Gente DI Dublino (Italian Edition) (1914)

As soon as I finished I realized that I was going to be re-reading these stories, probably many times. I will probably get more out of them with each and every time I revisit them. This is a masterpiece and I can see why we still read Joyce. The raw emotion combined with deep analysis of these real characters--no, real people, make these stories as illuminating as they are compelling. These characters lived and live in every city and their Irish experience is not a cultural anomaly. It is universal. When the husband in "The Dead" ponders his own superficiality and wonders whether he has been important in his wife's life--worthy even, of the life and the part of herself that she has given to him, this is any man in any time. Each story deals in universals yet takes these characters out of the vague imagination and gives them local habitation and a name. These stories have happened, are happening now, and will continue happening as long as people live and share their lives together. ( )

I read (most of) these short stories for my OU course. This particular edition has an absurd number of 'helpful' footnotes, which I gradually learnt to ignore unless I was really struggling with the meaning. I came to this collection with the idea that Joyce was difficult to read, but these were not that difficult really, other than one about an election, which I gave up on.

I can see that they are good, but I didn't particularly enjoy them and the mood was so depressing throughout. ( )

I liked these stories, but read them very slowly. Many of them were a bit too subtle for my taste, or featured a bit too much talk about religion. But I really loved the evocative and grim descriptions of Dublin, the vivid insights into how people lived. And the writing was very good, so, tack a star on just for pure joyful wordsmithery. ( )

Vignettes from pre-WWI Dublin. Interesting, often somewhat disturbingly, but frankly, I remember I had enjoyed Ray Bradbury's 'Irish' stories in some anthology much more. ( )

I was somewhat curious to read this after having read "The Dead" in high school, but that was the only one of these that managed to make any impact on me - the rest is just alright. ( )