Dubliners
by James Joyce
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Book Summary Information
Author: James JoyceReader: Malachy Mccourt
Reader: Dan O'herlihy
Reader: Patrick Mccabe
Reader: Ciaran Hinds
Reader: T.p. Mckenna
Reader: Brendan Coyle
Reader: Rejoycing Company
Reader: Camogie Inc.
Edition: Audio Cassette
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Published: 2000-03-01
ISBN: 0694523003
Number of pages: 9
Publisher: Caedmon
Book Reviews of Dubliners
Book Review: Irish Stew
Summary: 4 Stars
Because "Ulysses" is so imposing with its epic length and pages of solid, tiny text I decided to get my feet wet with "Dubliners," which is not quite half the other's length. From what I read with "Dubliners", I'll have to give "Ulysses" a shot in the near future.
Normally I'd do an obligatory plot summary, but that would be a pointless exercise because A) There are 15 short stories that comprise the book and B) None of them really has a traditional "plot" to speak of. Rather, "Dubliners" is a serious of what we in modern parlance would call "character sketches." Think of it as each story being a portrait of some person or scene done in painstakingly vivid detail. Each story focuses on some small moment that often leads the character to discovering a melancholy truth about life.
The first stories focus on children encountering the harsh realities of the adult world--a priest dying and an encounter with a creepy, crazy old man--and then move on to teenage love and then more adult problems of marriage, family, and politics before a final meditation on death in the aptly-titled "The Dead."
The way Joyce captures the humanity of each character is so stunning; he taps into the soul of these people to expose the secrets, wishes, hopes, and fears that reside within each of us. It's hard not to see a part of yourself in one or more of these characters, almost as if Joyce knew you over 90 years ago better than you know yourself right now. Because while the technology may change, the human psyche remains the same.
The reason I can't give this four stars is that like any short story collection there's a fatigue that sets in upon reading "Dubliners." The longer the collection goes on, the more similarities can be seen in the characters and the situations, the descriptions and the dialog. It's like listening to an album of music and noting that song 10 sounds a lot like song 5, which sounds a lot like song 2. There's really no way to avoid that fatigue unless the writer uses a completely different style each time.
As well, reading a book written over 90 years ago that's set in Ireland can be a challenge for a modern (not quite 90) year old American. Footnotes and such can be helpful, but it also interrupts the flow of the reading.
Still, Joyce's uncanny knowledge of humanity is well worth any fatigue or nuisances.
That is all.
Summary of Dubliners
Dubliners - James Joyce's stories of his native homeland - performed by a cast of 15 different actors originating from Ireland.? Unabridged.
The fifteen stories that make up this brilliant audio roam over a human landscape that stretches from the bleakest of despair to the most blinding of epiphanies.? First published in 1914, the stories are as lucid and accessible as they are memorable poignant.
As you listen to the cast of internationally famous stage and screen actors perform Dubliners, both the spiritually deadening atmosphere that drove Joyce from his homeland and the irresistible emotional pull it always kept on him to the end of his days become heartbreakingly beautiful.
Dubliners is an audio experience that will only grow in richness with each time you listen.?
The stories and performers are:
Sisters - Frank McCourt
An Encounter - Patrick McCabe
Araby - Colm Meaney
Eveline - Dearbhla Molloy
After the Race - Dan O'Herlihy
Two Gallants - Malachy McCourt
The Boarding House - Donal Donnelly
A Little Cloud - Brendan Coyle
Counterparts - Jim Norton
Clay - Sorcha Cusack
A Painful Case - Ciaran Hinds
Ivy Day in the Committee Room - T.P. McKenna
A Mother - Fionnula Flanagan
Grace - Charles Keating
The Dead - Stephen Rea
?
Dubliners was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed. The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under the auspices of Ezra Pound. The first three stories in Dubliners might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist, and many of the characters who figure in Ulysses have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work. It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin. The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life. Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland.
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