The 3 best books by James Joyce

It often happens that the heterogeneity of the work is one of the virtues of geniuses. And yet, there comes a day when you finish one of them, such that Michelangelo exhorting that famous: Speak!, intended for his David and it seems that everything before and what is to come, in its variety, potentiality and great value, suddenly lose its value.

Something like this must have happened to the heterogeneous James Joyce when he finished his Ulysses ..., despite the fact that the first publication intentions were not at all flattering, the English censorship confronted its ethical filters of the time to this great work. Paris had to be the city that gave birth to the complete work back in 1922.

Ulysses aside (although it is a lot to put aside), the work of James Joyce oozes richness, creativity and humanity in many of his multiple compositions. Justice is making a selection so that, at least, Ulysses shares the podium with two other good books by the Irish genius ... because if it was already a lot that the Irish homeland had to Oscar Wilde, this new universal author came to take over from what was a splendid century (between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth) of letters for this land of castles, myths and legends, of exuberance in front of the sea and of intrepid islanders.

3 Recommended Novels By James Joyce

Ulises

The epic classic narratives awaken, in parallel to their exalting intention, the sarcasm of everyday life. «The classic heroes They have gone for a walk in the Callejón del Gato », as Valle-Inclán would say. The most successful story about the paradox of living between a rock and a hard place, the space between dreams and frustrations.

Summary: Ulysses is the story of a day in the life of 3 characters Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the young Stephen Dedalus. A day trip, a reverse Odyssey, in which topically Homeric themes are reversed and subverted through a decidedly anti-heroic group whose tragedy borders on comedy.

A parodic account of the epic of the human condition and of Dublin and its good manners whose structure, overwhelmingly avant-garde, warns at all times of its difficulty and demands the utmost dedication. Ulises It is a high-sounding, vulgar and scholarly book where there are some that offers a different, strange, occasionally annoying and undoubtedly exceptional literature.

Portrait of teenage artist

With undeniable reminiscences to Dorian Gray portrait, by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce brings the idea to his field to make it much more personal.

In this case, the portrait captures his perception of what his youth was like, what he was like, what his ideals and motivations were until that very moment when he sat down to write this book. Summary: Novel with a strong autobiographical charge, published periodically between 1914 and 1915 and finally as a book in 1916.

The protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego, recounts episodes of his life through random evocations of his thought that lead him to come across again and again with Catholicism, sin, sacrifice, penance and the socially adequate.

Joyce's work of atonement and personal exorcism is also the definitive consolidation in the development of a character, Stephen Dedalus, fundamental in Ulysses.

Portrait of the young artist

Finnegans Wake

For every reader who ends up worshiping Joyce after reading the novel Ulysses, for anyone who borders on the fetishist and who seeks the rarity, the way to approach the author spiritually, there is a different work, written perhaps from the subconscious reached in a alcohol delirium.

The truth of drunkards should be a debt to be paid by every writer, to end up vomiting all that was left in the inkwell, the intentions never made explicit ...

Summary: Finnegans Wake, a story of drowsiness, drunkenness, dreamlike and alcoholic imagination, is not a book written in a language. Nominally, yes, it is written in English, but it is pure circumstance.

Behind English there is something else, a poetic alteration, deliberate, sometimes malicious, that turns English into the shell of the language of dreams. An unremarkable relationship of polysemies, hidden meanings, unpredictable twists, subconscious symbolisms and random events that, according to Joyce himself, would have occupied academics for more than 100 years.

The work, technically untranslatable, has been the subject of some attempts at a Castilian version. The Lumen edition is the last of them with the largest amount of text rendered into the language of Cervantes.

Finnegans Wake

Other interesting books by James Joyce

The dead

Joyce also extends his shadow towards the short narrative. And on this occasion he brings us closer to a different Christmas, with the same icy reach of Andersen's girl with matches but more focused on that transformation of joy into the impossible celebration when those with whom he most likes to toast are no longer there...

The Christmas evening at the Morkan ladies' house is the annual event par excellence. The home is filled with laughter, music and dancing to the great enjoyment of the guests and their hostesses. But also of the quiet silence of those who are no longer there. The memory of those who left us will lead the characters to travel long-forgotten paths.

The reader, by the hand of Gabriel Conroy, lost in the reflection of the white Dublin night, will attend an epiphany, now immortal in the annals of literature, which anticipates the innovative techniques used by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

The Dead, Joyce
5/5 - (7 votes)

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