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A review by bedcarp
Dubliners by James Joyce
3.0
slightly pretentiously, perhaps it's fitting that i've put down the final page of joyce's dubliners as the year draws to a grateful close. the 6 or so days following the revelry of christmas and preceding the wide-eyed ambitions of a new year feel more desolate and empty with each iteration i experience, a time devoted to the rumination of unfulfilled resolutions to once again be rewritten, once again be compromised and shuffled along in the flat decay of time. it's a time where one celebrates (or perhaps commemorates) the purely arbitrary demarkation of a tiny ball in space hurtling around a much larger one, over and over and over. amidst a number vainly ticking up once every year one inevitably feels paralysis rather than progress, in the cooling of young romantic ambitions, in the dulling repetition of working life, in the frigid intimacy of domesticity long past its prime.
dubliners, for the most part, does not invite its characters to transcend this cycle of repetition. yet its vignettes of middle-class stagnation amidst a furore of nationalism and protestantism remain engrossing in joyce's masterfully naturalistic narration, the subtle lyricism in which he paints scenes of everyday, mundane life, how his narratives seem to accelerate in their natural course before subtly diverting to an ironic, hollow ending or build to a possible epiphany only to be underscored with a caustic hint of superficiality or hopelessness thereof.
if i have any minor criticisms of the collection, it's that some of the stories (namely "ivy day" and "grace") seem to preoccupy themselves with somewhat heavy-handed metaphors regarding irish politics or the history of christian orthodoxy respectively -- neither of which particularly appeal to any personal niche of mine as a reader and make for a somewhat laborious read. but discounting these nitpicks, dubliners works as a remarkably consistent and coherent set of stories, held together by their themes of deflated ambition and paralysing stasis. i also love the structuring of the collection -- how it charts the progress of various lives from childhood to public life while retaining a certain feeling of entrapment among all the characters, from the disillusionment at the araby fair to mr duffy's self-inflicted loneliness and grief to gabriel conroy's final epiphany about his wasted and passionless years of life.
and while dubliners' entries simply mostly end in disillusionment or quiescence, its final paragraphs also offer a chance of escape, the idealisation of a vainly romantic sacrifice as a way of transcending the numbing repetition of existence. perhaps to stare death in the face and greet it without any regrets or misgivings about one's pursuits is joyce's answer to this overriding sense of stagnation. perhaps, too, it is an indulgence, a brief instance of self-awareness that ultimately is made meaningless in the face of achievement nullified through the universality of death, an empty epiphany on the snow falling all around the universe as one remains hanging in limbo in a hotel bed.
dubliners, for the most part, does not invite its characters to transcend this cycle of repetition. yet its vignettes of middle-class stagnation amidst a furore of nationalism and protestantism remain engrossing in joyce's masterfully naturalistic narration, the subtle lyricism in which he paints scenes of everyday, mundane life, how his narratives seem to accelerate in their natural course before subtly diverting to an ironic, hollow ending or build to a possible epiphany only to be underscored with a caustic hint of superficiality or hopelessness thereof.
if i have any minor criticisms of the collection, it's that some of the stories (namely "ivy day" and "grace") seem to preoccupy themselves with somewhat heavy-handed metaphors regarding irish politics or the history of christian orthodoxy respectively -- neither of which particularly appeal to any personal niche of mine as a reader and make for a somewhat laborious read. but discounting these nitpicks, dubliners works as a remarkably consistent and coherent set of stories, held together by their themes of deflated ambition and paralysing stasis. i also love the structuring of the collection -- how it charts the progress of various lives from childhood to public life while retaining a certain feeling of entrapment among all the characters, from the disillusionment at the araby fair to mr duffy's self-inflicted loneliness and grief to gabriel conroy's final epiphany about his wasted and passionless years of life.
and while dubliners' entries simply mostly end in disillusionment or quiescence, its final paragraphs also offer a chance of escape, the idealisation of a vainly romantic sacrifice as a way of transcending the numbing repetition of existence. perhaps to stare death in the face and greet it without any regrets or misgivings about one's pursuits is joyce's answer to this overriding sense of stagnation. perhaps, too, it is an indulgence, a brief instance of self-awareness that ultimately is made meaningless in the face of achievement nullified through the universality of death, an empty epiphany on the snow falling all around the universe as one remains hanging in limbo in a hotel bed.