A review by lelia_t
Dubliners by James Joyce

4.0

I preface every review of short stories by saying I’m not a good short story reader. Most make me tense while delivering only a key-hole vision of the narrator’s experience. Most of the stories in Dubliners fit this pattern and I can’t say I relished reading them. The exception is The Dead, a story I’d read in high school and remember as being my introduction to the transcendent beauty that can be found in prose. I found it just as beautiful this time around, but having lived a little more I appreciated the way Joyce takes us from the small worries and social niceties of a party to the stirrings of Gabriel’s passion for his wife and then to a moment of being, or spot of time, where his vision opens to include all the living and the dead in Ireland. It’s a beautiful story that seems almost a blessing on the lives of all the characters we’ve caught glimpses of in the previous stories.