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jonbrammer 's review for:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
Densely allusive. Enormously ambitious and pretentious. This round of reading Portrait clearly demonstrates his path to writing the labyrinthine Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The endnotes are essential. Stephen Daedelus struggles under the weight of Irish history, of the Catholic dogmas, and his own brilliant mind.
I maybe love Dubliners most as an act of crystalline pure writing skill, of capturing the city in the literary mode. But Portrait is perhaps the most essential Joyce - the bridge between the narrative and the experimental.
"It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." Daedelus must leave Catholicism, must leave Ireland, in order to understand them. It is this attitude of alienation, the exile's viewpoint, that points to the contradiction of being human - we are both of this natural world and driven to transcend it.
I maybe love Dubliners most as an act of crystalline pure writing skill, of capturing the city in the literary mode. But Portrait is perhaps the most essential Joyce - the bridge between the narrative and the experimental.
"It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." Daedelus must leave Catholicism, must leave Ireland, in order to understand them. It is this attitude of alienation, the exile's viewpoint, that points to the contradiction of being human - we are both of this natural world and driven to transcend it.