1914 was a simple time. Back then, you could actually work out what was happening in a James Joyce novel. This is why the description of the book includes the following helpful line.
This book holds none of the difficulties of Joyce’s later novels, such as Ulysses, yet in its way it is just as radical.
It is indeed more comprehensible. The opening dialogue of each story may not be quite as verbose as a Jane Austen novel, but you can pretty much work out what is going on within the first half of the story (the book itself being a collection of short stories).
In some ways though, this takes away a little piece of the James Joyce magic. The descriptions, by being less surreal, become a little less vivid as well.
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Tags: dublin, fiction, ireland, james joyce, novel
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2015 at 11:10 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.