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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chilling,
By
This review is from: James Joyce and the Burden of Disease (Hardcover)
This book sheds devastating new life on Joyce's life and art, and is a must read.
The infection he contracted in his teens cause Joyce's iritis and near blindness, his funny walk, sexual impotence, his wife's miscarriage and hysterectomy, his daughter's madness, his early death and much else besides. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are crawling with allusions to syphilis and its symptoms, as is "The Sisters" of which the first version was composed in 1904, the year in which Joyce was first treated for the disease. Victim of a nasty joke, Joyce responded to his miseries by clowning. His masterpieces are also confessional. Ferris asks us to "suspend Ellmann's construct of Joyce as a secular humanist" and see him "as a guilt-ridden, diseased, deracinated Catholic who repented his sins" and remained a frequent church-goer. |
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James Joyce and the Burden of Disease by Kathleen Ferris (Hardcover - November 9, 1994)
Used & New from: $15.95
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