that I wouldn’t understand a damn thing he said although I knew he was a brilliant writer…one for the ages. I think it was ‘Ulysses’ that scared me off, and I made a massive generalization (if I don’t understand that book, I won’t understand anything by Joyce). My mistake. In Two Gallants, a young man waits to see the result of his best friend’s visit to a young woman they assume is a prostitute.

So it was only slowly, over the course of many years, that Dubliners gained recognition for both the modernism and the rather brute realism of its stories. Some consider him a complex lunatic. That his conflict with language has led him astray, and others who say he has unparalleled talent, which is beyond human comprehension today. It is argued that the narrators in Dubliners rarely mediate, which means that there are limited descriptions of their thoughts and emotions, a practice said to accompany narratorial invisibility where the narrator sees instead of tells. [5] While some point to Joyce's use of free indirect discourse as a way to understand his characters, he often obscures the reliability of his characters in a way that would make any kind of analysis very difficult. [4] As Richard Ellmann has argued, "Joyce claims importance by claiming nothing." [6] His characters' personalities can only be observed because they are not explicitly told. A boy grapples with the death of a priest, Father Flynn. With his aunt, the boy views the corpse and visits with the priest’s mourning sisters. As the boy listens, the sisters explain Father Flynn’s death to the aunt and share thoughts about Father Flynn’s increasingly strange behavior. “An Encounter”

When I said below that the stories aren't "exciting" ... yes, well, first I didn't mean that they were not very affecting stories, because some of them are. One could use the word "depressing"? But more, I think the atmosphere of the stories is probably much like the weather that I associate with the Emerald Isle. Damp, cloudy, hints of rain, chill in most parts of the year, maybe summerlike for a couple weeks in July. Gloomy. Weather that makes you seek out a pub and the warm comfort of a pint with friends. Then there's that Catholic haze that looms over everything, the haze and the weather and maybe even the people such that Joyce himself had to flee. Los quince cuentos y relatos de “Dublineses” se impregnan de esa mística irlandesa en sus calles, su gente y edificios. Nuevamente recuerdo a Julio Cortázar porque creo que estos dos autores supieron ahondar profundamente en la idiosincrasia de sus ciudades logrando mostrarnos con firmes pinceladas cómo era la naturaleza real de sus habitantes y de esos submundos descriptos en bares, oficinas, casas, parques, calles, ciudades, muelles y plazas. Frawley, Oona. A New & Complex Sensation: Essays on Joyce's Dubliners. Dublin: Lilliput, 2004. ISBN 978-1-84351-051-2. We forget that sometimes, life is also the acceptance of that which is presented to us by mere chances, or more than that, by the long witnessed “usual”.We are told in a brief introduction that Joyce was a pioneer in popularizing the structure of the modern short story as focused on “a fleeting but decisive episode.” Elsewhere I’ve read of the focus of the modern short story described as 'the moment.' After an infuriating day at work, Farrington embarks on an evening of drinking with his friends. Even though Farrington pawns his watch to replenish his empty wallet, he finds himself spending all of his money on drinks for himself and his companions. Growing more and more frustrated, Farrington almost explodes when he loses an arm-wrestling match. At home later that night, Farrington vents his anger by beating his son. “Clay”

Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.” These short stories almost felt like they were ripped from a longer book. There are many characters in the stories, and Joyce didn’t make them memorable enough to remember. This is a collection of short stories. Or are they one single long story? “A Portrait of the City as an Old and Stultifying Enclave.”? Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”I had thought, this small part being so beautiful, that FW would be another masterpiece, but the rest of it isn’t one tenth as fascinating or linguistically lovely, and it will do your brain in. The only thing I’ve been able to do with FW is parody it, rather lamely And so Joyce did. But no matter how much had he abandoned Dublin, after all he took this city with himself forever. He loved and hated it, became a bard of Dublin and its inhabitants, a great admirer but its stern critic at the same time. The same sentiments had he for his homeland, often in his works called Errorland . Prvi susret sa Džojsom. Oko njega sam samo okolišao, osluškivao priče i nisam znao šta da očekujem. Neki ga na mnoga vrata hvale, drugi kažu da je sumoran, a treći govore da treba hronološki čitati njegova djela, jer jedna vuku druga, i hvata nit sa svakom sljedećom. Doduše pokušao sam Portret umjetnika u mladosti, i misaono nisam bio spremn za nju. Pa sam tako tražio preludijum za istu. Odlučih se za ove kratke priče, jer bih svaki dan po jednu priču pročitao te tako pokušao da držim kakav-takav fokus. I ova zbirka priča me je zaista dirnula, kad sam je završio, poželih još.