Dubliners, James Joyce
This is the first James Joyce I’ve read in full (I was assigned “Araby” in high school, or maybe it was earlier, and managed to skip the reading without any serious consequences). Joyce really likes to use subtext in these stories. There is a good deal of symbolism, and the stories are laden with references to Catholicism and Irish nationalism and literature that often flew way over my head.
The “point” of these stories is to portray slices of Dublin life for the reader. I felt that they accomplished this goal, yet I felt unmoved most of the time. Maybe it was trying to place myself in early-1900s Dublin, and failing to situate myself, that caused the lack of connection. I enjoyed what I was reading, but I felt that my connection was usually academic, rather than emotional.
The two stories I enjoyed the most, “A Little Cloud” and “A Painful Case,” did spur in me a heavier emotional reaction. “A Little Cloud” is about professional envy, dreams which were pursued with a lackluster spirit and thus doomed, and the realization that one is not where one intended oneself to be. “A Painful Case” is about self-imposed loneliness, the understanding of which settles upon a soul like a heavy fog. For whatever reason, I found these stories to be punchier than the rest, and it was much easier for me to empathize with the protagonists.
One other thing I liked about these stories is Joyce’s way with words. He really had an ear for an interesting turn-of-phrase, one which I wish had been more ever-present. I also connected with individual moments of flailing that Joyce depicts. There’s a guy who can hardly hear his companions speaking in a loud automobile, so he has to guess what they’re saying and formulate an appropriate response—I’ve done that a million times. I found myself caught reflecting by a particular line in the story “Grace”: “His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points…”