Have a good measure of patience ready to exchange for keen insight and impeccable writing

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	• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) James Joyce Penguin Classics, 2003 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 238 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Have a good measure of patience ready to exchange for keen insight and impeccable writing

Actually, I listened to an audio version of this book - it was the only way I was able to finish it. Even so, it still took me quite a while to get through it. The writing is very dense, and self-absorbed. The book offers many rewarding insights into stream of consciousness thought processes, and typical youthful struggles with issues like religion, good and evil, aesthetics, books and learning, family relations, nationalism and politics, sex and love, asserting one's independence, and getting along with teachers and peers. The detailed accounts of Roman Catholic dogma were a bit tedious, yet I ran into references to them in other works soon after finishing those sections. Having been brought up Protestant, I was spared a lot of the gory details created by the human imagination regarding what hell must be like.

A rather profound insight that came in handy one day while teaching was that people who work hard to live pious lives often end up with a short temper, impatient with the visible weaknesses of others. That also was confirmed in a separate context soon after I listened to that part.

I had to give this work five stars - it is acknowledged great literature - but I wasn't so sure I liked the narrator that much the further I got into it. I guess anybody can be hard to like when they make an effort to be brutally honest about their thoughts and feelings. The narrator's ambivalence about things like his teachers and his interactions with them were sometimes disorienting, but that was certainly his purpose - to show that there are many possible views of the same interaction, and you have to make your own calls. The question posed to the narrator toward the end, about whether he had actually ever loved anyone in his life so far, put the entire work in a perspective worth pondering.

I think for the razor-sharp insights and the utterly lucid writing, this work is eminently worth reading. But you may have to push yourself to make it to the end - I did, anyway.

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Being James Joyce

Several years ago a movie came out called "Being John Malkovich." I didn't see the movie, but the title was always intriguing to me. Essentially, this book is as close as one could come to "being" James Joyce as a young man.

As other reviewers have noted, the book starts slowly. I did not find the storyline to be particularly compelling, but the revolutionary "stream of consciousness" style introduced by Joyce to the literary world in this book was quite compelling. While I could not call this book a "page turner," make no mistake: it is well worth the effort to persevere to the end. There is a reason why some books are considered "literature." This is one of them.

My Viking Press edition contained no notes or explanations...just the simple, unadorned manuscript without someone's notes telling me what I should extract from the book, what I should think, why it was great literature, etc. Nothing to "coach" me in a particular direction. Now that I have finished reading it, I would enjoy exposing myself to notes and essays on this work, to compare my own impressions with those of others.

The plot of the book is simple enough: a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story featuring Stephen Daedelus, Joyce's alter ego - hence, the title of the book. We follow Daedelus through his formative years, first as the young son of a wealthy family sent off to boarding school, then as the adolescent whose family has fallen from political grace and is now struggling to make ends meet as young Stephen changes to another school that while different, is still as much about religious instruction (Catholicism) as about secular topics. Then, we find him in his mid-teens undergoing a stage in which he abandons himself to lust and then swings the pendulum to the other extreme by attempting something approaching mortal perfection in his religious devotion and briefly even considers entering the priesthood. At the close of the book we find Daedelus in college demonstrating his clearly formidable intellect as he ponders and debates subjects with his professors and peers such as the meaning of beauty and the responsibility of the artist. Ultimately, Daedelus gives us his conclusion on how he intends to live his life that is at once both profound and cliché: to express himself through his art (his writing) as freely and wholly as he can, even if it means being spurned by society and making mistakes. In today's vernacular, it would probably come out as something like, "I gotta be me." But of course Joyce leads us to this conclusion not as some airhead MTV-generation pronouncement, but as the result of his coming-of-age experiences and his deep philosophical ponderings about the meaning of life, the role of religion, and his purpose on this earth.

The stream-of-consciousness style pioneered by Joyce in this book is remarkable, both in its originality to the literary world, and in its ability to give us the events of the story not just through the eyes of Daedelus, but almost through his subconscious. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to read someone's thoughts, right down to the sometimes erratic ways in which one thought leads to another or the impressions that occur somewhat randomly, this is what Joyce delivers. In these pages, he delivers not what it would be like to observe James Joyce, but what it would be like to actually be James Joyce.

The language throughout is beautiful, many times a form of prose poetry. Often described as a novella rather than a novel, the rather sparse page count is rather deceptive: this is a dense book and will take as long for most people to read as a book three times its length. One thing in my edition of the book that was unconventional was Joyce's refusal to use quotation marks to distinguish dialog. He set off dialog with elongated dashes at the beginning of dialog sentences instead. Occasionally, I had to read passages several times to understand who was speaking because Joyce depars entirely from the convention we are all used to.

All in all, this is an excellent starting place for those new to Joyce such as myself, both because it gives insight into the author, and because it introduces the character Daedelus who apparently figures prominently in other books by Joyce such as "Ulysses."

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Education Book

Required reading for daughter. Book took too long to arrive. MysticBleu

Charting your own course in life

The narrative point of view of this book was very innovative for its day. Its not a traditional driving narrative where the author weaves together elements of a plot that leads the characters to a telling conclusion. The point of view is interior to the main character, but in the third person not the first, and the language changes as the character changes.

The narrative follows the growing up and coming to age of Stephen Dedalus from his earliest memories. It shifts from exterior events to interior reflections and fades in a disconnected way into dream events. Some of the exterior events are quite striking and memorable, such as Stephen getting whipped for something he did not do, the bird-girl on the shore, and a long priestly harangue about going to hell. Many signs along the way acquire a mythic or symbolic significance. There are frequent references to birds and flying, which signify Stephen's growing intention to leave Ireland.

The heart of the book is the story about a struggle against authority. The ability to rebel against dire warnings of everlasting punishment from disobeying a religious order requires considerable strength of mind from a lone individual. It requires inner resources, a constant source of solace that gives one an unwavering resolve. Stephen experiences the travails of youth, the giving into lust and subsequent shame, and then turning to the Church. He realizes that by becoming a priest all his material cares would be taken care of and the Church would allay his security anxieties. But his artistic temperament is awakened, most notably in the epiphany of seeing the girl on the shore; and he knows that he cannot endure the kind of sick drudgery that he would feel in the labors of renunciation of his self. Instead of having others chart his course, he awakens to the freedom of charting his own course.

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Highly moving coming of age story

This is the semi-autobiographical coming of age story of Stephen Dedalus. I read it about 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate and found it fairly hard to get through, so I thought I'd give it another go. On my second reading I found I was able to relate far more closely with the protagonist and appreciate the quality of Joyce's prose. The story, which is told mainly in the third person, recounts several stages of Stephen's youth. The beginning of the book is written in almost childlike prose as it depicts Stephen's experiences as a schoolchild at a Catholic boarding school. I was able to relate to Joyce's depiction of a very precocious yet sensitive young boy, full of childlike curiosity and terrified of the harsh discipline meted out by the priests. The latter part of this chapter also contains an interesting discussion between Stephen's father and his colleagues about Parnell and Irish politics. Not being an expert on Irish history, I couldn't follow this debate as intelligently as many readers will be able to, yet through it Joyce depicted the sharp political cleavages dividing Ireland at the time.

The next two chapters follow Stephen at a Catholic high school. He has become increasingly alienated from society and emotionally withdrawn. He also begins visiting prostitutes, which leaves him feeling disgusted with his sinful nature. Perhaps the most amazing part of the book is in chapter three, which details Stephen's religious conversion and subsequent renunciation of his faith. This chapter contains a sermon on the torments of hell which terrorizes Stephen and leads to his initial spiritual immersion. This sermon carries on for about 15 pages and is given in the most lurid, evocative prose that one can imagine. The sermon is explicitly designed to terrorize young minds and lead them to renounce their sinful ways. It really resonated with me, as I myself grew up in a conservative church where I was reminded every Sunday of the unimaginable horrors that awaited me if I did not turn my back on the sinful world. While Stephen, shaken with guilt and terror after this sermon, initially tries to immerse himself in the rites of the church, he continues to be assailed by doubts and skepticism, which ultimately lead him to renounce his faith. Joyce vividly describes the joy and freedom that Stephen feels upon freeing himself from the reins of religious doctrine and proclaiming his independence from all such confining systems of thought.

The last part of the book shows Stephen as a university student. There were parts of this chapter that were hard for me to relate to. First, there is about a ten page section in which Stephen elaborates to a friend his theory of aesthetics. Art scholars and philosophers might find this fascinating, but it was somewhat hard for me to follow. There is also a very peripheral romantic interest that is never fully fleshed out. Joyce's ultimate aim here, though, was to depict Stephen as a highly independent young man. Stephen refuses to lend his support to the various faddish social and political movements of the day, whether it be Marxism or Irish nationalism. In the end, Stephen makes the decision to leave Ireland, finding that his artistic aspirations will never be fulfilled if he stays.

Overall, this book clearly deserves its reputation as one of the best works of literature in the English language. Although several aspects of the story are hard to relate to for those who are either not Irish or experts on Irish history, there are also a number of universal themes that resonate more widely. First, this story can be read as a sort of free-thinker's manifesto. While it is admittedly hard at times to fully relate to Stephen (he is depicted as elitist and anti-social), many will be able to relate to his feelings of alienation and his independence of thought. Finally, one cannot properly review this work without noting Joyce's prose. Joyce reminds me of Nabokov in the sense that, although he is often longwinded, one can forgive him his longwindedness because it is simply a pleasure to read his beautiful prose. This is one of those books that contains passages that I will go back and read over and over again.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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