Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by catchthesewings
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
4.0
A really compelling tale of transformation. We meet Stephen Dedalus as a young boy, and through the course of a handful of scenes we get to watch him mature into a young man with a defined worldview. Joyce’s narration tends to drift backwards in time as Stephen’s thoughts do. So, though we never get a summary of how Stephen has changed from one scene to the next, we do get flashes of memory spanning that time. The glimpses we get of other characters are brief, but they tend to leave a strong impression.
The writing is dense, but playful. Every sentence is doing a lot of heavy-lifting, and you really have to pay attention. Skim a paragraph too fast and you’ll miss the transition into a new scene or the introduction of a new character or the entire context of that character’s relationship with Stephen. You can see the first traces of some of the more experimental narrative techniques Joyce would explore later in Ulysses. Moment-to-moment, it was the writing itself that hooked me, carried me forward to the next page.
I found the beginning and middle chapters of the book more compelling than its ending. The first 3-4 chapters encompass the greatest shifts in Stephen’s worldview. One quirk of reading this after Ulysses is knowing where Stephen is going to end up. Nonetheless, the whole book is full of great moments and descriptions. I suspect Stephen’s story rings true for a lot of artists as they discover their voices.
The writing is dense, but playful. Every sentence is doing a lot of heavy-lifting, and you really have to pay attention. Skim a paragraph too fast and you’ll miss the transition into a new scene or the introduction of a new character or the entire context of that character’s relationship with Stephen. You can see the first traces of some of the more experimental narrative techniques Joyce would explore later in Ulysses. Moment-to-moment, it was the writing itself that hooked me, carried me forward to the next page.
I found the beginning and middle chapters of the book more compelling than its ending. The first 3-4 chapters encompass the greatest shifts in Stephen’s worldview. One quirk of reading this after Ulysses is knowing where Stephen is going to end up. Nonetheless, the whole book is full of great moments and descriptions. I suspect Stephen’s story rings true for a lot of artists as they discover their voices.