James Joyce

Biographies in this series are the perfect fun size. Light, but long enough to have a lot of real stuff in them, more than a mere introduction.The very first sentence of this book invites you into Joyce with an imitation of his writing style, & after that Edna O'Brien shares generously & mellifluously her great understanding of the man, his life, & his work, drawing on scholarly commentary of his books & from the journals & letters of him & the people around him so that you know how they all felt about his life & their lives in themselves & for the purposes of this biography in relation to him. It's so well-written & so interesting -- what a life he had, crazy as he was, that -- I could hardly put it down. Edna O'Brien's great interest in him comes across truly.

As is almost consistently the case, the series of biographies produced under the collection of Penguin Lives has once again succeeded in providing a palatable doorway through which the hungry but busy reader can find the substance of an important if historically tough writer or artist. Edna O'Brien, herself an accomplished writer, here provides us with a fellow Irishman's view of the incredibly important writer James Joyce. Though most of us have at least read his 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and have seen plays and film adaptations of some of his other works, few of us feel we understand this complexly brilliant mind enough to say that approaching 'Ulysses' or 'Finnegan's Wake' would be easy reading. O'Brien gives us not only the chronology of Joyce's life, she also picks up on individual instances in his youth and manhood that served as fodder for his detailed novels of his Irish heritage. The writing is brisk, acerbic, challenging, and ultimately rewardingly educational. Finish this brief history and you most probably will run to the book shelf for another go at the master!

Having read this small volume, I believe that I have read one of the most beautiful books ever written. I have read numerous biographies in my life, from laborious, super-detailed massive volumes, the doorstops, through quickly written popular biographies, to bare sketches, cynical or amusing interpretative biographies, but never have I read a real work of art. "James Joyce" by Edna O'Brien is a homage to the artist by the artist, and it set me on my knees in every aspect. Edna has always adored Joyce, but also understood him both as an artist, and as a human being, the understanding even more important, because never was there a writer more misunderstood and hated, alive or postmortem, than poor James Joyce. "The he [the critic] posed a question. Had Joyce a future? The answer was no. As poet and novelist Joyce would always fail. Joyce's future is assured. His shade haunts every great writer who has followed him. The essays, treatises, books and seminars abound, but more tellingly, and perhaps more viscerally he is still hated." p.170During Joyce's lifetime, it was natural that his art of vision stirred the literary circles, for never had there been a daring experimentation and a literary revolutionary like James Joyce. It was even more natural that the public loathed the writer, for he dared to paint life as he saw it, as he personally experienced it, never looking back to the prevailing code of morals, be it Irish Catholic, prudish middle-class English, or even more prudish Puritan American; or any other code for that matter! For Joyce, there was no barrier he would not cross, no sacrifice he wouldn't make to unravel his vision. A sad fact is that his native beloved Dublin loathed him perhaps the most, unable to see apotheosis of his country in his presumably blasphemous and anti-Irish stories and novels. Disenchanted, Joyce turned his back on Ireland, and never came back. From the very start to the very end, Joyce was refused publication, was ridiculed, slandered and humiliated. "That Joyce has risen above so much misunderstanding is surely a testament to those wounded eyes and the Holy Ghost in that ink bottle. The battle as to who owns James Joyce infiltrates many a Joycean occasion, a claim so proprietary and absurd that it deserves no answer. Genius is singular and Beckett was indeed right when he said that the artist who stakes his life is on his own." p. 171And this kind of attitude is still prevalent at the turn of the century, decades after the death of the poor author of just a handful of books. In decades that passed since his death, all literary forms were tried, all holy cows contested many a time, new forms of expression invented, and forgotten, nothing really shocking a reader anymore, and yet it's still Joyce who is a symbol of inarticulate, a symbol of rebellion and bad taste, especially for those who have never read a single work by this author. If you ask whether his books were controversial, the answer is yes, whether his b

Our other dear reviewers are missing the point of Penguin Lives. The editor, James Atlas, in choosing fiction writers to author these brief biographies, has blown fresh air on a genre that has grown stale with its own self-importance. Perhaps some readers may wish to read the minutia, but I find it tiresome. Having slogged through Ellman, which I found a tougher go than Finnegan's Wake, Edna O'Brien brings a finely-tuned Celtic voice to a life ill-lived.