Next in our overview of Odysseys, we embark on an epic journey of our own toward the endless tome masterpiece James Joyce’s Ulysses. No reader comes to Joyce without preconceptions. Was he the greatest literary genius of the 20th century? Or a pretentious drunkard and misogynist? Was he an Irish patriot and torchbearer for Irish cultural revival? Or a Francophile ex-pat who gave Ireland the slip early on?
For most of us, though, he’s just a guy in little glasses and a hat who wrote a very long book that is almost impossible to read.
So for those who aren’t sure what to make of James Joyce, this is your perfect starter pack.
But as befits an Odyssey, we’re not going directly to Ulysses. We’re backing up and looking at Joyce’s two earlier books, also set in Dublin, also deeply indebted to the Odyssey. These are Dubliners, his book of 15 short stories, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel, both published in 1914, the year in which WWI started.
Joyce thought he would publish Dubliners in 1907, but a very fraught, complicated and frankly pretty bratty series of fights between Joyce and his Dublin publisher – along with a lot of other messy life circumstances – meant that it wouldn’t be published for another seven years. As Sophie and Jonty guide listeners through the long and winding — often whining — road to Dubliners, we ask how it’s a version of Homer’s Odyssey, how it lays out Joyce’s creative vision, and what it tells us about the kind of man James Joyce really was.
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