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by loudmax
1468 days ago
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Dubliners is absolutely beautiful. It's a collection of short stories, which helps to make it accessible to casual readers. There's a feeling of real depth and empathy in some of the stories. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also relatively accessible, though I didn't enjoy it as much as Dubliners. I read Ulysses when I was in my 20s. Parts of it are fantastic, but for significant portions of the book I barely understood what was going on. Maybe I should revisit it. I found Finnegans Wake utterly baffling. Some people love the humor they find in it, but it requires effort to understand the basic language the Joyce is inventing. |
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Most people do. I have an english prof who did his dissertation on it because, as he told me, he was pretty sure no one on his committee would be able to challenge anything because no one had actually read it.
the first "chapter" in Finnagan's Wake is the densest, hardest to read part of the book (not that the rest is easy..) so it stops most people in their tracks. One think I discovered is it makes a little more sense when you hear it spoken, because (as was somewhat common at the time) much of the book is phonetic so what is incomprehensible on the page sounds almost like real speach when you hear it.
Its also fun to read the commented version (there is a work for that type of edition that escapes me at themoment.) Basically a version where the text of the book only occupies the center of the page, then outside the text is all sorts of references and footnotes with lines pointing to blocks of text in the body. 90% of all the references go over my head. I remember seeing a phrase highlighted and note pointed out that the same phrase was a play on words (or pun, I forget) in two different languages at the same time.
Not really a book to read, but a fascinating thing to study.