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Summary: O'Brien is our own Joyce
Review: Read this book for Edna O'Brien's wonderful prose and illuminating insights, as much as for Joyce. Edna O'Brien is the Joyce of our time, though I doubt she would accept such high praise. Her new novel, WILD DECEMBERS, is as entrancing as anything Joyce wrote. Using some connections, I got an advanced reader's copy. It won't be out till April 2000. It will take me that long to reread Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake now that I know a bit more about what the bluggy earmugger was telling us in his stories. James Joyce was the only man who could write in Irish in English.
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Summary: A good short take on Joyce's life, but irritating at times
Review: Since there's little else intelligent on Joyce's life other than Richard Ellmann's whoppingly big book, this slimmer volume is quite welcome. While Edna O'Brien's "Joycean" use of language here seems initially quite clever as a means for telling the story, it tends somewhat to obscure the meanings of what she's trying to say. The book also sometimes doesn't explain things as clearly as it might--if I weren't a familiar with Joyce's works and Ellmann's biography, I think I would've been greatly puzzled by some of what O'Brien conveys. Moreover, as readers below have noted, her tendentious assumption that the novels (particularly PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST) are transparently and exactly autobiographical is a real mistake.
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Summary: A writer's introduction to Joyce
Review: This book is a good introduction to Joyce. It is written with a real feel for his language and life. It is not the overwhelming biographical scholarship of Ellmann, nor the detailed reading of the text much academic scholarship gives.It is however a competent and at times especially insightful look into the tribulations of the writer's life As part of the popular Penguin series in which Writers tell of the lives of other writers, O'Brien focuses on what most interests her.She talks about the insult of the Joyce family's poverty , and what it meant for them to go down from a kind of bourgeois life to one of great neediness. She writes about Joyce's love life and she tells the story of his infidelities and his complicated relationship to his wife Nora without going into each particular incident at length. She has an interesting few pages on reader reaction to ' Ulysses' including Virginia Woolf's comment calling it ' underbred, the effort of a ' queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples' In this work O'Brien often generalizes insightfully about the writer's condition in general, maintaining controversially that the more dedicated the writer is , and the more capable of seeing into the feeling of others on the page, the more monstrous the writer becomes in life. She compares Joyce's lonely end with that of Tolstoy, O'Neill, Virginia Woolf and Dickens. She says ,"A writer and especially a great writer, feels both more and less about human grief, being at once celebrant, witness and victim. If the writing ceases or seems to cease the mind so occupied with the stringing of words is fallow.There was nothing he(Joyce at the seperation from Nora) admitted but rage and despair in his heart, the rage of a child and the despair of a broken man." p. 176
She also provides very fragmentary but good analysis of Ulysses, explaining the stylistic genius of the ' Oxen in the Sun episode ' where Joyce parodies and rewrites the history of the English language stylistically.
It is light and quick reading , a good glance at the great man's work and life.
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Summary: A Singular Genius
Review: This is one of several volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Each provides a concise but remarkably comprehensive biography of its subject in combination with a penetrating analysis of the significance of that subject's life and career. I think this is a brilliant concept. My only complaint (albeit a quibble) is that even an abbreviated index is not provided. Those who wish to learn more about the given subject are directed to other sources.When preparing to review various volumes in this series, I have struggled with determining what would be of greatest interest and assistance to those who read my reviews. Finally I decided that a few brief excerpts and then some concluding comments of my own would be appropriate. On Joyce and Ireland: "Of all the great Irish writers, Joyce's relationship with his country remains the most incensed and yet the most meditative. Beckett, a much more cloistered man, was unequivocal; he made France his home and eventually wrote in French and though his elegiac works carry the breath of his native land, he did not expect Foxrock, his birthplace, to be etched in the consciousness of the world. Joyce did. He determined to reinvent the city where he had been marginalized, laughed at and barred from literary circles. he would be the poet of his race." (page 15) On criticisms of his portrayal of Dublin: Joyce "said he was not to be blamed for the odor of ash pits and rotted cabbage and offal in these stories [i.e. in Dubliners] because that was how he saw his city. 'We are foolish, comic, motionless, corrupted, yet we are worthy of sympathy too,' he laughed haughtily and added that if Ireland were to deny that sympathy to its characters, the rest of the world would not. In this he was mistaken." (page 78) On his deteriorating health: "The strains were beginning to show. he had endocrine treatment for his arthritis, had to have all his teeth removed and was fitted with permanent plates. His eyesight so worsened that he had only one-seventh normal vision. He was given iodine leeches for his bad eye but soon it was clear that they would have to operate." (page 130) On his enigmatic nature: "The truth is that the Joyce [others] saw was a fraction of the inner man. No one knew Joyce, only himself, no one could. His imagination was meteoric, his mind ceaseless in the accruing of knowledge, words crackling in his head, images crowding in on him 'like the shades at the entrance to the underworld.' What he wanted to do was to wrest the secret from life and that could only be done through language because, as he said, the history of people is the history of language." (pages 165-166) As is also true of the other volumes in the "Penguin Lives" series, this one provides all of the essential historical and biographical information but its greatest strength lies in the extended commentary, in this instance by Edna O'Brien. She also includes a brief but sufficient "Bibliography" for those who wish to learn more about Joyce. I hope these brief excerpts encourage those who read this review to read O'Brien's biography. It is indeed a brilliant achievement.
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Summary: Edna, James and Penguins
Review: This is the third Penguin book in the "Lives" series I've read. Yes, they are glosses, but pretty nice ones. Who really wants to read definitive biographies? Leave that for researchers. I consider myself a literary dillitante and found this book by O'Brien a welcome spur to reread some Joyce books that had been lurking too long on my shelf.
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Summary: Unoriginal, unilluminating gloss
Review: This Penguin series, which looks so promising on paper, has become increasingly disappointing. Excepting Gary Wills's argumentative, riveting St. Augustine and Peter Gay's predicably smart Mozart, they read like Landmark Books for adults, and this one is especially lite. How corny is it to begin with a paragraph of bad puns or to assume that whatever Joyce wrote in his fiction can be applied to his biography? If Dedalus said his mother smelled better than his father, is it fair to say that of Joyce without even a source attribution? You might as well stick with the man himself, though if you really want a biography, invest the time in Ellmann's masterpiece or search for Scholes's brief In Search of James Joyce. I can't see that O'Brien brings much to the party.
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