Paper and Porcelain’s Reviews > Dubliners > Status Update

The subtext of multilayered anecdotal detail still profusely bleeds and profanely burns bright onto the pages of judgment, distrust, slippery slopes from neat obscenity to nasty habits, and in that - like a silver lining’s dash of earthly rehabilitation - arrives a ladylike redefinition now reclaiming what is entitled. Whirlpools of men and masculine power dynamics engulfing the dwarfed rights of women.

Death and taxes, there, here, and there for good. Adulthood assumes many roles, marker of life’s progress, gift of gratitude to childhood, but it too and beleagueredly is a vehicle on which old kids falter to the affairs of politics and every good or evil thing it implies. The Boys Who Cried Wolf, at this stage within their not so little shepherding, evolves innocent lies into devastating deceit and much more.

: An adventureless tale. Letdowns have sprung up and sprouted out the seeds to spark awakenings in aging Dublin dwellers. Femininity of Joyce pushes no primitively presumed burden of motherhood on any lady; his summoned memories are of ladies - at war with loneliness - contemplating the passing of time by feeling possibilities of finding love, as one to birth a new person with, coasting a little farther each breath.

Diminished chords of endless desire and demands sustain, playing more agressively that by the time Dubliners’ characters of the latest chapter wrestle with their stimulated sensitivities, false harmonies have swollen unbearingly loud. James Joyce, a man familiar with stigmatized ideals of his gender, lets his life permeate the paper with a particular fragility here; masculinity critique courses through each page.

“Beautiful?” Captive at age’s cornerstone prior to new-world nirvana comes around the curb, Man as a breed of being is teased and troubled by higher education, higher-storeyed houses, higher life. Dublin - its personified boy bending his head up to London and Paris’ yearned-for festivities and frivolousness - represents every individual’s infinite dissatisfaction when confronted with the race of possession.

The Dublin of this playgrounder-to-pengrabber’s recollection seems sparsely lit, a pair of parallel tungsten streetlights gating each avenue’s frontal gap and not an according fence post of luminosity afterwards, urging readers - visitors - to be their own tour guides down the dark urban structures each looming less visibly; the tenants fall in love less morally and age less gracefully as the book is unfurled.

Seeking out a distraction from the slow-to-leave stresses with speed - a reference to the drug - on fast-to-outlive swiftness of artificial advancement and chain-injecting arenaline rush withdrawals. Kidnapped in kiddish shenanigans slipping away against the fingers, pedestrians of Dublin’s polarity where half waltzes out of bed and the rest rushes back on board are cast to show the former growing beyond whimsy.

One tenths enwoven in tales of the town piecing together with synchronous, complimentary color schemes, James Joyce pierces aliveness of life’s last era of living beings and paints the daunting - godly guaranteed - future of their farewells. Either taking in our torsos the air remnants of warm-worded gases they used to exhale or preparing for their touchable presence to become vapor, there resides death’s door.

Each story incandescently bats at the juvenile spirit persevering in elderly bodies - homerunning balls of generation-gap morals and ethics from a young perspective in chaptered aspects, firstly friendship and secondly falling in love. The eloquence of geographical and sensorial contexts continue to escalate for readers to gradually mature in their sympathies of new and old people.

Despite the spiritual distance, Joyce garnishes the book’s entry point with scenes, scents, and textures that are so fragrant and pungent, smooth and coarse - individually interpretable but similarly sense-arousing - that you are practically present in the run-down, low-density Irishtown’s distinct character regardless of who you are.