8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful homage to the artist by the artist, May 23, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: James Joyce (Penguin Lives Biographies) (Hardcover)
Having read this small volume, I believe that I have read one of the most beautiful books ever written. I have read numerous biographies in my life, from laborious, super-detailed massive volumes, the doorstops, through quickly written popular biographies, to bare sketches, cynical or amusing interpretative biographies, but never have I read a real work of art. "James Joyce" by Edna O'Brien is a homage to the artist by the artist, and it set me on my knees in every aspect. Edna has always adored Joyce, but also understood him both as an artist, and as a human being, the understanding even more important, because never was there a writer more misunderstood and hated, alive or postmortem, than poor James Joyce.
"The he [the critic] posed a question. Had Joyce a future? The answer was no. As poet and novelist Joyce would always fail. Joyce's future is assured. His shade haunts every great writer who has followed him. The essays, treatises, books and seminars abound, but more tellingly, and perhaps more viscerally he is still hated." p.170
During Joyce's lifetime, it was natural that his art of vision stirred the literary circles, for never had there been a daring experimentation and a literary revolutionary like James Joyce. It was even more natural that the public loathed the writer, for he dared to paint life as he saw it, as he personally experienced it, never looking back to the prevailing code of morals, be it Irish Catholic, prudish middle-class English, or even more prudish Puritan American; or any other code for that matter! For Joyce, there was no barrier he would not cross, no sacrifice he wouldn't make to unravel his vision. A sad fact is that his native beloved Dublin loathed him perhaps the most, unable to see apotheosis of his country in his presumably blasphemous and anti-Irish stories and novels. Disenchanted, Joyce turned his back on Ireland, and never came back. From the very start to the very end, Joyce was refused publication, was ridiculed, slandered and humiliated.
"That Joyce has risen above so much misunderstanding is surely a testament to those wounded eyes and the Holy Ghost in that ink bottle. The battle as to who owns James Joyce infiltrates many a Joycean occasion, a claim so proprietary and absurd that it deserves no answer. Genius is singular and Beckett was indeed right when he said that the artist who stakes his life is on his own." p. 171
And this kind of attitude is still prevalent at the turn of the century, decades after the death of the poor author of just a handful of books. In decades that passed since his death, all literary forms were tried, all holy cows contested many a time, new forms of expression invented, and forgotten, nothing really shocking a reader anymore, and yet it's still Joyce who is a symbol of inarticulate, a symbol of rebellion and bad taste, especially for those who have never read a single work by this author. If you ask whether his books were controversial, the answer is yes, whether his books were hard to understand, the answer again is yes. All this does not justify all of attacks the author had had to endure, even after his death, miserable as it was. His fiction is not for everyone, and I myself have turned down one of his novels, having miserably failed with my language. But it never occurred to me to try to burn the author on the righteous stake of his lack of appropriateness. Whether or not I, as a reader, agree with the opinion that Joyce was a genius is secondary. I have read his works, and I do appreciate the challenge, and the fact that he, the artist, widened my horizons, augmented my perception, because he made me think, think hard and analyze. Ultimately, I believe that it is a general, widely applicable regularity, a universal phenomenon; easy books we like to read, they slip through the larynx of our neural network like honey sled down the Pooh's mouth, and sometimes they leave a trace, a shred of action, a character or two, merely a silhouette, but few novels make us think, and if we are willing, stand up to the challenge of allowing the author superimpose his vision over ours, detract the train of conventional thought we are naturally used to employ, prickle our thinking so that we find ourselves in the depths of dark, blue water, with no direction prevalent or dominant, devoid of any holds of reality, those crutches our mind uses for identification and analysis. To let ourselves go with the stream of his fiction is to let ourselves experience an afterlife, where the only stronghold is our imagination, and ears willing to listen to the melody of the artist's voice. That we emerge from this dream slightly wounded, a bit scared, mangled over, directionless and sometimes either delighted, or depressed and vulgarized? Then, if we do come back, we may safely re-employ our senses and try to comment on the commentable, positive or negative, what does it matter? It's the experience that is of the ultimate value, the unforgettable fire of literary expedition into the hybrid conjunction of our own mind, and the artist's. I like to think that my mind is unique enough to produce an equally unique mixture of his thoughts, and my own. Whether or not I liked what I read, is irrelevant.
Edna O'Brien diverged completely from the usual way biographies are written, and God bless her for that. Rarely pieces of trivia or data are mentioned, this book bursts in seams with life, a real life of James Joyce, focused on the man himself, and his art, above all else. A small book, a poem in prose, a beautiful elegy, and ode and a sonnet, an ambitious, delicate work I will keep rereading to the end of my life. I love you, Edna.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A perceptive account of a monster of a writer, August 24, 2002
This review is from: James Joyce (Penguin Lives Biographies) (Hardcover)
Irish writer Edna O'Brien's brief (179 page) biography of James Joyce was aimed at people like me who are curious about Joyce's life, but not curious enough to undertake Richard Ellman's definitive but massive biography. O'Brien venerates Joyce's writing, but recognizes the high cost to most everyone who had any contact with Joyce.
Although she argues (without convincing me) that Joyce was not a misogynist, she does not attempt to defend him from being viewed as a monster; instead, she answers her question "Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do."
O'Brien provides interesting responses to Joyce's life and lifework. Hard-core Joyceans will already have processed Ellman's biography--regarded by some as the best biography of any writer ever written. The somewhat curious have a fine guide in O'Brien. Her book is generally readable, and I am inclined to trust her sense (as a novelist, as an Irish novelist) of what in Joyce's fiction is autobiographical.
The volume is an excellent match of biographer and subject, like Edmund White's biographical meditation on Marcel Proust that began the series of Penguin Brief Lives, a welcome antidote to the mountains of details that make so many biographies daunting.
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