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Journal Entry 1 by  catsalive from Rooty Hill, New South Wales Australia on Saturday, August 11, 2007
 masterpiece of subjectivity, a fictionalized memoir, a coming-of-age prose-poem, this brilliant novella introduces Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Ulysses, and begins the narrative experimentation that would help change the concept of literary narrative forever. It describes Stephen's formative years in Dublin; as Stephen matures, so does the writing, until it sparkles with clarity.
Masterpiece of semi-autobiographical fiction reveals a powerful portrait of the coming of age of a young man of unusual intelligence, sensitivity and character. Telling portrayals of an Irish upbringing and schooling, the Catholic Church and its priesthood, Parnell and Irish politics, sexual experimentation and its aftermath, and problems with art and morality.
One of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. Young Irish Catholic, Stephen Dedalus, rejects religion and national ties to develop unfettered as an artist. Stronly autobiographical, the novel is one of the founding texts of Modernism and the precursor of Ulysses. Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916 who found its treating of the minutiae of daily life indecorous, and its central character unappealing. Was it art or was it filth?
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Journal Entry 4 by tqd from Sydney, New South Wales Australia on Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Well, this was a bit of a struggle. But I managed it! Yay! This was #4 on my Set It Yourself Reading Challenge (http://www.bookcrossing.com/forum/6/5689125), which was a great incentive to read (and finish) it. I also got to read along with other readers over on LibraryThing's Group Reads: Literature group, which helped. (Although they all seemed to like it far more than me. But I think the people who didn't like it gave up. I just have a masochistic streak and refused to let Joyce win.)
The opening chapters are great: the language, the stream-of-consciousness, the real feeling of being a child listening (and not understanding) adults. Then our hero (Stephan Dedalus) hits his religious phase, and I almost went batty. The descriptions of Hell were fab, but apart from that, reading it was like walking through tar. I ended up skipping entire pages just to get through.
Luckily, Stephen rejects his extreme Catholicism, and I thought hurrah! it can only get easier!
Well, yes. And no.
Stephen's not a lot more likeable as a "I'm ever so clever" Uni student, and there was a far too long digression on aesthetics that drove me batty. But the ending was interesting (young love never goes smoothly), and I did get to the end.
My comments from LibraryThing on chapters 1 & 2:
Okay, I have tried Joyce once before, with Ulysses. Not much best reading attempt, I admired the language, put it down after several pages and never got back to it. (I have seen - I wouldn't classify it as "reading" - the first page of Finnegan's Wake and I'm never going to bother to attempt reading that one.)
So this was refreshingly straightforward, compared to those two.
It felt to me very stream-of-consciousness, which is a style I haven't read since my Virginia Woolf phase, back in my early 20s. It rather made me want to go and read some Woolf again!
He captured a lot of the feelings of childhood, I felt that his descriptions (as with the bits of Ulysses I did manage to read) were very evocative and spot-on, not to mention bloody inventive use of language ("they said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain"). The stream-of-consciousness descriptions being emotional in tone really highlighted my own fuzzy childhood memories and made it even more real to me. (Even though I never went to Jesuit boarding school, or anything even remotely like that!)
Are childhood memories fuzzy because they are so long ago, or because we change and we can no longer see the world in the same way?
As a teenager however, he did seem to have a touch of arrogance to him that I didn't particularly like. But this has to be the most literary description of teenage sexual obsession I've ever read! And again, I seem to remember being likewise obsessed, but hardly able to describe it in such a fashion...
Can anyone make sense of this bit: "... I'm sorry to say that they are only as I roved out one fine May morning in the merry month of sweet July" (Mr Dedalus talking politics, it's page 97 in my old Penguin edition). Some sort of Irish slang/saying?
My comments from LibraryThing on chapters 3 & 4:
Argh. Argh. Argh. I found these two chapters almost unreadable, with their emphasis on Catholic guilt. I ended up skipping entire pages (which I never usually do) because I couldn't make sense of any of it, but it still took me 10 days to read these two chapters, which is quite unheard of. (Okay, I went off and read some other stuff in the meantime, before coming back to this.)
I liked the descriptions of Hell, I did get a good feeling for why one would be feeling guilt.
And there was a great sense of relief when he finally got to the end, and decided to not be a priest (and I thought: hurrah, no more religion).
I am a third-generation atheist, and while I rather like a bit of religion in my books (it's how I learn about others' belief systems) this was FAR too much for me.
I started Chapter five this morning, and it seems much more interesting. Phew, glad I made it through these two chapters!
And my comments from LibraryThing on the final chapter and overall impressions:
I thought I was going to come a cropper on this chapter: after slogging my way through the religious chapters and not enjoying myself at all, all of a sudden I hit a discourse on aesthetics. (I studied Philosophy as an undergraduate, and did a subject on aesthetics, and I didn't get then why people get excited about different people's ideas of beauty, and I still don't get it. Things are beautiful because they're beautiful, get over it.) At least I didn't have to skip any pages, but I didn't enjoy those pages, and I'm afraid I didn't enjoy the book over all.
His descriptions were great, but there was just too much wordiness, and, frankly, too much "look at me, I'm ever so clever". Really not keen to try anything else of Joyce (I'd previously crashed and burned on Ulysses).
Interesting, I was reading at the same time The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, which has a fair amount of Catholicism in it as well. Somehow Joyce made me want to run screaming from the room, but Greene made me feel that Catholicism was a beautiful religion. (Even if our heroine is rejected by the church.) Go figure.
Phew! I'm glad I've finished it, if only so I can now have an opinion on Joyce that is my own. :)
I shall be donating this to the 1001-library (Australian branch) as there seems to be a bookray or two already out there for this novel...
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
