James Joyce
Written by Edna O'Brien
Narrated by Donada Peters
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
One of Ireland's best current novelists provides a thumbnail sketch of Ireland's greatest writer. A passionate and sensuous portrait, James Joyce is a return to the land of politics, history, saints, and scholars that shaped the creator of the twentieth century's groundbreaking novel Ulysses. O'Brien traces Joyce's early days as a rambunctious young Jesuit student; his falling in love with a tall, red-haired Galway girl named Nora Barnacle on Bloomsday; and his exile to Trieste where he found success, love, and ultimately, despair. Joyce's raucous life as well as his thoughtful commentary on his major writings are presented succinctly and masterfully for any Joyce lover to enjoy. O'Brien captures with simplicity the brilliance and complexity of this great master.
"It is swift, moving and brimming with the author's enthusiasms and her well-earned affection for a difficult colleague." -Los Angeles Times Book Review
Edna O'Brien
In more than twenty books, Edna O'Brien has charted the emotional and psychic landscape of her native Ireland; often criticized in her own country for her outspoken stance, she has forged a universal audience. Awards and prizes include the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, Writers' Guild of Great Britain, Premier Cavour (Italian), American National Arts Gold Medal, and Ulysses Medal 2006.
More audiobooks from Edna O'brien
Saints and Sinners Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Girl: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Falling In Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5HiBrow: World Book Night 2012 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to James Joyce
Related audiobooks
Ulysses: The Classic Tale Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUlysses Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Life of Samuel Johnson Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Death of the Lion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Altar of the Dead: A spiritual and philosophical fable about life, death and love. Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Little Dorrit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Good Place Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our School (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOur Mutual Friend - Book the Fourth: A Turning (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBound for the Great Salt Lake (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Call of the Wild Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGeorge MacDonald: A Biography of Scotland's Beloved Storyteller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not a Tame Lion: The Life, Teachings, and Legacy of C.S. Lewis Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Poetry of W B Yeats Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOur Mutual Friend - Book the First: The Cup and the Lip (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe King of the Golden River Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of All Power Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Notes: Full Cast Drama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Read My Heart: A Love Story in England's Age of Revolution Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Once a Grand Duchess: Xenia, Sister of Nicolas II Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Only a Ghost Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMudlark River: Down the Thames with a Victorian Map Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5To the Lighthouse - Unabridged Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReuben Sachs: A Sketch Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
European History For You
Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The King's Assassin: The Secret Plot to Murder King James I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Teutonic Knights: A Military History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of American Cemeteries Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The War on the West Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Story We Carry in Our Bones: Irish History for Americans Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Reformation: A History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Templars: The History and the Myth: From Solomon's Temple to the Freemasons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Iron, Fire and Ice: The Real History that Inspired Game of Thrones Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: with Pearl and Sir Orfeo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 – 1066 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for James Joyce
55 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5James Joyce was an author who could easily have been classified as mad or brilliant or perhaps both. Edna O'Brien gives us a glimpse into James Joyce's unconventional life in her novel, James Joyce: A Life. I wanted to read this book because James Joyce is on my list of authors whose books I need to read. I've had Dubliners sitting on my shelf unread for the longest time. However I have managed to read a few of his works so I didn't feel totally unprepared. Edna O'Brien touches on various points in Joyce's life from birth to death. From Joyce's dysfunctional family life to his volatile marriage to his wife, Nora. O'Brien includes many interesting facts about Joyce's rise to fame. His peculiar tendencies and his prideful nature.I think if I had read more of Joyce's novels before hand it would have helped me to decipher and make the character connections even more so. O'Brien did a fairly good job in trying to correlate the influences in Joyce's life to the characters in his novels. This is also a short biography so it doesn't go into great detail about Joyce's life. However this is a great introduction to James Joyce. Overall this is a good read. It's an insightful look into one of literature's treasures. This biography is really enjoyable and I'm so glad that I read it. Now it's time to dust Dubliners off the shelf.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An odd experience this: in college, I apparently loved Joyce. I read his works, I read Ellmann's biography, I thought Joyce was right about more or less everything.
Here I am, less than 15 years later, reading O'Brien's short life in anticipation of re-reading Joyce's work (other than the Wake), and I've come to almost exactly the opposite conclusion: that Joyce is wrong about more or less everything: an awful human being who hid behind tiresome romantic cliches about Truth and Beauty, a man whose prodigious linguistic talents were wasted on puerile and boring topics and ideas, writing as he did at great length about his own non-existent victimization and the objects he'd fondled at one time or other--and then justifying it all with some half-arsed discussion of the inner spiritual essence of whatever.
And this book makes those feeling worse, simply because O'Brien allows those cliches and puerilities to stand as marks of Genius and Independence. She believes that "writers have to be such monsters in order to create," which is so plainly false that it's hard to know what she's talking about.
On the upside, it's a short read, and fairly easy; O'Brien slips in the odd Joyceism, but they're ignorable. The real problem, as with anyone who self-consciously follows Joyce, is that she writes sentences, not paragraphs. That's all well and good if you want to quote a hagiographical sentiment down the pub, but not great if you want to read, understand, or, heaven forfend, criticize what you're reading.
More concretely, there's almost nothing in her about PAYM, and I have no idea why. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Edna O'Brien does a good job of giving an introduction to Joyce (the complicated author). Joyce was a genius beyond his period or our period of understanding. The genius probably frustrated the author. The book shares the man, who was profound and challenging to the modern man. We love Joyce even when he might make us mad. He was a critical author who's writing was a paragon of free verse and feeling of home. Edna O'Brien shows us why Joyce's writing is worth the time and effort to make understanding out of circuitousness paths.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5James Joyce, the phenomenal Irish writer, was born in 1882 and died in 1941 at age 59, probably a great accomplishment considering the amount he drank in his lifetime. Joyce lived mostly in poverty, partly because of the impoverishment of the family in which he grew up, and partly due to his own alcoholism and extravagance. As an adult, there were many times when he could only pay rent by the day. His life partner and later wife Nora Barnacle would sit in a café or park all day holding their first child, waiting to hear where they could sleep. (And yet O’Brien characterizes Barnacle as morose and mopey and castigates her for “weakening [Joyce’s] natural cheerfulness.”) Once Nora delivered a letter to Joyce at his workplace complaining about their circumstances and he responded by blowing his nose in it. [Why she didn’t leave him seems like a very interesting topic to me, but O’Brien did not address it, perhaps because her sympathies are unquestionably with Joyce.]Joyce borrowed incessantly from everyone he could, alternately begging, flattering, and abusing would-be lenders. Somehow, he always found people willing to let him take advantage of them. Joyce, O’Brien observes in understatement, “loathed responsibility.” Later in life, Joyce found a patron, a Miss Weaver, who loaned him close to a million dollars in today’s money. O’Brien writes approvingly that Miss Weaver never asked for anything in return, whereas she seems rather disgusted that Sylvia Beach (of the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company) who helped Joyce get published “wanted a share in the glory…”Joyce’s romantic relationship with Nora began on June 16, 1904, and the date of their first liaison is now celebrated around the world as Bloomsday, as it is also the date Joyce used for his circadian masterpiece featuring Leopold Bloom, Ulysses.Of Ulysses O’Brien writes: "Language is the hero and heroine, language in constant fluxion and with a dazzling virtuosity. All the given notion [sic] about story, character, plot, and human polarizings are capsized. By comparison, most other works of fiction are pusillanimous.""He said he had all the words, it was simply a question of putting them in the right order. He would pore over each word not only for its rhythm, its sense, its aptness, its beauty, its vulgarity, its myriad associativeness, but sometimes for its prophetic core. Every word, like every image, was up for investigation. Even then he was dissatisfied. He wanted a language above all languages, he refused to be enclosed in any tradition. He wanted to be God.""He would astound his readers. he would bring them to a pitch of consciousness where they had not gone before. Not for him the 'experimentation' of Marcel Proust, of whom he said: 'Analytic still life. Reader knows end of sentence before him.' He would breach unknown frontiers."O’Brien is merciless with detractors of Ulysses. As she points out, it took Joyce “seven years of unbroken labor, twenty thousand hours of work, havoc to brain and body, nerves, agitation, fainting fits, [and] numerous eye complaints ….” There is certainly no question that Joyce put a great deal of work into his book, but I don’t think his sufferings in that regard automatically disqualify any criticisms. However, O’Brien's sensitivity pales next to Joyce's, who not only craved flattery and appreciation, but never forgot an insult, penning the offending persons into his books as unflattering characters. O’Brien also talks a bit about Finnegans Wake, suggesting correctly that “If Ulysses had angered people, this new work would send them into paroxysms” with each reader needing “to make a daring leap to construe meaning” from the text. In writing this book, O’Brien said of Joyce that “he was determined to break the barrier between conscious and unconscious, to do in waking life what others do in sleep.” But when O’Brien calls one of the characters in the book “the most accessible … ever conceived by Joyce” I believe that would be a stretch. It is difficult to find people who are able to read it, much less consider the characters “accessible.” Nevertheless, even to go through and pick out understandable pieces from the text is to become quickly astounded and appreciative of Joyce’s genius. As O’Brien writes:"His imagination was meteoric, his mind ceaseless in the accruing of knowledge, words crackling in his head, images crowding in on him ‘like the shades at the entrance to the underworld.’ What he wanted to do was wrest the secret from life and that could only be done through language because, as he said, the history of people is the history of language.”He well might have wrested the secret of life and attempted to share it with the rest of us in Finnegan's Wake, but not many readers have managed to figure out what he discovered, though not for lack of trying.Discussion: The author is clearly a fan of Joyce (in Joycian style she calls him “funnominal”), and as bad as he sounds even from the reporting of a sympathizer, she doesn’t seem to have much negative to say about him, nor much supportive to say about the people who gave their lives, their livelihoods, and their happiness to Joyce for little in return. She even maintains that “monstrous” behavior is necessary for genius; unfortunately, those whose lives Joyce ruined seemed to have felt the same way. [And as horrible as Joyce was to the women in his life, we can at least say that he was just as horrible to the men.] She also seems willing to exonerate Joyce’s bad behavior because of his upbringing in straitened and hideous circumstances. And indeed, the family lived on tea, fried bread, and drippings, while Joyce’s father drank his pension and his mother was usually pregnant. To O’Brien, Joyce’s brilliance also “excuses” his incredible arrogance: “Who can blame him if in that spate of high-hearted youth and virtuosity he likened himself to Parnell, Hamlet, Dante, Byron, Lucifer and Jesus Christ?”From O’Brien’s account one can see clearly that Joyce was a very troubled man, as well as a very ingenious one. But is one really necessary for the other?There is no index, which is unfortunate; no reference for quotes; and no indication of when a poetic or punful remark is by Joyce or by O’Brien. Nevertheless, this is an eminently readable little biography, and not without its own poetic style.Evaluation: Even if you have read other biographies of Joyce, this is a very literate and entertaining, but not uncontroversial, addition to the oeuvre.