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Title: James Joyce: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives) by Edna O'Brien ISBN: 0-670-88230-5 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.31 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A perceptive account of a monster of a writer
Comment: Irish writer Edna O'Brien's brief (179 page) biography of James Joyce was aimed at people like me who are curious about Joyce's life, but not curious enough to undertake Richard Ellman's definitive but massive biography. O'Brien venerates Joyce's writing, but recognizes the high cost to most everyone who had any contact with Joyce.
Although she argues (without convincing me) that Joyce was not a misogynist, she does not attempt to defend him from being viewed as a monster; instead, she answers her question "Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do."
O'Brien provides interesting responses to Joyce's life and lifework. Hard-core Joyceans will already have processed Ellman's biography--regarded by some as the best biography of any writer ever written. The somewhat curious have a fine guide in O'Brien. Her book is generally readable, and I am inclined to trust her sense (as a novelist, as an Irish novelist) of what in Joyce's fiction is autobiographical.
The volume is an excellent match of biographer and subject, like Edmund White's biographical meditation on Marcel Proust that began the series of Penguin Brief Lives, a welcome antidote to the mountains of details that make so many biographies daunting.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Joycean Primer
Comment: As is almost consistently the case, the series of biographies produced under the collection of Penguin Lives has once again succeeded in providing a palatable doorway through which the hungry but busy reader can find the substance of an important if historically tough writer or artist. Edna O'Brien, herself an accomplished writer, here provides us with a fellow Irishman's view of the incredibly important writer James Joyce. Though most of us have at least read his 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and have seen plays and film adaptations of some of his other works, few of us feel we understand this complexly brilliant mind enough to say that approaching 'Ulysses' or 'Finnegan's Wake' would be easy reading. O'Brien gives us not only the chronology of Joyce's life, she also picks up on individual instances in his youth and manhood that served as fodder for his detailed novels of his Irish heritage. The writing is brisk, acerbic, challenging, and ultimately rewardingly educational. Finish this brief history and you most probably will run to the book shelf for another go at the master!
Rating: 5
Summary: a great writer on a great writer
Comment: Biographies in this series are the perfect fun size. Light, but long enough to have a lot of real stuff in them, more than a mere introduction.
The very first sentence of this book invites you into Joyce with an imitation of his writing style, & after that Edna O'Brien shares generously & mellifluously her great understanding of the man, his life, & his work, drawing on scholarly commentary of his books & from the journals & letters of him & the people around him so that you know how they all felt about his life & their lives in themselves & for the purposes of this biography in relation to him. It's so well-written & so interesting -- what a life he had, crazy as he was, that -- I could hardly put it down. Edna O'Brien's great interest in him comes across truly.
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Title: Marcel Proust (Penguin Lives) by Edmund White ISBN: 0670880574 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Charles Dickens: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives Series) by Jane Smiley ISBN: 0670030775 Publisher: Harry N. Abrams Pub. Date: 09 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Virginia Woolf (Penguin Lives Biographies) by Nigel Nicolson ISBN: 0670894435 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Dante (Penguin Lives) by R. W. B. Lewis ISBN: 0670899097 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 25 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Leonardo Da Vinci (Penguin Lives) by Sherwin B. Nuland ISBN: 0670893919 Publisher: Viking Penguin Inc Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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