Rating: 
Summary: A good short take on Joyce's life!
Review: As in the other volumes from this series, O'Brien's version of Joyce's life is but a sketch, evocative and at times even poetic but only an introduction. While she mostly succeeds in capturing the emotional state of this most Irish and contradictory man, using his fictional characters to understand their author is a weak point. Joyce was neither Stephen Dedalus nor Leopold Bloom nor Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and confusing some of their exploits with his life is misleadingÄfactually and emotionally. Still, this volume, some of which has previously appeared in O'Brien's James and Nora: Portrait of Joyce's Marriage, is a good start for anyone who can't face the 800-page biographies but wants to know the essence of the man and his works. For public and academic libraries.
Rating:
Summary: A Joycean Primer
Review: As is almost consistently the case, the series of biographies produced under the collection of Penguin Lives has once again succeeded in providing a palatable doorway through which the hungry but busy reader can find the substance of an important if historically tough writer or artist. Edna O'Brien, herself an accomplished writer, here provides us with a fellow Irishman's view of the incredibly important writer James Joyce. Though most of us have at least read his 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and have seen plays and film adaptations of some of his other works, few of us feel we understand this complexly brilliant mind enough to say that approaching 'Ulysses' or 'Finnegan's Wake' would be easy reading. O'Brien gives us not only the chronology of Joyce's life, she also picks up on individual instances in his youth and manhood that served as fodder for his detailed novels of his Irish heritage. The writing is brisk, acerbic, challenging, and ultimately rewardingly educational. Finish this brief history and you most probably will run to the book shelf for another go at the master!
Rating:
Summary: a great writer on a great writer
Review: Biographies in this series are the perfect fun size. Light, but long enough to have a lot of real stuff in them, more than a mere introduction.The very first sentence of this book invites you into Joyce with an imitation of his writing style, & after that Edna O'Brien shares generously & mellifluously her great understanding of the man, his life, & his work, drawing on scholarly commentary of his books & from the journals & letters of him & the people around him so that you know how they all felt about his life & their lives in themselves & for the purposes of this biography in relation to him. It's so well-written & so interesting -- what a life he had, crazy as he was, that -- I could hardly put it down. Edna O'Brien's great interest in him comes across truly.
Rating:
Summary: a great writer on a great writer
Review: Biographies in this series are the perfect fun size. Light, but long enough to have a lot of real stuff in them, more than a mere introduction. The very first sentence of this book invites you into Joyce with an imitation of his writing style, & after that Edna O'Brien shares generously & mellifluously her great understanding of the man, his life, & his work, drawing on scholarly commentary of his books & from the journals & letters of him & the people around him so that you know how they all felt about his life & their lives in themselves & for the purposes of this biography in relation to him. It's so well-written & so interesting -- what a life he had, crazy as he was, that -- I could hardly put it down. Edna O'Brien's great interest in him comes across truly.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful homage to the artist by the artist
Review: Having read this small volume, I believe that I have read one of the most beautiful books ever written. I have read numerous biographies in my life, from laborious, super-detailed massive volumes, the doorstops, through quickly written popular biographies, to bare sketches, cynical or amusing interpretative biographies, but never have I read a real work of art. "James Joyce" by Edna O'Brien is a homage to the artist by the artist, and it set me on my knees in every aspect. Edna has always adored Joyce, but also understood him both as an artist, and as a human being, the understanding even more important, because never was there a writer more misunderstood and hated, alive or postmortem, than poor James Joyce. "The he [the critic] posed a question. Had Joyce a future? The answer was no. As poet and novelist Joyce would always fail. Joyce's future is assured. His shade haunts every great writer who has followed him. The essays, treatises, books and seminars abound, but more tellingly, and perhaps more viscerally he is still hated." p.170 During Joyce's lifetime, it was natural that his art of vision stirred the literary circles, for never had there been a daring experimentation and a literary revolutionary like James Joyce. It was even more natural that the public loathed the writer, for he dared to paint life as he saw it, as he personally experienced it, never looking back to the prevailing code of morals, be it Irish Catholic, prudish middle-class English, or even more prudish Puritan American; or any other code for that matter! For Joyce, there was no barrier he would not cross, no sacrifice he wouldn't make to unravel his vision. A sad fact is that his native beloved Dublin loathed him perhaps the most, unable to see apotheosis of his country in his presumably blasphemous and anti-Irish stories and novels. Disenchanted, Joyce turned his back on Ireland, and never came back. From the very start to the very end, Joyce was refused publication, was ridiculed, slandered and humiliated. "That Joyce has risen above so much misunderstanding is surely a testament to those wounded eyes and the Holy Ghost in that ink bottle. The battle as to who owns James Joyce infiltrates many a Joycean occasion, a claim so proprietary and absurd that it deserves no answer. Genius is singular and Beckett was indeed right when he said that the artist who stakes his life is on his own." p. 171 And this kind of attitude is still prevalent at the turn of the century, decades after the death of the poor author of just a handful of books. In decades that passed since his death, all literary forms were tried, all holy cows contested many a time, new forms of expression invented, and forgotten, nothing really shocking a reader anymore, and yet it's still Joyce who is a symbol of inarticulate, a symbol of rebellion and bad taste, especially for those who have never read a single work by this author. If you ask whether his books were controversial, the answer is yes, whether his books were hard to understand, the answer again is yes. All this does not justify all of attacks the author had had to endure, even after his death, miserable as it was. His fiction is not for everyone, and I myself have turned down one of his novels, having miserably failed with my language. But it never occurred to me to try to burn the author on the righteous stake of his lack of appropriateness. Whether or not I, as a reader, agree with the opinion that Joyce was a genius is secondary. I have read his works, and I do appreciate the challenge, and the fact that he, the artist, widened my horizons, augmented my perception, because he made me think, think hard and analyze. Ultimately, I believe that it is a general, widely applicable regularity, a universal phenomenon; easy books we like to read, they slip through the larynx of our neural network like honey sled down the Pooh's mouth, and sometimes they leave a trace, a shred of action, a character or two, merely a silhouette, but few novels make us think, and if we are willing, stand up to the challenge of allowing the author superimpose his vision over ours, detract the train of conventional thought we are naturally used to employ, prickle our thinking so that we find ourselves in the depths of dark, blue water, with no direction prevalent or dominant, devoid of any holds of reality, those crutches our mind uses for identification and analysis. To let ourselves go with the stream of his fiction is to let ourselves experience an afterlife, where the only stronghold is our imagination, and ears willing to listen to the melody of the artist's voice. That we emerge from this dream slightly wounded, a bit scared, mangled over, directionless and sometimes either delighted, or depressed and vulgarized? Then, if we do come back, we may safely re-employ our senses and try to comment on the commentable, positive or negative, what does it matter? It's the experience that is of the ultimate value, the unforgettable fire of literary expedition into the hybrid conjunction of our own mind, and the artist's. I like to think that my mind is unique enough to produce an equally unique mixture of his thoughts, and my own. Whether or not I liked what I read, is irrelevant. Edna O'Brien diverged completely from the usual way biographies are written, and God bless her for that. Rarely pieces of trivia or data are mentioned, this book bursts in seams with life, a real life of James Joyce, focused on the man himself, and his art, above all else. A small book, a poem in prose, a beautiful elegy, and ode and a sonnet, an ambitious, delicate work I will keep rereading to the end of my life. I love you, Edna.
Rating: 
Summary: increasingly disappointing
Review: I agree with the previous reviewer, that while this series Penguin Lives series looks so promising on paper that it is becoming increasingly disappointing, particularly this book. It tries too hard to be a novel and employs too many literary tricks and devises to pull it off as even a short biography. As a real biography nut I have been following both the Penguin Lives series and the Lives & Legacies series by the Crossroad Publishing Company. While the Lives & Legacies series does not tout the big authors this series does, the writing is exellent and in just 192 pages they manage to include the backmatter, that as a reader of even short form biography want and expect. Really, this series is worth checking out. Admirably as well, this series supports both new and established authors. First, that's rather rare these days in the publishing world; and second, it's great to hear some new voices.
Rating:
Summary: Short but sweet
Review: I read this book at the Jersey shore. Joyce's life was as bizarre as his fiction. This book gives you an insight into what Joyce was trying to do with "Ulysses" and later "Finegan's Wake." Of course, the Ellmann bio is still the definitive. This is a great little read with sand and roasted peanuts.
Rating:
Summary: A perceptive account of a monster of a writer
Review: Irish writer Edna O'Brien's brief (179 page) biography of James Joyce was aimed at people like me who are curious about Joyce's life, but not curious enough to undertake Richard Ellman's definitive but massive biography. O'Brien venerates Joyce's writing, but recognizes the high cost to most everyone who had any contact with Joyce. Although she argues (without convincing me) that Joyce was not a misogynist, she does not attempt to defend him from being viewed as a monster; instead, she answers her question "Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do." O'Brien provides interesting responses to Joyce's life and lifework. Hard-core Joyceans will already have processed Ellman's biography--regarded by some as the best biography of any writer ever written. The somewhat curious have a fine guide in O'Brien. Her book is generally readable, and I am inclined to trust her sense (as a novelist, as an Irish novelist) of what in Joyce's fiction is autobiographical. The volume is an excellent match of biographer and subject, like Edmund White's biographical meditation on Marcel Proust that began the series of Penguin Brief Lives, a welcome antidote to the mountains of details that make so many biographies daunting.
Rating:
Summary: A perceptive account of a monster of a writer
Review: Irish writer Edna O'Brien's brief (179 page) biography of James Joyce was aimed at people like me who are curious about Joyce's life, but not curious enough to undertake Richard Ellman's definitive but massive biography. O'Brien venerates Joyce's writing, but recognizes the high cost to most everyone who had any contact with Joyce. Although she argues (without convincing me) that Joyce was not a misogynist, she does not attempt to defend him from being viewed as a monster; instead, she answers her question "Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do." O'Brien provides interesting responses to Joyce's life and lifework. Hard-core Joyceans will already have processed Ellman's biography--regarded by some as the best biography of any writer ever written. The somewhat curious have a fine guide in O'Brien. Her book is generally readable, and I am inclined to trust her sense (as a novelist, as an Irish novelist) of what in Joyce's fiction is autobiographical. The volume is an excellent match of biographer and subject, like Edmund White's biographical meditation on Marcel Proust that began the series of Penguin Brief Lives, a welcome antidote to the mountains of details that make so many biographies daunting.
Rating:
Summary: A Smart Series
Review: Our other dear reviewers are missing the point of Penguin Lives. The editor, James Atlas, in choosing fiction writers to author these brief biographies, has blown fresh air on a genre that has grown stale with its own self-importance. Perhaps some readers may wish to read the minutia, but I find it tiresome. Having slogged through Ellman, which I found a tougher go than Finnegan's Wake, Edna O'Brien brings a finely-tuned Celtic voice to a life ill-lived.
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