Dubliners
"Dubliners" was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed. The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" began to appear in the journal "Egoist" under the auspices of Ezra Pound. The first three stories in "Dubliners" might be incidents from a draft of "Portrait of the Artist," and many of the characters who figure in "Ulysses" have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work. It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin. The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life. Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland.
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Community Reviews
This book contains great vignettes of the everyday life of citizens of Dublin. Although most of the stories seem rather tame compared to what modern readers would be interested in, you’re able to see how religion and societal norms mold the decisions the characters make. Not a thrilling book but showcases delightful prose.
It's obviously a classic for a reason, but I read a great deal and I found it so difficult to parse sometimes that I had to look up what this or that story was about and then start the story over again with the background clue. It seemed to require so much knowledge about the particular time and place it was written in, and almost never clued the reader in. It is sort of amazing the language in so many other classics has aged so well considering that Dubliners-aging could have equally affected them.
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