Why I Think James Joyce Could Very Well Be a Filipino - My Review of "Dubliners"

Dubliners by James Joyce


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
i got my copy of this book from the book collection left by a friend who suddenly died this year. having kept the copy for months now, i decided i could read this thin volume of a book (that was made up of several short stories, it turned out surprise-singly) while in transit between trips from home to my many destinations. the book's actually a relatively easy, fast read, which i did by just going through it without much care about the analysis (i.e. what's it all about, actually? did i get his point?); i was out to read it just to experience reading well-written short stories (hopefully to improve one's craft of writing - perhaps?, or learn a trick or two from the writer's style). the stories have that strange personal appeal to me, though all of them have relatively-difficult structure crafted into them by Joyce. shifting between time and situations on most of them has got me enmeshed such that i must have got lost in the midst of the stories more than once -- i just have to continue doing my reading in between my available time schedule.

and more strangely, the stories remind me a lot about the Philippines, about people i know and have met back in the Philippines -- maybe because of huge similarities brought about by a common religion being Roman Catholic, or even because both countries' setting is archipelagic. eerily, the mentality/ies of the characters i've read from the stories run almost the same as with some people i personally know back in the Philippines.

the characters come alive, and actually come too personal for me. Joyce's got such beautiful ways of using words, - cryptic at times and predictive as to the outcome, at the most, perhaps, because he lets us readers know what's in the mind of the characters - & he's never florid in the stories (just like some latin writers i read), though i thought more than a few of the words actually are too archaic for me, but he's able to narrate his stories uniquely in his own narrative style. he doesn't even try to impress that he's actually telling a story, as he just narrates the stories according to how he thought they out to be read by us. this starts right away from the first story (The Sisters). Plus I also like the illustrations that came in between pages of the stories - well drawn and helpful in imagining how a scene must have looked like, just like short of adding in pop-up dialogues like in comics ---i wonder even if there's a comics-format publication that came out using the stories of this book.

for certain reasons, i love the stories "The Dead," A Mother," "The Boarding House," "Two Gallants," and "A Painful Case" --- with the way Joyce told their stories, which aren't really typical formulaic-stories that would fail in regular cinema if they're ever produced for film, i could very well imagine how these people would have behaved in actual life. "A Painful Case" almost dragged out with its length, but it saved itself from being thrown to the dustbin towards the ending, when some sort of a scene showing regrets over things or decisions "you must have done when you were younger come back haunting your memory" - whew! --suddenly, the story resonates. Something about those characters reminded me of various moments in my life - as they're very aptly described. i'll certainly find ways to read the rest of his books (i've read his "portrait of an artist as a young man" in comics format when i was very young, i recall now, as it has got a very personal story to share to all interested readers out there).

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