James Joyce: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives)

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: 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 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.

Rating:
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.

Rating:
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.

Rating:
Summary: A good short take on Joyce's life!
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.