Dubliners

There are many books on my book shelf that I have not read. Some I bought. Some I got as gifts over the years. Some are extremely desirable gifts. Some are more like dumping by booksellers who couldn't sell something (in fact I want to relay dump them on some unsuspecting wannabe reader). 

As I confessed somewhere, I have not been reading a lot in the last 30 years or so and quite a few of these unread books have piled up crowding my shelf. Every time I look at any one such title I feel guilty about it, particularly if it is a book that I really want to read. The Dubliners was top of the list of such unread books. 

I think it's there for more than 30 years now. Aisling gave it to me as a gift, I can't remember when. Possibly when I was in Mongar. I had read only Araby as part of my syllabus in college. I quite liked the story back then. But somehow when the book came I never quite got round to reading all the stories. So in lockdown I picked it up and made a mental resolve to read it, come what may. I am happy to say I have now finished reading it. 

How did I like it? Well confession again. I had to struggle through the book. First of all, these are not really stories. Nothing much happens in most of them. There are certain characters that react in a certain way to one another. It's a different style. Totally different. 

Also, to appreciate the stories you need to know about Dublin, the Irish people, classical music, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism (is there such a word?) and also the Irish political scene of the 1930s. This particular edition has copious notes to make the context clear to readers like me. But if you have to refer to some 3 notes for each average page and they are at the end of the book then it becomes a very very slow process and the flow of reading is interrupted. So barring very few I did not refer to the notes. 

So I had to struggle through the book. The language is beautiful. I could identify certain scenes with the Calcutta of my childhood that filled my mind with joy but those moments were very few and far between. My mind was drifting away totally to something else from time to time. If I stopped reading for a while it would take me a long time to find out where exactly I had stopped. Boring is the right word perhaps but I am a little hesitant to use it because James Joyce is a big name in literature.