kay’s Reviews > Dubliners > Status Update

GRACE is by far the worst story of the book; so much so that it took me a whole week to complete its 20 pages. interminable, turgid -- simply not of interest. unfortunate! excited to dig into THE DEAD nevertheless...

a painful case ranks among the easier stories in this collection, but it is also one of the better ones -- a modernist framing of the human condition in which our yearnings operate in perfect tandem with our losses; we only wish for something when it is taken away from us. a novel observation? maybe not, but joyce makes it with a certain dramatic adroitness that makes the whole thing feel nothing short of revelatory.

a little cloud -- portrait of the (wannabe) artist as a gigantic loser