I was very engaged by this novel, which uses well-known real historical figures, but then applies a “what if?” scenario to a crucial moment in their lives. James Joyce, when arriving in Trieste in 1904 in search of a job at the Berlitz language school, left Nora Barnacle, with whom he’d left Ireland, to wait… Continue reading Penelope Unbound
To Utrecht, for the bi-annual International James Joyce symposium, timed, naturally, to coincide with Bloomsday. I went as part of a panel of Burgessians, and we explored the links between our man’s work and their man.The venue, at the ancient university, was perfect, and the conference was enormously stimulating. I had a pleasant encounter with… Continue reading Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
The footnotes – and there are plenty of them – in Kevin Jackson’s brilliant account of Modernism in 1922 are printed in a fetching purplish shade. I wondered, as I read, enthralled, whether this was a subliminal allusion to Eliot’s phrase from The Waste Land, when Tiresias observes the assault by the clerk on the… Continue reading Constellation of Genius