Dubliners
By James Joyce
Three Stars
Read in April 2014
After reading The Dead many years ago, I left the rest of this collection unread since I don’t care all that much for short stories. That was a mistake because Dubliners is exactly the kind of short story collection I have liked, one that attempts to capture a time and a place with a series of vignettes about a variety of people. I am a big fan of the Joycean epiphany, which is the major concern of all of these stories, which doubles my mistake in having left them alone for so long. The time is 1914, and the place is middle-class Dublin, with all of the characters, whether servant or master, ensconsed in a safe and secure position in life. There is no hint of the world war that will soon break out or the labor strife that rocked the city in 1913. Neither the wretched poor of Dublin’s slums nor the fortunate rich of the pale play significant parts in these stories. For servants, there are a young housemaid must decide whether to join her young man as he emigrates to South America, and in another story, a spinster launderess uses her day off to visit the family of a man who was her foster son. For mothers, there is the keeper of a boarding house who skillfully manuevers one of her guests, and in another, a stage mother whose manuevers on behalf of her daughter fail to produce acclaim. For those brought up on the idea that Joyce is a hard writer to read, this collection provides an introduction of short and easy-to-read stories.