A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ratings189
Average rating3.6
It all came together as I finished it in a way I cannot describe more than saying it occurred super-textually, like a wave that cascaded backwards, justifying every word Joyce wrote.
This novel by Jame Joyce is considered to be the author's autobiographical work, focusing on his childhood and adolescent years in Ireland. In these formative years, the protagonist (Stephen Dedalus) undergoes different phases of self-analysis.
I really tried to like this book but it is just dreadfully boring to read. While I appreciated certain part of the book, especially the omnipresent political undertone but overall it is needlessly tedious.
I was vibing with the free indirect speech early on, but as Stephen's sense of self importance grew, my interest waned. The uncritical portrayal of this adolescent self-aggrandisement is no doubt realistic, but I'm not sure I could take another page of his lectures on esthetics. I also felt that the same effect with regards to religion could have been achieved without dedicating half the novel to sermons.
3,5* The language is beautiful, I kind of liked the message, I just am not the target audience as the religious themes and moralising irked me. Maybe when I'm not bleeding stress because of uni finals I'll enjoy this more
[Just trying to mantain my habit to write in English around here. This review is more a writing exercise for my own sake than anything else. Here I go!]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, despite being among the first modernist works, is certainly a paragon of the literature of its era.
We can see here not only some of the themes presented in the early Joyce works, namely Dubliners, but also what would become the main traits of the Joycean prose, later developed in Ulysses and transcended by Finnegans Wake. From that point of view, it seems to me that A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man is itself a formative work in which Joyce, in pair with his literary counterpart, is also trying to find his own voice. This is more evident when we take a look at the style that characterizes the work. On the one hand, Joyce uses a lot of free indirect speech and, in that sense, the style differs partially from the stream of conscioussness expressed through interior monologues of Ulysses and the excentric prose of Finnegans Wake, that I'm still gathering the courage to conquer; on the other hand, the free indirect speech written by Joyce, so usual in the work of others, distnguishes itself by its complexity, reflecting directly the developement of the character and prefiguring somethat the hidden figure of an “arranger”.
Despite of embrionary in comparisson, the prose in A Portrait still has the very interesting dialogue between form and content that would characterize Joyce's later work. Joyce is, as always, so meticulous in the construction of its prose that the narrative shines in whatever way that he decides to develope it. Even the “less intricate prose”, written in favour of the affirmation of its content, is not even close of something meaningless in his hands - in other words, it remains both aesthetically pleasing and thematically significant.
I hate to admit it, but I felt a very personnal connection with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - a book that is almost as perverse in its awareness of the protagonist's faults as it is reluctant to explicitly judge him. I couldn't help but feel Joyce mocking my professional/intellectual ambitions and pretentiousness thoughout the book and I sincerly loved and hated to see some of my contradictions so explicitly exposed.
Unfortunately, I couldn't compare it with its contemporaries (1910-1920) because... well, I haven't read them yet. I will almost certainly revisit A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the future to try to grasp what I wasn't able to in my first reading. Absolutely amazing!
My relationship with this book is a private one, it can't produce a worthwhile review, thus I will simply reference the following excerpt:
To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.
The story is quite good. But I expected to be more catchy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it.
Way above my pay grade but it seems I somehow read this in college. The refresher was illuminating. Not an easy read but if you're interested in XX Century English language lit a necessary one.
The dreariest, most guilt-ridden, wordy coming of age story ever.
I read this for the 2018 Book Riot challenge. The task was to read an assigned book that I either hated or didn't finish. I both hated and did not finish it in high school. Now I can say I finished it.
There is a germ of things and thoughts that determines flight/fall of one's being ... If Hamlet had it on his sleeve, albeit disinclinedly, then Stephen has it in his shadows, which threaten himself to pass by from a mere distance.
The germ here very much breathes in the ‘vagueness of his wonder', as Stephen would call it; in the stillness of the stare he would elicit when the most important moments of his being's life are discussed or dished out by others but not himself. In this sense of wonderment, which would easily eventually be seen as bewilderment of sorts, Stephen lets the germ to grow.
The style of Joyce's writing here determines quick and fast the slow dropping of words from a certain order, one by one, and persist longer; so that words, as they re-appear, in the parallel tributary of more words and more thoughts, appear in the crystal form of the piece.
Nonetheless for Joyce, the meaning of the tale does not lie in explicating the essential, but it hovers around in the symbolism of the immanent.
Is ‘vagueness' then the point of departure through which Stephen initiates himself in the world; “Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry?” Is it the very “dross of earth” that eventually evokes a splitting stinging pain of ‘conscience'. And isn't it in the quagmire of a peculiar setting which Stephen claims to reject in imbibing that his disinterested “soul is born”?
If there is a so called epiphanic moment for the reader of Stephen's account, it certainly gets enmeshed within the stylistic-structural ‘fall' and ‘flight' the protagonist's henceforth constitution of a ‘soul' whose aesthetic consciousness unfolds in the saudadic manifestation of memory enabling him to render art:
“And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?”
The shadowy vagueness and the disinterested disposition of the son or the student begins to take up something on his own – ‘paper' beckons the ‘pencil' beckons the words that are winged by memories that Stephen endears his life with.
‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' is the kind of a book which attempts to resist valuation; what could be termed as epiphanic moments of being, may not readily match the reader's impulse, for the latter would have to partake in it as an experience for its own accord.
Need to think, re-read, and go over this a bunch before reviewing(and write a paper), but I thought it was fantastic. Why are Irish writers so good?
“Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?”
Look, I realize anyone who gives James Joyce two stars for anything is kind of an asshole. My feeling on having read this (on plane rides to and from my little brother's college graduation–fatal mistake?) is not that it's objectively just okay, but that I probably need a college-level English lit class to appreciate it. Literature that makes me work as a reader is just sooooo not my scene right now, and I get that that's my failing, not Joyce's. In other news, I stole half my little brother's books from his “Humanistic and Existential Psychology” seminar, and am currently tearing through Viktor Frankl's “Man's Search for Meaning” (review forthcoming). I'll definitely credit Joyce with some of my current fervor for anything that attempts to tackle the field of inquiry of what it means to be human.
Portrait of the Artist was good; good at putting me to sleep! Actually that's only partially true. The beginning, when Daedalus was a child just wasn't particularly compelling to me to me. My long-time suspicion that I'm not a fan of coming-of-age books (Bildungsroman's according to Wikipedia) was confirmed as I read in detail of incidents on the playground and discussions between 10 year old's. I slept through my bus stop during one such discussion. I ended up having to take another bus (the 44) and got home 30 minutes late, but I digress.
As Stephen grew older, the book became more interesting. Quite a bit of the plot is centered around his feelings (and actions) in regard to truth, religion and women. The writing, as I fully expected from an author as celebrated as Joyce, is great. There are some interesting philosophical dialogs on art and beauty. Stephen's internal dialogs also often sounded familiar. Thoughts on guilt. On change. On family, etc.
Really though, it's just not my kind of book. It's too internal, too dreary and depressing. I occasionally I enjoy that in a book, but this time I don't feel like I am coming away with any major insights into human nature. I'm glad I read it, but mostly just because now I know.
This is the semi-autobiographical story of a young man in Dublin as he gradually comes to relinquish the bonds of family, town, and church and comes to trust his own thoughts and beliefs.
Many consider this book to be one of the best books ever written.