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    The Best of James Joyce
    The Best of James Joyce
    The Best of James Joyce
    Audiobook (abridged)1 hour

    The Best of James Joyce

    Written by James Joyce

    Narrated by Emma Hignett

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A celebration of the work of one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Includes readings from Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSaland Publishing
    Release dateJan 12, 2011
    ISBN9781908650030
    Author

    James Joyce

    James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He came from a reasonably wealthy family which, predominantly because of the recklessness of Joyce's father John, was soon plunged into financial hardship. The young Joyce attended Clongowes College, Belvedere College and, eventually, University College, Dublin. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, and eloped with her to Croatia. From this point until the end of his life, Joyce lived as an exile, moving from Trieste to Rome, and then to Zurich and Paris. His major works are Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939). He died in 1941, by which time he had come to be regarded as one of the greatest novelists the world ever produced.

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    Reviews for The Best of James Joyce

    3.5/5

    3,726 ratings87 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The story follows Stephan Dedalus as he grows up in Ireland and eventually breaks away from Irish society. He abandons religion, Irish politics and much of what he’s been taught and what his family holds dear. As a teenager he’s tormented by Catholic guilt, especially concerning his sexual urges. He’s both fascinated and plagued by the thought of women. Stephen eventually goes his own way, to the point of leaving the country.Joyce’s writing style is dense and wordy. Attention must be paid to every word. It can be a chore at times, but the Stephen’s story is fascinating.
    • 1/5
      I'm probably going to English major hell, but I could not get past the first half of this book.
    • 5/5
      The classic Bildungsroman. Of course, I hate to use the term Bildungsroman cause you sound like a pompous ass. However, since I am in fact a pompous ass, it works out ok.
    • 1/5
      I don't usually bother to write bad reviews, but this book takes the cake for me. Reading that whole sermon about hell was already hell in and of itself, and that's only one of many things wrong with this book. Why must you torment me, Joyce? I only wanted to read a novel of yours, for heaven's sake. I'm surprised I had it in me to even finish it.
    • 3/5
      Zwakke start, als een standaardcollegeroman, maar vanaf hoofdstuk 2 erg intrigerend door de breuk in constructie en stijl. Het hoofdpersonage is erg antipathiek en gecomplexeerd. Sterk autobiografisch. De donderpreekscene is subliem. Prachtige alternatieve Bildungsroman
    • 5/5
      How should one review a great classic novel that has stimulated so much analysis and criticism that the paperback version in our library contained more pages devoted to analysis than to the novel itself? I’ll just describe how it affected me personally since I am unlikely to add much to the enormous existing corpus of literary commentary.I read the book first when I was a freshman at the University of Notre Dame. There I first encountered James Joyce’s semi-stream-of-consciousness technique, which made for quite challenging reading for a college freshman but very enjoyable for a grizzled old lawyer and graduate of a “Great Books” program. This semi-autobiography of Joyce resonated a great deal with my own experience of growing up in the Catholic Church.The book is a growing up and coming-of-age story about Stephen Dedalus, who would also feature in Joyce’s tour de force, Ulysses. Stephen has to establish his individuality apart from the tentacles of family, religion, and country, then - and until quite recently - in the throes of political upheaval.Stephen argues with family and with friends at college, and this enables us to experience his thoughts on Irish nationalism, poetry, art, sex, and more basically, what he wanted to do with his life. For me, the passage that provide the most fun was the description of a Jesuit’s fire and brimstone description of hell. For one unacquainted with this sort of thing, the passage might read as parody. But I know better: that old Jesuit’s tirade was almost exactly the same sermon I heard 50 years after the book was published at a religious “retreat” that my Catholic high school required me to attend. Occasionally, Joyce gets carried away with his own extraordinary ability to compose complicated syntax employing his sesquipedalian vocabulary. Like William Faulkner, he sometimes seems to be just showing off. But there are aspects of life that he really, really gets: like the great relief a true believer experiences when his mortal sins are washed away through the sacrament of confession (technically, “Penance”). He also has a meticulously authentic ear for English spoken by Irishmen.Evaluation: I think this is one of the great novels in English that all truly educated people should read at least once. (JAB)
    • 3/5
      Not an easy read. It took Joyce 10 years to write, and it shows.The prose doesn't really flow. But there are other rewards. It's like Joyce is writing in the style of an impressionist painter - the objective is convey a general impression, a feeling, rather than to be explicit and direct. Once the reader accepts this contract with the author, things move along better!In the end I had a vivid picture of a difficult childhood, with a father falling apart with drink, a mother struggling with the loss of faith of her son, and the author gaining the confidence to rebel against conventional expectations.Good stuff, but just not an easy read!
    • 4/5
      I kind of doomed myself reading Ulysses first. I loved that book so much and I loved this book as well, but I can't seem to give anything else by James Joyce a full five star rating. This book was great, but not as great as Ulysses, I thought.

      What I liked better was the fact this was an easier read. It's only five chapters and less than 300 pages...unlike his other book. It's not that confusing to figure out either. I still like Ulysses better though. I felt like that was his magnum opus. However, this was his first novel.

      Some day I'll get around to reading Finnegans Wake. I've read the Dubliners too, which again I didn't care for as much because I read Ulysses first.
    • 4/5
      I'll tell the truth: Not all of this novel is exciting stuff. A lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing that seems to meander about before getting to any kind of a point.But that's intentional. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young Irish writer from his childhood to his early adult years in the early 20th century. This young man is working out his own belief system, his own philosophy and thoughts about religion and artistry, and rarely does such a thought process occur directly and expediently.Thus, the rambling text.But that's not to say there's nothing of import to be found here. If nothing else, this short novel shows the budding work of James Joyce as he builds his writing strengths and style that will eventually become more apparent in his longer, better knows works, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
    • 3/5
      It says something for this book that as I was re-reading it I kept feeling like I was, for instance, riding home on a Melbourne tram, or sitting at a university coffee shop: yes, I was obsessed with this book in my late teens and early twenties. Voila: the strength of the book, and its weakness.

      In short, Joyce is groping toward stylistic tools that really only come into their own (if I remember correctly) in Ulysses--the deep embedding of characters' words in the narrative voice, the intense structuring of a book, and the willingness to vary form). All well and good, and certainly better than the standard 19th century stuff.

      But young-I had no freaking idea that that was going on; what young-I responded to was the ideas, because the Young Man will respond to adolescent thoughts. Probably the only critical problem worth arguing about with this book is how seriously we're meant to take Daedalus's epiphanies (I cheat by using that word). The introduction to my Oxford World's Classics edition tries to avoid taking them too seriously. The book is in the third person, so "a small but significant space opens up between character and narrator... in maintaining this space Joyce avoids reinforcing those old humanist cliches of identity as wholly self-generated, of the individual existing independent of the strictures of history, culture and ideology."

      Well, I disagree.* The book's structure, I think, points its reader to an understanding of Daedalus that is not in the least ironic. He claims that he shall try to "fly by those nets" of "nationality, language, religion," and almost every encounter in the book is tied in to one of those nets. At family gatherings, people discuss nationality and religion; at school, everything is tied in to language. Daedalus sloughs these responsibilities and duties one by one over the course of the novel--the structure, as I said, is very impressive--before finally declaring himself free of them. He "will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church." And so on. He checks out a girl on the beach, and she is hot. Q. E. D.

      In short, Joyce seems to have gone to a little too much trouble if flying by the nets is really a joke. It's not a joke, it's a standard teenage dream of absolute freedom, that I'm sure Joyce never gave up. The most gripping parts of PAYM appeal to our worst illusions.

      But there are less gripping parts that make the book worthwhile. Another interesting structural point, for instance, ties in to Daedalus's somewhat Hegelian description of literature. It begins, he suggests, with the lyric, "the simplest verbal vesture of an instant emotion, a rhythmical cry... He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion." The next stage is the epic, "when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progreses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others." The final form, however, is the dramatic, "life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination."

      PAYM starts with childish words spoken childishly, little more than a cry; as it develops, the artist broods (at exhausting length) on himself, but fails to gain distance from himself or others. According to Daedalus's own understanding, then, PAYM is underdeveloped. At the end of the book, he has only just managed to get to the point where he *might* be able to reproject life from his imagination; up till then, the book, and Daedalus himself, have languished at an inferior artistic stage.

      And this, I think, is why one should read PAYM before Ulysses: it is the underdeveloped, self-obsessed, sincere version of the actual masterpiece. Even according to its own ideas, it isn't very good.





      * And, because I'm feeling verbose, I'll give you two disagreements for the price of one. The problem is not one with 'humanist cliches,' which makes it sound as if the problem is Daedalus not understanding the strictures. The problem is that this understanding of individualism is itself a product of those strictures. I'd argue that (paraphrase of an apocryphal story) individualism would be a good thing, but it's going to take a lot of history before we can get there. Someone needs to cut off my word supply for a while.
    • 4/5
      I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.In its historical context, Portrait of the Artist is groundbreaking. As it reads now, there is a self-interest that becomes a little too much to stomach after awhile. The most powerful moments occur during Stephen Dedalus's formative years as a sensitive youth somewhat set apart from his contemporaries, as illustrated by his defense of Byron's poetry against accusations of blasphemy. His quest for a new aesthetic in his later years feels trite and somewhat self-important by contrast. Obviously, my bias as a 21st century reader is difficult to overcome, but I've read so many solipsistic Künstlerroman in my lifetime that it's hard to be objective. Though, to be fair, almost all of them were after Joyce, so I suppose I would have felt differently had I read this one first.
    • 3/5
      Formally brilliant, this exemplar of modernist prose is also tremendously dark, at times tedious, and at others esoteric.
    • 5/5
      I am usually not a fan of big celebrities reading the classics. They tend to make it about the performance and not the work. Not so with Colin Farrell's brilliant rendition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Farrell's tone is deadpan and understated. His reading makes the work sound as if it were written yesterday. Extremely entertaining and equally sublime.
    • 2/5
      I'm going to admit that I got nothing out of this book. You are immediately thrown into the life of Stephen Dedalus and I really didn't care a bit. It's short, which is a blessing, but is full of long tirades/philosophical discussions of family, country, sex and attraction, and the church. There are moments of pretty writing, but I wasn't at all invested in the character before it was all too dramatic. I've read other books in this vein that I love - like Proust and Woolf and the part of Dorothy Richardson that I've read so far - but this I just couldn't connect with. Does not make me look forward to Ulysses, which I've always meant to read some day.
    • 4/5
      Despite having been a professor of literature, I haven't read much by James Joyce. I loved his story collection, Dubliners, but I've never tackled what are considered his great novels--and I'm not really sure that I want to. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a short novel that showcases Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style in an accessible way. It's the story of his later hero, Stephen Daedalus, from childhood through his university years. I would agree with those who say that it's tied to a particular time and place (Ireland in the early 20th century); note, for example, Stephen's idolization of Parnell and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church. Yet many of the struggles young Stephen goes through, such as breaking out from under his parents' wings and finding his own place in the world, are still prevalent for the youth of today. There's a lot of humor in the novel that helps it to rise above the usual coming of age story.I listened to the book on audio, wonderfully read by Colin Farrell, an actor of whom I'm not usually fond. One rather funny note: When I originally downloaded the book, the cover title appears as 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman"! I see that someone must have reported the error and a correction has been made. I usually delete books once I've read them, but this one will stay on my iTunes for the novelty factor.
    • 3/5
      I have never read James Joyce before and I had heard that A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man is considered to be his most accessible work so I decided this was where I would start with this author. In this book we follow the early years of Irishman Stephen Dedalus, starting from his boyhood and taking us through to the end of his university years. It is apparent immediately that James Joyce is a master wordsmith. His writing paints vivid pictures but I disagree with those who call this book timeless. I felt it was quite dated and specific to it’s time and place. It is a barely concealed autobiographical piece and takes the main character through his adolescence while he searches for his own identity. His views on family, religion and the very essence of being Irish clearly date this piece as early 20th century writing. Joyce is brilliant but I struggled through this short and quite readable book so I am not reassured that I will appreciate his more complex works and I expect they will be pushed to the bottom of the 1,001 pile.
    • 3/5
      In Portrait, James Joyce dramatises incidents and periods from his own childhood and adolescence, and I don’t really know what to feel about this book. Parts of this were brilliant: the writing, the rhythm, the selection of words and images. This book is excellent at expressing the unscratchable ache that is growing pains: the death of a child’s naïve belief in Justice when unfair punishment is handed out; the intensity of adolescent frustrations, both sexual and religious; and the search for fundamental meaning in life. On the other hand, well, there were numerous occasions where I felt like rolling my eyes at the text, because I’ve read too many books about sensitive, intelligent, precious little main characters who struggle mightily against their schoolboy tormentors and an understimulating environment. I know that I can’t really hold that against this book -- the century of intervening literature that makes this kind of story feel so trite is not this book’s fault. But still: the story feels so trite in many places.This book left me feeling very ambiguous. For example: a very large section of this book is taken up by a series of fire-and-brimstone sermons delivered by a Jesuit hell-bent on frightening children into good old Catholic obedience through extensive and lascivious descriptions of torture. I can appreciate what Joyce was going for here, and it’s well done indeed: I can really taste the hunger for power, the emotional manipulation, the all-encompassing prison that this kind of mentality wants to enforce. But these sermons take up 12% of the text. 12%! That is way, way too long, and spoils the effect. Then there are later bits, where the main character expounds his views on beauty and art which serve as a replacement for his earlier religiosity, and which are intellectually impressive, but they are shoehorned in in the clumsiest of ways. Again, the effect is spoiled.Both of these -- the fire-and-brimstone, and the intellectualizing theories -- overstay their welcome and tip the balance from “Impressive, well done” into “Man, Joyce really loves hearing himself talk”. And self-important smugness is a sin I find hard to forgive. So yeah. Three stars?
    • 3/5
      An autobiographical novel, it is very conventional compared to where he was going for the rest of his life. He chooses his framework characters, the male parts of the Daedalus family, and thyeir relationships to the growing Stephen.
    • 3/5
      (Original Review, 1981-02-16)"April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."How much I love/hate Joyce when I read about him...how could he have denied his mother on her deathbed? That act disturbed me - he did not even kneel when she died.I am not speaking of hypocrisy here just thinking of a young poseur who was thinking of himself above all - as you do at that age - especially if you are the ''favourite'. How much are the writings of Joyce autobiographical? Is the 'real 'Stephen Dedalus - AKA Joyce - a 'self-obsessed arsehole' - and did Joyce realise that about himself during his writing? As regards the Portrait Joyce changed the original title from ‘Stephen Hero’ - why did he do that? When did Stephen stop being a Hero?Read it again recently - skipped loads of 'the sermon because being brought up a Catholic have kind of heard it all before but have never been on a Retreat where apparently, in the olden days, you would receive the hell-fire message in spades. I found it interesting in the book that Stephen had to find an anonymous confessor to his 'sins'. He seemed too proud or ashamed to confess to a priest at the school who may have recognised his voice.I think one of the best things I learned from The Portrait was how much Joyce loved his jovial, irascible Father. The last chapter in The Portrait seems a bit of a 'cop-out' with its diary entries...a bit rushed-but maybe that was all meant.The last entry is particularly poignant (vide quote above)The bits that stick in my mind aside from the obvious passages (Hell Fire Sermon ) are the childhood passages, Dedalus remembering his uncles' tobacco smoke, listening to and trying to make sense of the adults arguing about current affairs as a bystander, the bewilderment of starting a new and strange school and trying to understand and navigate the adult rules and language of the constitution chimed with my own memories of childhood. The child is the father of the man, I think Joyce says we cannot shake off these experiences, they form who we are. You are always going to be an exile from them even if you leave physically and geographically.
    • 4/5
      The rhythm and detail of Joyce is here as he captures the passion, extremism, and narcissism of the adolescent mind.
    • 3/5
      When I first started reading this book I really enjoyed it, I lost myself in the flow of the writing. However, towards the middle my interest was lost, not so due to the heavy prose about sinners & hell, although I did think it was overdone, it was more the long soliloquies about things such as the meaning of beauty or the works of classic writers & philosophers. They just seemed self indulgent & didn't bring anything to the story. What I enjoyed most about it was that its one of my favourite types of story - a coming of age tale. I do prefer more modern versions of this type though, mainly because I like to relate to the character & its hard to do that when there is such a gap in the times. I think this is a book you'd gain more from if you knew about the politics and Irish culture of that time. And a knowledge of religion would have helped too, as I'll readily claim ignorance to the different Christian denominations. Overall, long-winded but good.
    • 5/5
      It's a great novel about all aspects of the Christian life...........................The part where he stops being deathly afraid of sin is actually really necessary. (“Supererogation”). Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to Guardian Angels, Wednesday to saint Joseph, Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to Suffering Jesus, and on Saturday he went to the jazz club with Thomas Merton. It doesn’t mean.... I don’t know. “Father forgive me; it’s been a day since my last confession, and I looked at Eva Cassidy the jazz singer for twenty seconds.”“Father forgive me; it’s been eight months since my last confession, and I’ve been really whoring it up the whole time.” There’s a difference. ...............................Really, by the last part, when he was “disillusioned with church and society”, or whatever, it could very well be, “A Portrait of the Scholastic as a Young Man”. If he was annoyed with the rowdy students, it was because they couldn’t follow all his quotes of Aquinas in Latin. As he was once a rowdy student himself, it’s quite the transformation. And yet he was not weighed down with a sense of sin, but carried with him a certain satisfaction. ...................................The closest any of them come to sinning, if you will, (excluding, for some reason, “I’ll be the death of that fellow one time”), in the end is questioning various doctrines, which is not a sin. It’s only a “nationalist” church which would curse that, and it’s not a nationalist book, or, more to the point, a nationalist *reality*. .... He just doesn’t sound like a cursing cynic to me. [reposted 2/3/18].
    • 3/5
      This is a collection of philosophical arguments and theological sermons framed by the titular artist's school life. All in whole, interesting and introspective in parts, but completely forgettable.
    • 1/5
      All I can say is: Thank goodness that's over!! I'm sure I really didn't understand it, but it doesn't make me even halfway interested in trying to understand it. At least I know what it's about, and I can mark it off the list!1 like
    • 4/5
      A portrait differs from an autobiography in that it is a subjective impression of the character from a certain point of view, and distorted to some degree through the use of a specific style. Whereas biography is more objective.Though the work is predominantly autobiographical in its source material, it is more a self portrait in its presentation, dressed up as a novel on the childhood and young adulthood of "Stephen Daedalus" who later takes a role in Joyce's Ulysses. Two things make this book interesting: the style in which it is written, and the subject matter. Though far more accessible and plainly-written than either Ulysses, or the even more formiddable Finnegan's wake, there are embryonic hints here of his characteristic style that would develop more fully in his later works.Joyce had an atypical childhood both from the modern viewpoint, and to a lesser degree for his time. He was initially educated in a Jesuit college in Ireland, before moving to another one due to his father's financial difficulties.This education seemed to encourage his propensity toward a religious disposition, which he showed for many of his earlier years, before a lapse into temptation and "pleasures of the flesh". Toward the end of the book he goes on to think about aesthetic theory, inspiring discussion with his peers at university. This would be a good introduction to reading Joyce, both because it gives the reader an understanding of Joyce's experiences, and because it is less challenging than his later works.
    • 1/5
      Required reading, college. I have no interest in stream of consciousness writing. It drives me mad.
    • 4/5
      high school required
    • 5/5
      This novel took me three times as long to read as it might have. A third of my time I spent reading it, a third reading about it, and another third lost in daydreaming and memories as time after time Joyce hit something from my experience so squarely on the nose that it sent me reeling.It didn't begin at all well. A title that reads like a subtitle, an opening line about a moocow, a stream-of-consciousness narrative with glimpses of scenes in fits and starts ... I feared the whole novel would be like this, until I understood it was a child's apprehension of the world. Confusion swiftly gave way to respect. James Joyce had a great talent for recapturing not only the events of childhood but also the much more difficult to remember perceptions, how a young boy takes in and processes what he learns about the world. I would never have recalled it quite this way, and yet it echoes with truth. The boy ages and the same truth shines from the page with each passing year and event, as how he perceives and what he perceives alter with time. He discovers the world is not black-and-white, that not all arguments have tidy resolutions, that the opposite sex is only human too, that religion cannot provide definitive answers, that destiny calls from within. He's still got his blind spots, though: he's stubborn about letting the world in, about taking responsibility for anyone or caring about his roots, and he's far too full of himself and his accumulated learning. But what's an artist without a surfeit of pride?I took the title to be self-referential to Joyce, but it's meant more generically; this is the development of a fictional artist's mind from childhood to self-identity as such, although with biographical elements borrowed from Joyce's own life. Surprisingly accessible (if not so much as "Dubliners"), the only sticking part for me were the big long diatribes about hell and damnation which don't really get examined but pull no punches as an example of what was being knocked into Catholic Irish boys' heads, and maybe still are in some dark corners of the world. I'm bound to deeply admire this book, one I'm stunned by for how well it got inside my head and toured me through episodes from my own life, like a tourist guide who remembers me better than I do.
    • 5/5
      Excellent wording and so well written it is scary.
    • 3/5
      dude, i don't know. it's a classic. maybe listening to it on audiobook right as the semester starts wasn't the best idea.