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100 Books Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I once got into a heated argument with a co-worker over James Joyce. (I miss having a co-worker who can get heated over literature.) It was silly, but the argument began when he said he believed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's most accessible work. I argued on the side of Dubliners. What I never told him was that I hadn't even read Portrait. I had, however, started and given up around page ten many, many times. I blame the first sentence. "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…" It's the last sentence you would expect to open a book of such stature. That sentence gets into your brain, and it tries to work out relevance or meaning and soon you either have an aneurysm or you put the book down. But this time I had to read it. It was assigned on this list. So god damn it, I would hold my nose and plow through the moocows and the crows eating the eyes of boys who won't apologize and it would all make sense. Most of it at least. That's the thing about Joyce. Every time you read it, there's this whole other angle, this other room of things going on that you missed. And you know when you're reading it that you're going to have to read it again in a year or two. But it doesn't bother you because as you change, so does the book. I have read Dubliners half a dozen times - a few stories I've read many more than that - and I know that the next time the desire hits, I'll love it for completely different reasons. And really, no one writes lust like Joyce. It's not flowery and romantic and swelling like in some novels. It's dirty and sticky. It makes your skin crawl while also making your heart quicken. "He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration…It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal." Everyone fears James Joyce because they know Ulysses is always looming in the background. There's no need to fret. Portrait of the Artist is a more accessible book, something that won't cause back pain if you lug it around with you. Just read Dubliners first.  |
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