6/12/2023 0 Comments Dubliners book![]() ![]() Or this really posh bloke feeling sad because he's not as posh as the other blokes around him. Or two youngfellas bunking off school and meeting an oddball who's also a bit of a perv. Just like, say, 10 pages about a funeral of this priest who had a mental breakdown before he died. Like the worst kind of art-house movie you'd stumble across on a Saturday night on BBC 2 when your Mam and Dad were out at Uncle Jack's summer hoolie, and your sisters were in the kitchen flirting and smoking with Davey Riley from the youth club. But Dubliners? Imagine our disappointment, when we sat before this slim-bound volume, at our ancient wooden flip-top desks, the ones with the obsolete inkwells carved into the corners, and listened to sad-eyed Master McCarthy give us the background blurb to James Joyce, and the power of the well-honed short story, and the greater power of the narrative epiphanies contained within these pages, and within this sacred collection of 15 miraculous tales. We were 12, some of us going on 13, and the nearest we'd been to highbrow literature were the eye-gouging groans in Shakespeare's Lear, or the hanged puppies and bashed brains in Bronte's Wuthering Heights - both chosen, one suspects in retrospect, to appease the blood thirsty instincts of eager boys on the teenage turn. I don't know why we did Dubliners when we did. ![]() Kevin Maher is the author of The Fields, which comes out in the U.S in August. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |