Product Description

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader understand Joyce's use of textures, dialect, and symbols. Each of the beautifully written short stories in this collection precisely details a brief scene in the life of a resident of Dublin at the turn of the 20th century. Although the characters do not know each other, their experiences unfold along the same streets and often overlap thematically. Their tragedies mirror that of Ireland, a country struggling for political identity and held back, in Joyce's view, by rigid religious ideas and adherence to tradition. Joyce's great skill at dialect offers a sense of the city's complex social structure, while themes of isolation, emotional paralysis, violence, regret, and death run throughout the collection and link all of the stories. Chronologically, too, the stories appear to progress; portrayals of youthful confusion and disillusionment in the opening story, "The Sisters," become the haunting midlife meditations of "The Dead." Like his masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce's Dubliners displays consummate control of nuances, emotions, and images.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20740 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Released on: 2006-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• 190 pages

Customer Reviews

"A long mournful whistle into the mist"

Although James Joyce lived outside of his native Ireland for most of his life, his work is as Irish as peat smoke. His story collection Dubliners, published in 1914, consists of fifteen slices of early 20th century life in the city where Joyce was born. Dublin itself is a detailed backdrop, and the self-awareness of the characters plays out on Dublin's streets and interiors. The reader doesn't find rollicking plots here, but the character sketches are rewarding and somewhat open-ended. Many of the characters are at some turning point or epiphany; many are rather unlovely; but all go under the lens with no moral judgment from the author. This is not a book that spoon-feeds attitudes or opinions.

Joyce reveals to us a boy whose adventure leads to a brush with a child molester; a young woman planning to elope but choosing the safety of domestic servitude at the last minute; a boarding house proprietor who turns a blind eye as her daughter gets pregnant by one of the residents; a rage-filled clerk who craves drink and takes out his frustration on his colleagues and family; an emotionally remote man who spurns the affection of a woman and is confronted with his own loneliness when he sees her obituary in the paper. In the final story, the novella-length "The Dead," Gabriel is an educated but socially awkward character who suddenly realizes that his lack of engagement with life is profoundly crippling.

These characters don't seem to be putting their best feet forward for the reader's entertainment, but they ARE drenched in their own realities. The trappings of religion thread through the stories ("the Holy Ghost and the banshee"), as do poverty, drink, repression, fear and rage. Was this the Ireland feeling its national identity, unfurling itself after the Local Government Act set it on a liberating course to Home Rule? Dubliners is like a family portrait taken early in the morning after a long, hard night; there's no romanticizing and it may not be the whole truth, but you have to acknowledge that the shadowed eyes and weary postures have a crystalline reality. Five stars.

Linda Bulger, 2008

Literature For Those Who Appreciate It.
There are wine enthusiasts who claim that certain vintages are wasted on those who fail to appreciate them. I'd never go that far in trying to restrict anyone from reading anything that's out there, but in Dubliners there is a certain sense that for those who have trained their minds to seek out the nuances hidden within literature, a great reward lies waiting. These ultra-realistic, almost dry stories of ordinary men and women and the para-extraordinary in each of their lives, is set in Dublin, circa 1900, and is one of those collections that shows a new side of itself on every reading. Plus unlike most of Joyce's work, this book is easily readable.

Overrated but good
I've long proclaimed that Dubliners is Joyce's greatest literary achievement. I'd read the book first in the mid-80s, then the early 90s, and just a while back. While I stand by my initial assessment that it's Joyce's best work, with age, and my own forays into fiction, I see that it is not as good as I once thought, although it still has moments of greatness.
The book is fifteen short stories that were mostly written in the years 1904-1905, and were dubbed by Joyce as being `epiphanies'- moments of sudden insight. The key to that term, however, is that the epiphanies are meant to occur within the reader, not to Joyce's characters....It is legend that Dubliners originally consisted of twelve tales, and that Joyce later added Two Gallants, A Little Cloud, and The Dead, after the original dozen were done by 1905. I don't think that sort of knowledge really matters since the three tales are rather uneven in relationship to each other, so give no idea of Joyce's growth nor stagnation, and certainly not a hint of his later fracturing of narrative, which was already being hailed as Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man was already being serialized in The Egoist magazine when the book finally hint print, almost a decade later in 1914. Thus, his greatest work was unfairly overlooked by the critics of the day.
They were generally dismissed as trifles, save for The Dead, although, when the critical tide turned, it turned far too much in the other direction, with virtually every one of the stories being hailed as a masterpiece. They're not, although by contemporary standards the tales are indeed innovative and excellent. The stories vary greatly in approach, but their tone is too similar, that is- consistently dour, which augured the summation of Joyce as the favorite writer that nobody reads.
Also, there is a tendency, in the lesser stories, for Joyce to get stuck in minutiae of the day that means little now, as well as superfluous dialogue designed to add color, yet only adds fat. Another problem is that in order to show the inertia and decline of Irish culture into paralysis, around the turn of the Twentieth Century, Joyce's stories are essentially without much real conflict- thus their lean into `epiphany'. It also makes tales like Ivy Day in the Committee Room, laden with political references as arcane as a John Dryden poem, and little real character development, simply not good. In attempting a slice of Dublin life of the day Joyce sometimes falls prey to the fallacy that to be `real' he has to show characters doing dull things, or simply describe things too matter-of-factly, rather than letting the epiphanies speak for themselves, by brushing away the `ordinary' excess. Dramatically, the stories are rather predictable- what separates them from lesser writers' tales is how the expected is unleashed and described.
In short, while the argument that Joyce was a great writer, but not great novelist, sticks, the idea that he was without anything to say is demonstrably false. It's just that he did not have a whole lot to say, nor did he have anything particularly new to say. But, he said it, at his best, better than most. It is the fact that Joyce attempts more than contemporary short fictionists, and that this collection is not a mere collection, but a narrative movement, or symphony, with a purpose, that makes the book glow all the more brightly in contrast to the dreck that populates today's fiction. What most astonishes me, though, as I grow and age, is how little it takes for a person's reputation as an artist, to be founded on. James Joyce was a great writer, but tales like After The Race, Clay, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, and Grace- fully a third of the book, are simply not good stories, for reasons mentioned earlier. Not acknowledging that does no good, and only casts the reader and critic in the role of the sciolist professor I encountered.
It is only by acknowledging failures that the structures that go under a great work of art- its scaffolding- can be considered and applied by others. To not do so is to keep up the curtain that denies that greatness is achievable now, the same sort of lie that Gabriel Conroy's world finally lost in the snow.