The hordes of avid followers of this blog know that on each June 16, in honor of Bloomsday, I devote a post to James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904. That's the day Joyce went on his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. She seems to have permitted him considerable liberties and it meant enough to him to be commemorated in what some consider the finest novel written in the English language.
Maybe it is, but of the works of Joyce known to me the most enjoyable is "The Dead," the long story that brings his collection Dubliners to a close. There is a party on a winter evening to honor two elderly ladies, the maiden aunts of one Gabriel Conroy. The guests and the food and talk are described with Dickensian thoroughness, page after page, and finally the guests, including Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, head home in the dark. We've gotten to know something about Gabriel. He's educated, conservative, nearly middle-aged, a decent man but timid and conventional. Gretta, whose beauty has begun to fade, was once courted by a sickly man who caught his death serenading her on an inclement night. That is one thing we learn. Another thing we learn is that Gabriel thinks it very important to wear galoshes in wet weather. Alone with his wife after the party, he watches out the window as the snow falls and has a kind of muted vision of mediocrity and insignificance--within and without. The end.
I've done the story the same justice as the teaser, "Danish prince returns home on school vacation and finds his father murdered and his mother already remarried to his uncle." If you are at all inclined, read "The Dead." If you like it, read all of Dubliners straight through: it's a great book, and your prize will be that at the end you'll get to read "The Dead" again.
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