A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914)

Rambling, clever, and as oftentimes difficult as its big brother Ulysses. And yet this book never quite grabbed me the way that other work did. Maybe the book's time frame (some eighteen years compared to Ulysses's single day) left it harder to get really involved in the same way. Or maybe the problem is something James Atherton points out in my copy's introduction, by the end of the book we know the main character better than most other literary figures, indeed Joyce barely deigns to mention the other characters beyond their names and their dialogue. And maybe that's the problem: by the end of the book I knew Stephen Daedalus very well; I just didn't like him that much. ( )

It turns out that Joyce and I are just not a good match. I am actually quite fond of the way that he uses language, but I am not a fan of the way he uses plot, character and structure. I was quite interested in the first third of the book, but then it reached the all-religion-all-the-time point and, although the language was quite gorgeous in parts, I found myself tuning out entirely because I just didn't care. And then the university section was a tiresome struggle to the finish.

So many reviews of this book seem to talk about it as though you can judge intellect by people's appreciation of a particular novel or author. It's like the reverse Dan Brown. It's also completely false logic. Taste and intelligence are not the same thing. You can "get" Joyce and still not enjoy him. I appreciate the innovations he made and the impact he has had on the modern novel. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to enjoy reading his work.

Just because something is a classic, people, that doesn't mean you have to like it! It certainly doesn't mean you should pretend to like it, for fear of being thought stupid if you admit that it wasn't your thing.

I didn't like this. I also didn't like Ulysses. If you didn't like them either, that's okay. You're no less of a reader, a literature lover or an intellect for it :)

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.

In its historical context, Portrait of the Artist is groundbreaking. As it reads now, there is a self-interest that becomes a little too much to stomach after awhile. The most powerful moments occur during Stephen Dedalus's formative years as a sensitive youth somewhat set apart from his contemporaries, as illustrated by his defense of Byron's poetry against accusations of blasphemy. His quest for a new aesthetic in his later years feels trite and somewhat self-important by contrast. Obviously, my bias as a 21st century reader is difficult to overcome, but I've read so many solipsistic Künstlerroman in my lifetime that it's hard to be objective. Though, to be fair, almost all of them were after Joyce, so I suppose I would have felt differently had I read this one first. ( )

Formally brilliant, this exemplar of modernist prose is also tremendously dark, at times tedious, and at others esoteric. ( )

Kudos to LitCharts for explaining a whole bunch of stuff to me that would've gone way over my head otherwise. I overall enjoyed this, but I really struggled to stay focused - had I not been on holiday, I would've tried to get an audiobook and listen while reading. ( )