Dubliners (Oxford World's Classics) Paperback – Illustrated, 12 Jun. 2008

Joyce's collection of 15 stories takes the reader through the various strata of Dublin society of the early years of the twentieth century. The prose is of a uniformly high standard, though some of the pieces are too fragmentary and unresolved to be fully satisfying. When Joyce does tell a story, though, he tells it excellently, making me rather regret that he didn't use standard prose and story-telling techniques more often.The sum of the collection is greater than its individual parts, however, so that even the shorter character sketches add something to the reader's understanding of Dublin and its citizens. Despite the wide range of class and circumstance Joyce addresses, each one has a sense of total authenticity, of a deep understanding of how this society intermixes. There is a common theme running throughout, of people trapped, either by circumstance or because of decisions they have made, and many of the stories focus on a moment in the central characters' lives when they become aware of their trap. Drunkenness, violence and the stifling stranglehold of the Catholic church all play their part in showing a society where aspiration is a rare commodity, usually thwarted. I understand some of the stories were considered shocking at the time for their language and sexual content. Given the relative mildness of them to modern eyes, this fact in itself casts another light on how socially restricted the society was at the time of writing.The prose is somewhat understated, with Joyce relying more on the penetrating examination of character rather than any flamboyancy of language or stylistic quirks, and that works well for me. He achieves a depth of characterisation with few words, acknowledging his reader's ability to interpret and understand without the need to have everything spelled out. Just occasionally, this left me floundering a little in the couple of stories where he is addressing contemporary Irish politics or mores, but I accept that's my weakness rather than his. In the stories where he is addressing more fundamental aspects of human nature, I appreciated his rather sparing style greatly.Overall, I found the fully developed stories excellent, while the ones that are primarily character sketches are interesting if not wholly satisfying. However, as a collection, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, the weaker parts being more than compensated for by the stronger.

Joyce at his best and a joy to read. The book is neat and pocket-sized but to achieve this, the typeface is rather small for old eyes!

If you tried but failed to understand Joyce's Ulysses, as I did, you need to know that Dubliners is much easier reading.It is not what I expected. In one story Joyce describes how as children they played Cowboys and Indians - with Joyce a somewhat ineffectual Indian. 'An Encounter' describes how as children they met but managed to ignore an old pervert. Another describes a diffident man forced to marry a pregnant girl. 'Two Gallants' describes two men on a pub crawl, one of whom was apparently successful with girls at the drop of his hat, to the envy of the other - though his actual 'success' was tawdry.Perhaps surprisingly, Joyce also shows a sense of humour. "A Mother" is a masterpiece in avoiding responsibility - it would be a great script for something like the TV show "The Office". Here Mrs Kearney "respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed" - well, this was in the days before privatisation! Drink, pubs, curates and religions abound. In 'Grace' Mr Cunningham explains "...that one of Pope Leo's poems was on the invention of photography - in Latin, of course".These snippets of Dubliners' lives are far from rosy. Life just goes on, rather pointlessly it seems. You are left wondering what inner worlds these people inhabited.But what struck me personally were the parallels between the events Joyce describes and some my own past experiences - so for me these accounts have an uncanny power.

The Dubliners is a series of vignettes depicting ordinary life in Edwardian Dublin.Joyce is viewed as one of the pivotal authors of the twentieth century, at the vanguard of modernism. Ulysees is often quoted as the principal example of stream of consciousness. Modernism itself focused on what was going on in the inner world rather than the external. In many ways, therefore, The Dubliners is disappointing. With the exception of The Dead, the stories don't really examine motive or psychology, they are rather observational in style and leave the reader to guess at the inner lives of the characters involved. Whilst the dialogue is crisp and enviable the narrative borders on the expositional and in places this makes for dull reading.The Dead is the exception, a beautifully crafted and simple but moving story, different because one is very much in the head of Gabriel the main protagonist.The Dubliners is a worthwhile read if you are interested in the historical development of fiction, but not if you are looking for engaging plots or character analysis.