A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Wuthering Bites Book Club Review at a Glance

What We Said

Our group enjoys classic novels and tries to read them from time to time. We also like to have a clearly-framed plot and several well-developed characters. "Portrait of the Artist" has none of this, and as it turns out, most of our group could not finish the book. It seemed to be full of stream-of-consciousness ramblings that go on and on to nowhere. We did not grasp his philosophy or rebellion against the established norm. Maybe we should have complemented our reading with some literary criticism about James Joyce. Instead we had a good discussion on Irish Catholicism. Therefore not all was lost in our attempt at James Joyce.
-Sue

Katy Ellis, 9/17/2003    C+
I read this book while in Galway, Ireland--the home town of James Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle--and so found myself liking the book for the wrong reasons. I liked it because I could relate to the landscape (of Dublin and Ireland in general) and because the turns of phrase were being used by the Irish folks around me at the time. Overall, however, I wasn't thrilled with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because it seemed too stream of consciousness, too hard to draw out major themes that I could apply to life. Other than enjoying the desciption and voice of the early parts of the book which come from a child's perspective I honestly couldn't connect with much of this novel.
Inspired food accompaniment:   A thick pint of Guiness: a meal in itself.
Other suggested books/authors:    Any poetry by Seamus Heaney, but especially the collection of poems called "Station Island."

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James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin in 1882. He attended Belvedere College, a Jesuit school, from 1893 to 1898 and graduated from University College, Dublin in 1902. Freeing himself from the strictures of religion, family, and his homeland, Joyce fled Ireland in 1904 accompanied by Nora Barnacle, a young Galway woman he'd met earlier that year. They lived in such European cities as Pola, Trieste, and Rome, together with their two children, Giorgio and Lucia, while Joyce supported them by teaching English and taking clerical jobs. Drawing on his experiences and childhood in Ireland, Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. The family settled in Zurich in 1915, and relocated to Paris in 1920. There, Joyce continued his fascination with dissolving the boundaries between life and literature in his masterwork, Ulysses, published in 1922 on his fortieth birthday. In 1923, Joyce began to compose his "Work in Progress." Seventeen years in the making, the book was published as Finnegans Wake in 1939. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.

• Chamber Music (poems), 1907
• The Dubliners, 1914
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916
• Exiles (play), 1919
• Ulysses, 1922
• Poems Pennyeach (poems), 1927
• Finnegans Wake, 1939
• Stephen Hero, 1944
• Giacomo Joyce, 1968

From the Publisher

James Joyce's first and most widely read novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the story of Stephen Dedalus, a young man struggling to decide between a religious vocation and an artistic one. The aftermath of the struggle that is so poignantly and unflinchingly recorded forms a large part of the story of Joyce's masterwork, Ulysses, in which Stephen reappears as a main character.
In A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce renounces an episodic framework in favor of a group of scenes which radiate backward and forward. As such, the book more closely resembles a random series of portraits than a chronological narrative. Using his own childhood and adolescence as the basic theme of the story, Joyce attempts to recreate the past by embracing it.