I seem to recall that most every recent summer (minus perhaps this one) CBC radio has run a little challenge to its readers to pick up and get through all of Joyce's Ulysses. Sadly, no, I haven't read or even opened his masterpiece. But I thought it rather appropriate to read something by Joyce to make my summer reading list at least respectable. So I picked up Dubliners.
For that small percentage of readers out there who haven't heard about this brief collection of short stories, Joyce paints through his pieces in this book the day-to-day lives of the working class of Dublin in the first decade or so of the last century. It is important because Dubliners tells stories that everyday working class people experienced (or could have experienced). This is a nice change give the more modern day obsession with the cult of personality/praise of the rich that seems to float through the works of regularly praised writers such as Rushdie and yes, Dan Brown. What Joyce shines through with is his ability to illustrate the everyday in a manner that engages the reader and propells oft ignored voices and experiences.
Moreover though, Dubliners shows writers the way to write economically and successfully at the same time. I know that many MFA programs push for higher page counts (mainly for the reason of forcing the budding fiction writer to get the mechanics of composition through physical memory). As an off-shoot of this, writers sometimes forget that you can accomplish a lot with a little. Joyce shows us in this collection that shorter fiction can work and do so wonderfully.
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