I am currently on a mission dedicated to James Joyce.

I made a purchase of the Audible readings collection that includes "Dubliners," "Portrait of an Artist," and "Ulysses," with the firm intention of finally delving into some of his more complex works.

I have a deep affection for "Dubliners" and have already read it several times. However, listening to the Audible version was extremely beneficial in grasping ideas that I had previously overlooked.

After finishing each short story, I would turn to Codex Cantina on YouTube (they are also available on Spotify) and contemplate their interpretations. They offer a approximately twenty-minute show for each story.

This was truly very helpful, especially when it came to providing background information on Joyce himself or even the unique customs and language usage specific to that era.

I began with "Dubliners" as I was already familiar with the material. Next in line will be "Portrait," and then, with a bit of trepidation and a plea to God for help, "Ulysses."

Understanding Joyce has long been on my bucket list. And after that, perhaps I'll take on the challenge of making tamales.

The soft music of whisky gently trickling into glasses created a most pleasant interlude.

I couldn't help but muse that perhaps over the course of 27 years, my affection for this collection had somehow underestimated its true brilliance. Alas, if it weren't for the penultimate story, Grace, then Dubliners would surely deserve a full fifty stars. Fortunately, I managed to obtain a critical edition, and the essays within were like portals opening up to unexpected vistas.

During the nearly thirty years since my initial reading, it was Araby and The Dead that had remained firmly lodged in my memory. However, it came as a shock when I discovered that The Sisters and An Encounter had a much more profound impact. At least, that was the case immediately after finishing them. I then delved into Harry Stone's essay on the themes of blindness in the story and found it to be rather poetic. This analysis led me back to reading the story once again. I truly value such repeated and informed readings, even though it may not always be practical in my somewhat erratic life.

I had a fascinating, albeit meandering, conversation with my wife about The Sisters and how our eyes in 2021 envision other factors that might potentially be at play. Those sinister threads seem to glisten in juxtaposition. My wife adhered to the idea of estranged disappointment throughout the collection and playfully said that, correspondingly, she must be Irish.

Brilliant and encyclopedic as James Joyce was, he was the artist who, more than any other, hauled the ancient storytellers' calling to distill an entire culture into the 20th Century. His work in prose began with this subdued, sequenced exercise in urban heartache, and it's the book I choose to celebrate for Goodreads.

Yes, ULYSSES had its way with me, too. It was a walloping inspiration, and there's no denying that. But DUBLINERS provides the ur-version for what's become a fiction staple, the community portrait in linked stories, and outdoes well-nigh all its offspring.

To be sure, the book stands on a formidable (not to say Jesuitical) arrangement, moving from childhood to public life. But more than that, each story focuses powerfully on the core tragedy of city existence. It shows how the city surrounds a person with the temptation for better, for transcendence, yet in so doing demonstrates our limitation and weakness.

Better yet, the stakes are mortal. Childhoods are compromised in an afternoon, lifelong unhappiness guaranteed in an evening, and no one ever has enough money. No one ever has enough. I can't think of any drama so grimly unrelenting about economic and family burdens, yet so resonant with an empathy-sonar capable of sounding every abyss.

Stories register even the shifts in the nervous system of a dim, frail creature like Maria in "Clay," or an abusive, cowed drunk like Farrington in "Counterparts." Nor can I recall quite such dead-on colloquial poetry (childhood hanging out, in "Araby": "we played till our bodies glowed").

Joyce allows the rhetoric to rise just once, in the baroque closing passage of "The Dead," so in the end suggesting the only redemption these twilit seaport figures may ever know: the loving yet cold-eyed reframing awarded them by art.

Before embarking on my maiden Joyce read, I was fully prepared to invest as much effort as needed to understand Dubliners. I didn't assume they would be incomprehensible or distant. However, there was definitely an anxiety similar to meeting a known stranger for the first time. This anxiety soon turned into a much-awaited prospect after reading the opening story and finally became a confident and gentle companion that led me through the sepia streets of an unassuming city. Dublin, as I quickly realized, was just around the corner.

I had little patience for the serious work of life, which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed like child's play, ugly and monotonous child's play.

Calmly engaged in the secure routine of their daily affairs, the people of Dublin appeared calm and secure on the surface. Yet, a moment's reflection on their dormant or potential lives managed to extract stories that were hidden in simple forms and simpler titles but traced intricate and sometimes unheeded emotions. An aimless walk ended in cheap happiness, and an embarrassing accident convinced someone to search for elusive redemption. A death revealed the value of oblivious living, while a motherly conduct was driven by frustrations and misplaced ambitions. Most of these characters were representative, not whole but remarkable fragments of lives that we either experience ourselves or witness in others during our lifetime.

She sat amid the chilly circle of her accomplishments, waiting for some suitor to brave it and offer her a brilliant life.

The perpetual struggle for attention between the past and the present was an integral part of these stories, without any violent clashes. Some of them seemed as if being viewed from a neighbor's window, while others welcomed me through a cordial door and took their time to introduce every element of the household. I admired how well the majority of people were coping with the consequences of their choices and how easily they found humor in the ironies of life. And I quailed at the sight of the suffocation of the negligible minority caught in the web of their inhibitions. I understood that even after having a clear view of their circumstances from a vantage point, they still refused to take a different path, to sail away to a different country, to a dreamy world.

It was hard work – a hard life – but now that she was about to leave it, she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

With each subsequent narration, I imagined Joyce in deep contemplation about everything and everyone around him. I imagined him carefully selecting an appropriate frame for his various thoughts and placing each one in its desired place. I imagined how he must have wanted to capture an epiphanic moment among the melancholic tune of Irish songs, when he wanted to paint a picture with a decided title but undecided colors, or when he simply wished to write about the approachable beauty of that girl on the other side of the pavement. I imagined his joy for the love and pain at the criticism of his native place. I was left in awe of the virtuosity of this young man and the several portraits he created with his words.

He had an odd autobiographical habit that 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 predicate in the past tense.

And when I reached the end, I simply wished to possess a literary talent like his for a very short time to write a story of my own and discreetly slip it into this collection. Dublin and Dubliners felt that close to me.

My husband reads fewer books than I do. Partially because as an indexer, he more or less reads for a living. But when he does pick up a book, he doesn't really go for the light stuff.

I'm talking about a guy who decided to bring "The Annotated Ulysses" as a vacation read a couple of years ago. I have pictures of him in a lawn chair by the lake, with the massive book in his hands, several bookmarks sticking out of it, and a bottle of beer nearby.

He's been raving to me about Joyce's awesomeness ever since. But he did not convince me to attack the infamous, mammoth, experimental book. He did, however, persuade me to start with "Dubliners".

While definitely on the light side (by Joyce's standards), it is also considered (both by many critics and by Jason) to be one of the finest collections of short stories in the English language – if not the finest. I believe the words my husband used to describe it were "an experiment in textural portraiture, modernist in the sense that Joyce was really interested in form and structure, particularly in the materiality of text and languages".

Nerd.

Set in Dublin right at the turn of the century, there is a tension under the surface of all these short stories that we perhaps understand better in the historical rear-view mirror. The realism of Joyce's writing does not leave much room for joy or hope. The characters' prospects are few, their lives confined to a bleak corner of the world, slowly being industrialized and urbanized. In fact, I struggle to find one example of so-called happy ending in this entire book. But the prose has a luminous quality to it that is quite stunning. Some passages do nothing more than describing the quality of the light, and yet I had to stop and re-read the sentence a few times, because I couldn't believe the image that had just been conjured. He often described the characters the same way: over-the-top and yet easy to imagine as flesh and blood incarnations of their actions and feelings.

Another reviewer described the short stories that make up "Dubliners" as a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of its characters, and I honestly can't find a better word. The stories are little snippets, stolen moments that rarely have resolutions – which is both frustrating and very realistic. How often in life do we get events wrapped up neatly with a bow on top? Joyce understood this, and refused to pander to the romantics who would see everyone end up happy and well. Another thing I noticed quickly was the propensity of Joyce's characters for leaving a lot of things unsaid. Sentences trail off into silence, questions are not answered with words, sometimes not even with looks.

I found myself wondering what were Joyce's real feelings about his home town. He left it, and often said that it was a place without a future, but he could never stop writing about it, as if it had become a part of himself he tried to put on the page so it wouldn't be under his skin anymore. While I could obviously never go to Joyce's Dublin as described in the pages of his work, I am now very curious to visit this city and see how it feels to walk down those streets, even if they have changed so much over the last hundred years.

This gets four stars because I kept feeling interrupted by the stories' sometimes abrupt endings. It is still a masterful and wonderfully layered book that I feel I will go back to many times. I appreciate the fleetingness of his stories, but there was a little something I wanted that I could just not get from this book.

Real adventures do not occur to those who stay at home. They must be pursued abroad.

A compilation of short stories focuses on the lives of middle and working-class Irish citizens in and around Dublin. Joyce's works commence with tales of children and progress in a nonlinear fashion through adult situations to a final story titled "The Dead."

Each vignette is loosely structured around some form of realization, although most of the realizations are understated. There doesn't necessarily have to be an ending to every piece, and that's fine. The Joyce Universe, much like our own, is lacking in epiphanies and abundant in social paralysis. Many of the dilemmas faced by the Dubliners in 1914 are still recognizable and relatable.

I find that Joyce becomes more enjoyable if I read him aloud with an Irish accent. Not an overly crazy Irish accent like that of Colin Farrell or the Lucky Charms leprechaun, but an articulate and controlled one like that of Cillian Murphy or perhaps Chris O’Dowd.

This way, I can better immerse myself in the atmosphere and essence of his works, and gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the stories and the characters within them.

It's as if by using the appropriate accent, I can bring the words to life and make the reading experience even more engaging and memorable.

For the city, lovers
And for mankind, desires
And for every moment, a mark in perception
And for beauty, pages
And you left behind from yourself shadows
Flowing in extended dreams without end
But they are closed
There
Reading a short story is a wonderful, profound, and rich journey of knowledge if the story is by James Joyce
Well, Joyce in writing starts from the induction of details of a situation
But the selection of the dramatic structure is an extremely precise process for Joyce
This structure, with its scope, its elements, the sequential development of its verbal events, and the emergence of its symbols from the hidden silence of the desolate darkness of the echoing speech, in which there are sections from
Irregular physical spaces and grooves of chaotic fantasies and unbalanced vanities and futile desires, this structure, which is specific to James Joyce
Establishes a dialectical relationship between the apparent and the hidden, or between the accumulated emotions with a scalpel and the hidden feelings that the characters do not express clearly, especially the narrator
Joyce places in the structural space focal points for the acquisition of knowledge in the world
For the reader to notice and stop at the style of the writer in opening his technical bag to extract from it what can be expected and what is not expected in the mind of the character inside the maze of words
The world is silent, or the phenomenon does not declare itself
There are the characters who think they perceive and know
And there is the witnessing narrator who sees ignorance and faces it
And sees weakness and overcomes it, leaving voices that embody unclear visions in memory
The journey of the self from the previous position to the adventurous experiment
And from the obscure custom to the lights of science that remain fickle even in the dawn of modernity
And the preservation of the anthropology of the cities that almost disappears in the trails of dust raised by the train that carries the traditions to the museums of the ages
And throws the minds into the crossing vehicles that are renewed and erase the traces of the passers-by
The generations meet, this meeting and that encounter
In it, learning and the desire for freedom
The attempt to get out of the prison of the place with its established traditions
The ends give birth to beginnings and a new awareness
For narrative methods that know how to build themselves
And they take in the analysis of a cultural geology weighted with the experiences of resisting destruction

I attempted to read this book approximately 20 years ago but didn't manage to complete it. However, this time around, I finished it and was truly sorry to see it come to an end. Now, I'm all set to read "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

Dubliners is a compilation of disconcerting stories that revolve around Irish life just prior to independence. These stories are centered on ordinary, day-to-day circumstances, yet they are filled with profound insights and personal depictions of people, places, and relationships.

The majority of the stories are rather bleak, encompassing a great deal of sadness and anger regarding people's situations. I have encountered similar individuals in small villages, and yet, Dublin, even in the 1910s, was a relatively large (for that era) city. Nevertheless, the provincial nature of people's lives and perspectives is vividly evident. There are a few exceptions, but those individuals are mocked for having the audacity to venture outside of Ireland.

My favorite lines are as follows (from A Mother): 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.

This description offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex relationship between the characters and the social norms of the time. It showcases how people often view and value others in a rather unconventional and perhaps even somewhat distorted manner. Overall, Dubliners is a thought-provoking collection that provides a unique perspective on Irish life during a particular period in history.

Dubliners is an outstanding introduction to James Joyce's body of work.

It is a collection of short stories set around the turn of the 20th century. Undoubtedly, it is more approachable compared to the literary feats of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

The Dead is perhaps the most renowned story in the book. It is a beautiful and complex account of a Christmas party hosted by two elderly sisters. It delves into themes like mortality and failure with remarkable nuance and insight. However, I also found great enjoyment in some of the lesser-known tales within this anthology.

An Encounter tells the story of two young boys who decide to skip school for the day. Their adventure begins brightly but ultimately takes a sour turn. It is an effective and unsettling portrayal of the loss of innocence. And A Painful Case describes a solitary and predictable man who defies the odds to find love and then loses it. When he receives tragic news several years later, his reaction is most unexpected.

Living in Dublin myself, I derived great pleasure from recognizing the street names immortalized in these stories and imagining the characters traversing them over a hundred years ago. It is a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking collection that has left me eager to explore more of the works of one of Ireland's greatest writers.

Although "Dubliners" is named as a short story collection, it is actually a disguised novel. The 15 stories in the book combine to form an unbroken entity. In most of the stories in the book, nothing exciting happens, and in that sense, there is no plot development in the stories either. If read individually, these stories will seem meaningless. (Many years ago, after reading five of Joyce's stories, I didn't understand the charm of any of them except one.) The narrators of the first three stories are young children or adolescents. Gradually, the ages of the characters in the subsequent stories increase; the complexity of life also increases. The first story, "The Sisters," begins with physical death, and the last story, "The Dead," ends with the death of a relationship. The people of Dublin, especially those of the middle-class, are more prominent in the stories. Their lives are stable and inert, with a strong desire for freedom. But they don't know how to achieve it. Or, even when the moment of freedom comes, their own minds betray them. At the moment of epiphany or self-realization, they fail to break free from their own inertia and do something new. There is a strong satire or suppressed anger in the stories regarding Catholic religious practices. Due to the abundance of localism, it is sometimes difficult to understand certain places or experiences. After reading one or two stories in the book, it is more appropriate to decide after reading the entire collection rather than just saying "it's okay." The stories that are enjoyable to read separately are - "A Painful Case," "The Dead," "Eveline," "A Little Cloud." Especially the last and longest story in the book, "The Dead," is truly unique.

A very appropriate example of reading a book at the wrong time.

I read this book in the third year of high school. Until a year before that, I was still reading Sherlock Holmes and Poirot books and Isaac Asimov's books. Then, I read this one. Of course, I mostly forced myself to finish its story, just because in the creative writing class, our teacher said that James Joyce is one of the great writers and I thought that as a writer (!) I must read his book and there was no one to tell me that this writer is not for this age.

The result? I didn't understand almost any of the stories, and I was afraid of James Joyce for years! (There is a film called "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and someone wrote this name as an allusion to the fear of intellectuals of not understanding Woolf's works and being ridiculed by those around them) and for a long time I thought that all great and famous books are necessarily books that require a lot of energy to read and there is no pleasure in reading them.

Looking back now, I realize that reading the right book at the right time is crucial. It can open up new worlds of understanding and enjoyment, while reading the wrong book can have the opposite effect. We should be more careful in choosing the books we read and not be pressured by external factors to read something that may not be suitable for us at that moment.

Perhaps if I had read James Joyce's works at a later stage in my life, when I had more life experience and a deeper understanding of literature, I might have been able to appreciate his genius and the beauty of his writing. But at that time, it was just a frustrating and confusing experience for me.

In conclusion, we should always remember that reading is a personal and subjective experience, and we should respect our own tastes and preferences when choosing books. Only in this way can we truly enjoy the process of reading and gain the maximum benefit from it.

Esta novela es pura poesía.

La narración de un episodio ordinario escrita de manera extraordinaria.

Es asombroso cómo el autor ha logrado transformar lo cotidiano en algo tan fascinante y maravilloso.

Parece imposible escribir algo tan bueno de algo tan común, pero sin embargo, este libro lo logra con maestría.

Además, si después se refuerza la lectura con la película de John Houston, se crea una alianza perfecta.

La película ayuda a visualizar aún mejor los personajes y la trama, añadiendo una dimensión extra a la experiencia literaria.

Juntos, la novela y la película forman una combinación inigualable que cautiva a los lectores y espectadores por igual.

This novel is pure poetry.

The narration of an ordinary episode written in an extraordinary way.

It is amazing how the author has managed to transform the everyday into something so fascinating and wonderful.

It seems impossible to write something so good about something so common, but yet, this book does it with mastery.

Moreover, if the reading is then reinforced with John Huston's film, a perfect alliance is created.

The film helps to visualize the characters and the plot even better, adding an extra dimension to the literary experience.

Together, the novel and the film form an unbeatable combination that captivates readers and viewers alike.