Turns Out That No One Needs To Be Afraid of James Joyce's Dubliners

It's Ulysses that is scary.  This collection of portraits was not difficult to read. Quite the contrary. But the panorama of Dublin that they created brought out a great discussion.   One member of Irish descent, felt disgust? shame? *at   the bleak  cast of manipulative, cheating, drinking, base characters. Save the husband in  "The Dead"; none of the characters grow in wisdom or spirituality.   Others felt that this collection, sequenced to mirror stages of a man's life, reflected universal themes.  And the bleakness reflects the human condition...not that of one place or time.  (Yet other books...Portnoy's Complaint and its portrait of Jews, for example, can be called universal but still sting a Jew.)

One member pointed out that they read much the way that a modern New Yorker short story reads. Joyce is the first modern writer.  And a great writer.

We wondered how a young man of 25 could have had the wisdom to write these stories...and wondered if perhaps it took someone that young to see the world in such bleak, conflicted way.  We questioned the symbol of snow because a writer (whose name I didn't write down)** suggested that a new writer analyze that in order to understand writing.  (A purifying, unifying, substance that falls on living and dead alike?)

And we wondered why did so many writers have to leave Ireland in order to write about it.  We pooh-poohed literary critics who saw incest, venereal disease, in every page of the stories. (Okay that is an exaggeration.) They interfered with instead of enlightening our reading.

From BB:

It wasn't just "disgust" and "shame" that this member of Irish descent felt but also anger and disappointment at the, for the most part, one-dimensional characters. The discussion calmed my defensive ire, however,and I have to agree that the stories are wonderfully crafted, especially "The Dead." It was Flannery O'Connor who advised a fledgling writer: "See how he makes the snow work in that story."

Speaking of the New Yorker and Irish writers, I'd recommend Colm Toibin's story "Sleep" in the March 23 issue. In it the imagination--secular rather than religious--yields such a bad trip that either the protagonist can no longer love or he needs to protect the one he loves from himself. 

Another recent New Yorker story to interest our members is Stephen King's excellent "A Death" in the March 9 issue.

Who's Afraid of James Joyce?

Next up:  March 25, 2015 is The Dubliners

Some anxiety around reading this book...

Should there be?

Feel like you are back in high school?

Why not go all of the way back.

Here are the Spark Notes--this time in e-form.

Spark Notes

(Actually I never used Spark Notes.

I should have especially when I didn't read the book.)

Don't have time to purchase...here is free e-version.

E-Book

And a review

Slate Review

Thanks to R.K. a link to stories read aloud.
Audio stories

Meeting Summary: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Sponsor's report was rather short, since Anthony Marra's bio is rather short--because Marra is incredibly young.  (No date of birth was  found in Wikipedia nor on his web page; only clue to his age was review that said he was not quite 30 in 2013.) Incredibly young?  It is hard to believe--incredible--that this first novel came from someone so young was the feeling of the book group.

Marra set out to write the novel he wanted to read--an English novel about the Chechen conflicts--but did not yet exist.  Why a novel? Perhaps because a novel can reach us on a more human level--emotional memory is stronger than our memory of factual reports?  We are a group of fairly politically savvy women--but none? few? of us had any deep understanding about what had happened in Chechnya  during the two conflicts. (Nor did any of us know about its long haunting history prior-- we did not know about the  mass deportation of the inhabitants of Chechnya to Siberia during Stalin's reign, for example.)  Where the nonfiction reports failed to grab us; the novel succeeded.  The brutality and horror and sheer stupidity became clear not as a long list of events, but as the background that affected the lives  of the main characters.

The writing and humor--yes humor--drew us in.  And as one member said, paraphrased...we learned to trust the writer and we were willing to continue on to read more and more about the insane devastation and dehumanization and exploitation of not only the Chechen people but the Russians directly involved in those events.

Just to inject some "criticism"... we read a quote from Dwight Garner's May 7, 2013 New York Times--Book of the Times.  (By the way ...it is a mostly positive review.)

He said that the crosscutting of stories and time confounded him and that he felt:  "...that I was reading a feat of editing as much as a feat of writing.  ...I admired this novel more than I warmed to it."  He also disliked the omniscient narrator who told the future of some of the characters.   Members disagreed; they felt that there was enough tension and that this devise helped make events more bearable and often added humor and a folkloric quality to the starkest portions of the novel.

Marra set out to make us cry and laugh on the same page and we mostly felt that his technique worked.  One nagging thought was expressed by a member--each character's humor had the same sarcastic tone.  But what a tone!

Many members are recommending the book to other friends and relatives.  (A few were sure that a film would be in the works, but speculated that the book would be better than the movie.)
If you haven't read it yet, do so.

YIKES:  The blog had 174 page views after I posted this entry.  An all time high.  From Russia! Am I paranoid?  Yes.

Next book is James Joyce's The Dubliners.  Some members had bad flashbacks to high school and college -- let's see if we can overcome our fears.  See you in March.

February 25th, 2015 Book: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

NPR Review




Washington Post Review

AND...

Interview with Marra

R.K. Sends this link...

BBC's Best 21st Century Novels



Here is a link to our book group discussion on a few of the titles...

A Visit From the Goon Squad: Discussion Notes

Wolf Hall

Visitation Street: Discussion

Ivy Pochoda's Red Hook mystery was well liked by a few members.  Others found its characters too unrealistically good to be "great" literature.  Much of the discussion has disappeared from this blogger's memory...a winter virus having wiped out any ambition to do anything especially anything involving thinking.  When low and behold,  BB, sent her piece on Visitation Street and its possible meaning.  (The author could have named her book after another gentrified street:  Pioneer Street, let's say.)

Thanks B.B.

Visitation Street: we didn’t talk about the title. There is a Visitation Street and a Visitation Church in Red Hook. In the book, the church The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is mentioned so frequently that I think the reader is supposed to make something of it. In Luke’s gospel The Visitation is the story of Mary, pregnant with Jesus, hastening to the hill country to greet her pregnant cousin Elizabeth, whose baby leaps in her womb at Mary’s greeting. So, maybe it’s by design that the novel begins with two girls of similar background, Val and June, and that near the end we see two girls, Val and Monique, who represent two sides of a divide. And maybe we’re to see that hope for a more fruitful, united future lies within these two and others of their generation whom they represent. 

When I raised this connection to DR, she thought it likely, but thought also that visitations referred to Marcus and June, an obvious connection that had totally escaped me.

Nevertheless, the book group discussion was rich and enjoyable.

Visitation Street:Meeting January 21, 2015

Some links to preview before meeting:

Ivy Pochoda website


Times Review