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rue_baldry 's review for:
Dubliners
by James Joyce
This was a re-read and I’m afraid I was slightly less impressed this time than I was as an undergraduate reading it for the first time. Since then I have viewed Dubliners as the template for what short stories should be like. That’s why I thought it would be a good idea to revisit. And I haven’t really changed my view on that. I still think the writing is very good and the character sketches and descriptions of situations are well done. The stories just weren’t as infallible or as resounding as I remember them. I guess then I was more easily impressed, saw things in more extremes, and had read less to compare them to.
For this read I read each story individually and left time before reading the next (sometimes weeks hence the long read time). I read online analysis after each one to see if I’d missed anything. I read all the notes at the back of the book. There didn’t turn out to be anything very profound which I’d missed, but some of the details added resonance and it helped to read synopses which pulled elements together.
I still think that anyone wanting to write short stories ought to read these ones. And if you want to get into Joyce then this is the place to start. I remembered a greater sense of desperation to escape a restrictive society. That must have been the element which most chimed with my own feelings at the time. Maybe I have come to accept the social oppression described and if so then I can learn something from teenage me and her reaction. Or maybe it’s just that it matters less to me now I have found my escape from it, just as Joyce would go on to do before he wrote Ulysses.
For this read I read each story individually and left time before reading the next (sometimes weeks hence the long read time). I read online analysis after each one to see if I’d missed anything. I read all the notes at the back of the book. There didn’t turn out to be anything very profound which I’d missed, but some of the details added resonance and it helped to read synopses which pulled elements together.
I still think that anyone wanting to write short stories ought to read these ones. And if you want to get into Joyce then this is the place to start. I remembered a greater sense of desperation to escape a restrictive society. That must have been the element which most chimed with my own feelings at the time. Maybe I have come to accept the social oppression described and if so then I can learn something from teenage me and her reaction. Or maybe it’s just that it matters less to me now I have found my escape from it, just as Joyce would go on to do before he wrote Ulysses.