A Day in Ireland

 

I just finished reading Dubliners by James Joyce (1882-1941).  This book falls under category #2 of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2017. A 20th Century Classic - any book published between 1900 and 1967.  Dubliners is a collection of short stories.  This book first came to my attention because of the acclaim that The Dead often receives an example of the quintessential short story, and it is one of the short stories in Dubliners.  

I read one short story a day to break it up a bit.  It's pretty obvious from the beginning that he was a gifted writer.  Within a few sentences he's plopped you straight into a cross section of someone's life and it feels like you haven't missed a thing.  Most of the stories really only cover one day in that person's life, but it's almost always at a junction in their life where they have some sort of personal epiphany (and it's usually not a very happy one).   I can't say that I "enjoyed" the book, because that's not really the right word to describe it.  Most of the stories are depressing and they usually emphasize the lower natures of human beings.  He brings out a lot of the vices within the Irish culture.  For example, there's quite a bit of the stereotypical Irish drunkard of a husband squandering all the money on booze.  I can totally see why his writing would have been controversial when it was published back in 1914.  I do have to say that I definitely felt an appreciation for his literary prowess even if I didn't always fully understand all of the political and cultural nuisances associated with life in Ireland.  I'll end with a couple quotes from Dubliners to give you an idea of his writing style:

“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.”  

“Too excited to be genuinely happy”

 “She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”