Customer Reviews

Dubliners (Classics on Cassette)

5 star:		(107)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I wish I could stand up here and make some pretentious claim that this is the "greatest short story collection of all time!" or something along those lines but I generally don't read short stories or short story collections. But I like James Joyce and so figured what the heck, I made it through Ulysses, this should be a cakewalk. So I read it and if you were wowed by Ulysses then this should reconfirm Joyce's genius for you and that he could do other writing besides that wacky postmodern stuff (before there really was a postmodern). If you're not a Joyce fan most of these (other than a notable handful) probably won't convert you. In essence these are Joyce's portraits of the people of Dublin and the city itself, most of these stories are character sketches, mostly following a few people around as they go about their lives. They were written over a period of time so the quality does vary a bit, the first few stories I don't find anything special but by the time you get to around "Two Gallants" the quality takes a sharp spike upward and stays there right until the end. The prose is fairly easy to follow, the worst part is deciphering all the Irish names and slang that are used liberally for obvious reasons . . . if anything it showed me how two cultures who technically speak the language can sound so different. The stories run the gamut of the "slice of life" genre, if such a thing exists, showing people from all walks of life and all classes of society, showing them as realistically as Joyce could, all their fears and foibles, warts and all. At his best he makes you live the lives of the characters and immerses you deeply into the city of Dublin, probably more than any group of short stories has ever brought a city to life. If you're still not convinced, then take this advice, buy the book for the sake of only one story, the last story in the collection, "The Dead" . . . simply put it is one of the best pieces of short fiction I have ever read. It starts off mundanely enough at a party but by the time the characters leave the party and go back to their hotel the writing becomes something almost otherworldly and Joyce starts writing some of the most evocative prose ever put on paper. If the last few pages don't send chills down your spine, then you must be dead. That's the only explanation. After that gem, everything else is just icing on the cake. Simply put, everyone should read "The Dead" and if you're the type of person whose fancy shall be struck by the rest of the stories here, so much the better.

Having grown up in a small town much like Joyce's Dublin, this book has a special significance for me. I've seen so many people from my town graduating from high school without really understanding that there is an entire world outside the place they grew up and lacking the ambition to go explore it. I fear many of them will spend their lives "getting by" in a job they hate, raising children who will inevitably do the same thing. Joyce's "Dubliners" depicts this cycle with as much complexity and compassion as any author I've read.

In an age where the most publicized fiction tends to be simple-minded and genre-bound, it's refreshing to come across a writer with Joyce's complexity. "Dubliners" is so rich in its intellectual and symbolic atmosphere that many readers may be put off by the overall weight of the prose. The writing is so thick with metaphorical contexts that the literal content of the story occasionally becomes obscured, which can be frustrating for those not used to reading Joyce. Yet, while difficult, "Dubliners" is far from impossible to decipher, and although these stories function well as a whole, they are also more or less self-contained, which makes "Dubliners" easier to get through than Joyce's other works(it's a lot easier to take on a ten page short story than a 600+ page novel like "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake"). For readers who are new to Joyce, this would be a good place to start.

A final note: since this book is old enough to be considered a "classic," there are a plethora of editions available from various publishers. I own the Vintage edition (ISBN: 0679739904). Not only is it a quality printing (not that cheap newspaper ink that rubs off on your fingers), it also contains about a hundred pages of criticism at the end that help shed light on Joyce's often illusive themes. Normally I shun forewards and afterwards (I like to think I've read enough to discover a story's theme on my own), but in the case of Joyce I found that a push in right direction can mean the difference between enjoyment and frustration.

As a young man, James Joyce abandoned his hometown of Dublin, and yet, he never wrote about any other place. He had also rejected Catholicism, and yet all his characters are dominated by it. DUBLINERS, Joyce's collection of short stories which set the standard for the genre, is filled with characters who come to terrible revelations (which he called "epiphanies") about how their lives had been scarred by the provincialism of Dublin, the divisiveness of its politics, and the oppression of religion. By extension, this is how Joyce percieved humanity at the dawn of modernism.

The stories range from the psychologially simple ("Counterparts" and "A Little Cloud") to the extraordinarily complex ("A Painful Case" and "The Dead"). But what is common throughout is the feel for Dublin just after the turn of the last century. The readers see the cobblestones, the chimneys, the trams and carts, the churches, and the street lamps. More importantly, the readers feel the tensions underlying the public smiles and infrequent bursts of confidence that the characters exhibit.

The pinnacle of this collection is "The Dead". A novella, actually, "The Dead" encompasses everything: politics, religion, art, journalism, history, love, and the inevitability of death rendering all worldly things meaningless. This doesn't mean the story is a downer: this death is necessary to making a fresh start. The ending of "The Dead" has been interpreted in hundreds of ways. However, there is no denying that as Joyce "pulls back the camera" from the Conroy's hotel room to the universe above, the writing swells to its most beautiful. To me, this is a movement toward the future, toward change, leaving the living dead behind to a more spiritual life on Earth.

Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points.

Generally speaking, I don't particularly care to discuss superlatives, but I must say that this [Dubliners - James Joyce] is perhaps my favorite book (even more probable: my favorite collection of short stories). I thought that I had a decent understanding of the stories after simply reading (and re-reading) a Vintage Trade Paperback edition, but I must say that the extra materials provided here are absolutely illuminating. I won't get into the facts one can simply overlook, but I will say that most of the essays are wonderfully written and brilliantly thought-provoking. The footnotes will come in handy for anyone who is not Catholic and anyone who does not know much about the currency values and gradations in Ireland. The annotations and critical writings will allow almost anyone to develop an understanding of Joyce's prose, which is doubtless some of the most beautiful prose in history.
As most people say, this is Joyce's most readable work. This is an undeniable fact, though to anyone who has enjoyed it, I would recommend taking the next step into "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

Joyce's short story collection "Dubliners" transcends the ethos of the genre in its seemingly undramatic quality, its epiphanic climaxes, its focus on the nobodies of dreary Dublin. Indeed, Dublin becomes a microcosm for the world in these stories, and each character representative of mankind, much like Bloom's single-day experience in "Ulysses" is a microcosm of a whole lifetime.

Joyce examines specifically the paralysis of his city at the time, but on a larger scale he exposes the self-enslavement to which all human beings potentially fall subject. His heroes are not victorious, but they have been made aware. The reader is not as engrossed by what is actually happening as he is by how the character feels - and he is profoundly grateful and moved by this. No detail should be overlooked in these stories; each one quietly beholds the whole Universe.

The stories are arranged chronologically, so it is additionally rewarding to read them in order. If you'd rather pick and choose, don't miss "Araby", "Eveline", "A Little Cloud", and "The Dead", the latter being the masterpiece of the collection. Penguin Modern Classics version includes a scholarly introduction and notes on names, dates, places: informative but ancillary - read them after you've finished the stories.

Though now more famous for his later, immense, incredibly ambitious novels, James Joyce's early collection of short stories remains a classic - and for good reason. Joyce, as someone once pointed out, was and remains almost unique among writers in that he published only masterpieces. Granted, he took years (eventually decades) to write each book - yes, even this slim volume of 15 short stories. It paid off. Just as Joyce was immensely influential with his stream-of-consciousness (or interior monologue) style used in Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses (#3 and #1 on Modern Libary's Top 100 Books of the 20th century, respectively), and the... let us say, indescribable, style of Finnegan's Wake (which people are STILL trying to figure out), his style in writing these short stories became almost the archetype for short fiction in this century. Instead of focusing on action-oriented events in the story (or, as Edgar Allen Poe suggested, by trying to create a particular mood), Joyce instead centered on the simple, everyday mundane events of regular life. This not only made the stories seem realistic and believable, but also made them universally applicable. This is the reason why this is considered one of the greatest short story collections of all-time, and has been one of the most widely anthologized. A true classic of the 20th century.

There are wine enthusiasts who claim that certain vintages are wasted on those who fail to appreciate them. I'd never go that far in trying to restrict anyone from reading anything that's out there, but in Dubliners there is a certain sense that for those who have trained their minds to seek out the nuances hidden within literature, a great reward lies waiting. These ultra-realistic, almost dry stories of ordinary men and women and the para-extraordinary in each of their lives, is set in Dublin, circa 1900, and is one of those collections that shows a new side of itself on every reading. Plus unlike most of Joyce's work, this book is easily readable.

Despite being written almost a hundred years ago, James Joyce's `Dubliners' is still as fresh as when it was released. The characters are Dubliners, but above all they are human beings and act as such, and this makes this collection of fifteen stories so universal. Moreover this book is a good start for readers who want to read Joyce and are afraid of his most famous and notoriously difficult works such as "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake".

The tales are supposed to be read in the order they are published because they follow the natural course of the human life. The first ones deal with childhood, then with adolescence, later adulthood --and in this segment some of them deal with public life-- and the last one is called "The Dead", making it clear that the stories follow the sequence of life events that happen to everyone.

Joyce's brother Stanislaus Joyce once wrote that the book pairs up stories on common themes: adolescent life, sporting life, artistic life, amorous life, political life, religious life, and celibate life (male and female), plus four 'petty employees' (two married and two unmarried), plus the final story on 'holiday life'. But this kind of classification is only a plus when one reads the book, because what really matters is Joyce's ability to create real people and situation.

Not only does the writer makes a wonderful job when developing his characters in such a small form of telling a story, but he also has a sophisticated command of the language. And some academics claim that "The Dead" is one of the best --if not THE best-- piece of short fiction written in the 20 century.

The view of the human nature in this book is quite dark most of the time, dealing mostly with the failure or the impossibility of acquisition something desired, Joyce is able to sneak in the human soul and its incapability of coping with loss, fear and another difficult feelings.

Most of the stories in "Dubliners" are not easy to be read, but all of them are a real pleasure to be discovered. An important book that with some concentration is accessible to everyone.

The first of James Joyce's books, "Dubliners" is a collection of fifteen stories written between 1904 and 1907. Joyce wrote the first of the fifteen stories in this collection, "Sisters," in Ireland in 1904. The story was published in August of that year under the pseudonym "Stephen Daedalus." Joyce wrote the last, longest and most famous of the stories, "The Dead," in Rome in 1907. The stories were published in the book known as "Dubliners" in 1914. While there are many editions of "Dubliners" in print, the definitive edition of the work is generally considered to be the corrected text prepared by Robert Scholes in consultation with Richard Ellman, Joyce's biographer. Random House publishes the Scholes edition under its Modern Library imprint and I recommend this edition.

"Dubliners" stands as one of the Ur-texts of modernism, a startlingly original collection of stories set in turn-of-the-century Dublin that began the Joycean literary project. That project subsequently moved through the increasingly difficult, and characteristically modernist, iterations of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake." Like those succeeding texts, the interested reader can find thousands of pages of commentary on "Dubliners," the study of Joyce's works being akin to a Talmudic undertaking, an undertaking that can, if one chooses, occupy an entire life.

Joyce once commented that the stories of "Dubliners" constitute a "chapter of moral history" that represents the "first step towards the spiritual liberation of [Ireland]." He also said, "I call the series `Dubliners' to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city." The stories are, in other words, inherently critical (although also, at times, appreciative) of the Dublin life that Joyce abandoned, living and writing as an expatriate in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich for nearly the entirety of his adult life.

The stories operate on two levels. On one level, the stories are realistic narratives of every day life in Dublin. On another level, however, the stories are suffused with symbolism, with recurring, allusive images of spiritual, sexual and political meanings that mark a departure from nineteenth century literary realism and make "Dubliners" an enduring, and deservedly canonical, modernist narrative.

The first story, "Sisters," begins with a striking example of the tone of the stories in "Dubliners." A young boy stands, in the evening, looking up at the shadows flickering through the window of an upstairs room where a priest is dying:

"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."

Thus, a vivid, realistic image appears in the reader's mind, but so does a collection of words that suggest meanings and themes that go far beyond the real, that capture physical and intellectual and religious undercurrents, the inner life of a young boy living in Dublin.

"Sisters" is a brilliant story, as is "The Dead" and nearly every other story in "Dubliners" (excluding, perhaps, one or two, the worst being "After the Race," a story that Joyce reluctantly included in the collection). Realistic in its narratives, richly allusive in its language and symbolism, "Dubliners" is one of a handful of story collections that truly deserves the label "classic" and should be read and studied by every serious reader.

My first encounter with Joyce was an English Lit. course in college, some twenty years ago now. We were assigned to read an anthologized version of "The Dead", and I initially approached it as one does all such reading requirements at that foolish age; however, this particular story ending up affecting me quite unlike anything I had ever read before. Dubliners is a beautifully written collection of thematically inter-related stories involving day to day life in early 20th century Dublin - stories that masterfully evoke what Faulkner described in his Nobel address as being the essential nature of true art: A portrayal of the human heart in conflict with itself. "The Dead" is the final story in the collection, and my favorite. I have re-read it numerous times and am so consumed by it that I'm not even able to provide an objective review. The final pages, from the point where Gabriel and Greta leave the party, to the end of the story, are absolutly stunning; the poetry of the words, the profound humanity represented - defies description. As in the final line of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" - You must change your life.