Dubliners by James Joyce

I last read Joyce when I was perhaps 13 or 14, no doubt at the recommendation of my sister with her famous list, etc. But I have some memory of my grandfather spotting me reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and commenting something to the effect of, bravo, I didn't appreciate Joyce until I was much older than you, maybe with a note of skepticism in his voice. And he died when I was 13, so it was certainly far back there. He was right, incidentally. I didn't get much from the book at the time. I think I probably could have done a good job explaining the concept, precocious as ever, but I doubt that I truly understood it. I certainly didn't appreciate or enjoy it as I would now. Joyce was around my age when he wrote the thing.

Well, now I am old enough, and more than old enough to appreciate and enjoy Dubliners, which I am perhaps desecrating by listening to — but then Joyce explicitly endorses oral delivery of his later work, so maybe the same applies to this. As you may have heard, it's very good. Joyce has that Shakespearean quality of feeling that one could dwell in his work forever and never exhaust its linguistic riches — that, somehow, the whole of language inhabits the work, which you could explore until you died yet keep finding new insights and pleasures. And like Tolstoy, you feel that the stories do not relate events so much as they are the events themselves. That Joyce's choice of language is perfect — every word is that way because it must be so. That Joyce never falls short the perfect way of expressing the story. On top of all that, this collection from the early twentieth century feels utterly modern, not dated in the slightest other than obvious references to the particularities of the day. The story about the political hands drinking and kvetching is the closest it comes to feeling irrelevant, but even that I can recognize from my limited experience as a canvasser.

He wrote all this in his early 20s. Somehow, that fact and watching Celeste speedrunners on YouTube makes me want to "be better" yet again.