Ms. Hen reviews Dubliners

Dubliners

James Joyce

Penguin

1914

Ms. Hen had read DUBLINERS many years ago, but she decided to read it again, because she wanted to read a book on her phone while she was working, and she thought short stories would work well for this scheme, that way, she would not forget what happened in the book since she only works one day a week. She does not think it’s right to read a book while she is at work, because it would appear as if she is not working. But everyone always looks at their phones, so she has no problem reading on her Kindle App. She prefers hardcopy books, but we can’t always have what we want, as this new era has taught us.

Ms. Hen was reminded of how charming and realistic all of these stories are. A lot of them seem to Ms. Hen as if they are about characters who are looking at another life different from their own life, and wondering what it would be like to be somewhere or someone else. In the story “An Encounter,” two schoolboys skip school and try to cause trouble, but a man disturbs them by speaking of beautiful young girls, and they run off. In “A Painful Case,” an older man who lives alone befriends a woman who is married, but then breaks off with her, and it shocked was she dies suddenly. He had a brief time of happiness when he knew the woman, but feels worse when he learns of how she died. “A Mother” is about a young girl who has an overbearing mother who demands that her daughter be paid for her accompaniment on the piano at a concert. Her mother thinks that it’s important that her daughter be paid because it is in a contract. All these stories are about people looking at other’s lives and yearning for change, but it most likely will never come.

These stories have a comfortable air to Ms. Hen; she has read them before, but when she read it this time, it was almost like she had lived them before, and they are about a world in which the characters believe will always be the same, and cannot change because if it did, it would be as if everything turned upside down.

When Ms. Hen read “The Dead," she had the odd feeling of familiarity, like she had been in the room where the Christmas party took place before. She thinks that this is an excellent example of how to write a party scene, and Ms. Hen can learn a lot from it. (She has written some party scenes recently, and they’re difficult to pull off.) Every character is accounted for and the scene moves from one end to the other and we can see what’s happening with everyone piece by piece. “The Dead” is a sad story, and one that can touch a lot of people, because there are ghosts who haunt them, who they carry around and never tell anyone until it comes out if a burst like Greta when she tells her husband the story of her youthful love and his tragic death.

Ms. Hen thinks everyone should read DUBLINERS, not just because it is a classic, but because it’s about people who lived in a era that is like a time capsule that will never exist again. They think things won’t change, but they have no idea what’s around the corner. Neither do we.