What one reviewer at amazon said about James Joyce's Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition With Annotations:
I suppose "Dubliners" as a collection of short stories is an excellent starting point for a newcomer to the literary world of James Joyce, for several reasons. The stories are written in plain English, a statement not to be under estimated, for Joyce is known for conscious, far-reaching experimentation within the English language, which ever since has inspired critics and theorists of literature, but at the same tame presented a common reader with a real challenge, ever so more overwhelming for the native speakers, not to mention those for whom English is a second, or third language. Joyce's most known works are as hard to read as they are to translate, this being the reason why "Finnegan's Wake" remains one famous book which is rarely translated, and even more seldom done so with any success whatsoever. "Dubliners" however comes nowhere close to the later-day experiments of this author, even if stories contained therein are thematically interconnected with "Ulysses". The prose is plain and captivating, often brutal, sometimes lyrical, but always dignified. Reading "Dubliners" is an adventure in itself, because if you happened to enter Joyce's world with the aforementioned volumes, you probably expected a similar experience. This book contains the very first literary attempts by this author, when although innovative in some respects, the stories fit well into the classical literary framework of the XIX century. Therefore, because of its accessibility, it's highly recommended to read "Dubliners" as your first volume by James Joyce. With this background, the ultimate task of dealing with "Ulysses", for it's a battle rather, than a casual reading, as Joyce himself projected, intended, and announced upon its publication - this task shall be much easier, and for once, even the reading of the aforementioned might prove successful and satisfying.
The stories contained in "Dubliners" are intriguing mainly because of their construction. Thematically interconnected, they constitute a coherent series of snapshots of Dublin, one of the largest cities in Europe at the time, and terribly under represented in literature. Characters appear as quickly as they fade away within the space of just a few pages, for you should know that the vast majority of stories in this volume are very short. So often the short stories are misunderstood, so often readers are genuinely perplexed. Unnecessarily so, because even if we agree that a short story should be brief and to the point, it's only too difficult to conceive a small pearl, which serves as a igniting spark of imagination, leaving the reader lost deeply in thoughts, genuinely affected by the content. It's not the case that everything should be explained, that the reader should be spoon-fed with logical presentation of events and causation. It's not the case that the ending of a short story should be definitive, so that there is nothing to subtract, nor anything to add when the last page is turned over. A good short story does not end with its last page, an observation I wish shall be helpful for you in your struggle with this literary form. It need not be a struggle, shouldn't be in fact, and if reading "Dubliners" will help you finding the answers on your own, so much the merrier.
Act after act in a play, we have a unique opportunity to see the real Dubliners, of all classes, occupations, with all different histories, lifetimes, passions, all types of human failure and success, all relative, built into the rich contextual background of Dublin, the city which should have been a capital of a country that also should have been but wasn't, at least not yet. These stories are not an assault on the storyline, as one might briskly attempt to categorize; their structure is classical, and yet Joyce contributed to the literary world by pushing the frontiers of the short story, at the same time retaining the compactness of the the contents despite of their enormous scope. It's not enough to read each story on its own, not in this volume. Although they are independent in the dimension of the storyline, the individual stories are essentially small jigsaw pieces of a puzzle; not in the sense of a greater, hidden meaning lurking there for a reader to discover, but in the sense of a multidimensional portrait of the city, the nation and its ailments, peculiarities and unique oddities. Much like Tyrmand's Varsaviana novels, "Dubliners" is an ode to Dublin, a city one loves so much to be sick of it, in Joyce's own words. There is a great deal to learn from James Joyce's "Dubliners", if you are so inclined, and the beautiful, accessible and yet context-difficult writing makes it a thoroughly enjoyable pleasure.
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