Dubliners

James Joyce was one of those great writers that I never, well, dared to read. Sure, I knew about Ulysses , but who wants to read eighteen chapters of two guys wondering about in an Irish town? And as for Finnegans Wake, it simply has a reputation as being the most difficult and abstractly written piece of work. So I never read James Joyce, but I was Okay with that; after all, there were plenty of other great writers to read and life is short. Right?

Well, I thought so, until recently that is. I discovered this little gem of his called Dubliners and I just fell in love with it!

Dubliners is a collection of short stories. As you might have guessed, it is about people who live in Dublin, how they go about their lives, and how they cope with their dreams and fears. The characters are your everyday people: priest, schoolboy, teacher, mother, daughter ... and what they do are quite ordinary too - there are no heroic actions, in fact, almost no actions whatsoever. James Joyce just observes how they go about their lives, and captures a snapshot here and there. But that image, under the examination of unhurried eyes, is captivating.

A few things about the book that I found particularly charming.

First, James Joyce's mastery of writing. He is simply a great writer. He knows how to describe a scene, choose the right words, or tell you about a person. His characters jump right out of the page at you, full of blood and flesh. He can really take the readers to the center of his story.

Second, he really loves Dublin. And you can't help but love it with him. His passion for the city, for its people, is touching. He loves it not because of it is without faults, but despite of its faults. It is that love that made him write passionately about each story, and that becomes one of the central theme that holds all the stories together, and the reader.

Another central theme of the book is the state of paralysis of Dublin and its people at that time. Everywhere you look, there is decay, inaction, complacency, and idleness. You are gripped with this hopeless feeling, and suffocated by it. This theme is not in just one or multiple stories of the book, but all of them; it is pervasively present, which creates an ambient context that is most difficult to shake.

And lastly, the stories work together to put a group portrait right in front of the reader. Each story is unique and wonderful to read, but their combined effect is a powerful unique experience that I did not expect. I have not read another book that so effectively interweaves central themes through separate pieces like this. Each additional story adds another dimension to the tapestry, until he brings it all together in a superbly written story fittingly called "The Dead."

Beyond its brilliant and almost brutal realism, it is also a book full of enigmas, ambiguities, and symbolic resonances. Dubliners remains an undisputed masterpiece, a work that, in Terence Brown's words, "compels attention by the power of its unique vision of the world, its controlling sense of the truths of human experience as its author discerned them in a defeated. colonial city."