Dubliners by James Joyce

 Dubliners

by James Joyce

Dubliners was a far more successful book that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for me. The stories were easier to comprehend.

The stories are mainly concerned with everyday Dublin life, full of longing, the difficulties of the mundane, life and death, and Dublin life compared to life in the wider world.

The standout stories for me were "Eveline," "Counterparts," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead." One thing that bothered me was that all of the stories ended rather abruptly, without any sort of satisfying resolution, except for "The Dead," which felt like the most successful and complete story of the bunch.

It is still a style of work that doesn't work for me overall. The language is stiff and overly complicated--definitely a product of its time. Many of the stories were also very much concerned with alcohol and prostitution, topics that don't really interest me, yet also concerns of their time and place.

I give Dubliners 3.5 stars.