جيمس جويس

by John Gross, صلاح الدين برمدا (ترجمة)

Book by Gross, John

Genres: Biography, Literature, Cultural

103 pages, Unknown Binding

First published November 25, 1970

About the author

John Gross was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement in London, a senior book editor and book critic on the staff of The New York Times in New York, and theatre critic for The Sunday Telegraph. He was also literary editor of The New Statesman and Spectator magazines.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a perfect introduction to Jimmy Joyce – very short (91 pages) and because it was written in 1971 totally free of the clogged infarcted mandarin language that wrecks so much writing about JJ (and everyone else) since the 1980s. Unfortunately it’s out of print.

I was always amazed by JJ’s scorched-earth policy towards writing – one single short story collection; one single conventional(ish) autobiographical novel; one play; one exploded-multiverse reinvention of the novel; and one final work which leaves the English language behind completely. What JJ would have done next if he hadn’t been so remiss as to die at the age of 59 is beyond our tiny imaginations.

I myself am not so much of a Joyce fan, really, I’m a Ulysses fan. I think Finnegans Wake is unreadable. JJ in his madness took 17 years to write it, that’s 17 wasted years for me, falling down a rabbithole he himself made, entranced as he fell like Alice. It was a grossly self-regarding experiment. As for the other stuff, Dubliners is excellent but oh so miserable (Gross says “the prose, for all its artfulness, tends to level off into an even drone”) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is tiresome (except for the hellfire sermons) and pompous, or I thought so when I read it many years ago, I should give it another go. (Gross says “The portrait of the artist turns out to be the dissection of a second-rate aesthete”.)

But all introductions to great authors should be like this – short, sweet, pungent.

[Bob R Bogle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I readily admit I wasn't expecting too much from this little green paperback (my copy is a 2nd printing from September 1972 and does not resemble the cover pictured on goodreads; try here: http://pics-librarything.r.worldssl.n...) about James Joyce and his fiction; it's a booklet of only 89 pages after all, plus end material, and it's so small I could easily cart it about in my pocket and read it here and there at brief and intermittent interludes during a recent trip out of state. I was therefore surprised and pleasantly affected by John Gross's sly and efficacious, even charming, style.

This is merely one installment from a popular 1970s series of publications on "Modern Masters": study guides focused on writers and thinkers upon whom college students might be likely to be tested. This is a kind of precursor to more recent Notes of the Cliff or Spark variety, you might say, and in general that more ancient series is of a more refined and thoughtful order than what was to follow in ensuing decades, perhaps reflective of an era in which students were somewhat more concerned with learning for its own sake than simply and exclusively with passing tests.

In the first half of the book or so Gross provides us more with his own impressions of Joyce than with a tick-tock biography, painting us a non-chronological montage of the artist's personality. Further on he does begin to take on Joyce's artistic works in chronological order, and now this little reflective book grows a bit more formulaic, as we pass from Dubliners to Portrait to Ulysses and finally to Finnegans Wake, with the various lesser works included at their proper places. It seems to me that because Gross's booklet is so short he is less successful here, but only because he lacks the space to tell his tale properly.

Still, this little guide booklet is, I think, a generally excellent one for ruminative undergraduates, perhaps, who are about to begin exploring Joyce's infinitely complex world. Or, I might add, it is a friendly companion for those who are already familiar with Joyce, who only want a little light reading to carry with them on their next vacation.

[Caracalla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written overview of Joyce's oeuvre, in an old series that published a lot of interesting introductions like it. I think there's still room for writing of literature of this sort, a sort of personal evaluation by a well-informed connoisseur although it's rightly not seen to have any academic value. I really like Philip Hardie's pamphlet on Vergil for similar reasons. I was maybe looking for more on the Wake but it was great to find out more about what had been written on his other work.

[Zareen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author concisely & clearly summarises Joyce’s writing style and themes. He carefully analyses all his novels & places them in their social & cultural context. He reviews the novels & some of his poems.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired Apr 30, 1992
Cheap Thrills, Montreal, Quebec