Dubliners

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Signet, 1991.

When I was in high school I fell in love with James Joyce’s style of writing. We share the same birthday. The Dead, a short story from Dubliners was my all time favorite. Gabriel became my favorite name; a long lost child.

Dubliners is comprised of 15 short  and simple stories all centered around the people of Dublin. To sum up the collection it is a portrait of a city as seen from the eyes of the people living there. The very first story, The Sisters, is nothing more than a family’s reaction to a priest’s death. While the characters are not connected, their stories are. Life and death, love and loss, youth and aging, poverty and wealth. Joyce does a remarkable job capturing the spirit of the Irish while revealing universal truths about mankind as a whole. It is as if we, as readers, get to peek into the character’s lives and are witness to moments of our own circumstances.

What I find so remarkable about Dubliners is that Joyce originally had great trouble getting it published. And even after he finally did it didn’t sell that well.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Irish Fiction” (p 125). Where else? Edited to add: I’ll tell you where else…Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Ireland: Beyond Joyce, Behan, Beckett, and Synge” (p 110). I guess you could say Dubliners shouldn’t be included in this chapter because it’s supposed to be about “beyond Joyce.” Something to think about.