A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManDownload Now...
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Customer Review: Supersaturated with the religion that he had stopped believing in: growing up in a colony
This is my second climbing of the Portrait mountain. It is hard going, but not because it is inaccessible, say in the way that Finnegans Wake is. The narration is clear straightforward English, but is very compact and full of allusions. If you have an edition with good annotation, it takes time to digest those. Otherwise you just miss too much. (I played golf on a tough links course last week; when you do not concentrate and do not play exactly to the fairway, you have a hard time finding your ball under the high grass, and if you find it, it is hard to play. Somehow I found that a nice simile for reading the Portrait.)
The book is one of the modern classics in the Bildungsroman genre. It is a novel about a young man who shares a lot with Mr.JJ, but is not exactly like him. It is structured in 5 chapters, which do not have titles. Let me try to assign titles to the chapters to give an idea of contents.
I Childhood and dicovery of courage
II Puberty and discovery of sin
III Exposure to a terrifying sermon, fear, remorse and confession
IV Piety and toying with vocation before narrow escape
V End of belief, split with home, country, and church.
A constant theme from the start to the end is the decline of the family's standing in society and the disappearance of its prosperity, down to plain poverty.
By the way, near the end, our hero has a discussion with a dogmatic Italian student about Giordano Bruno, the heretic. Opinions clash.
Why only 4 stars? I find the chapters 3 to 5 too dry in their devotion to repeating the sermon, then contemplating taking the vow, then debating art with fellow students. It becomes too much like a religious/philosophical treatment for a novel. (I can understand that students who have to read this by curriculum may not be so very enchanted with it.)
Product Description
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, providing an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique.
Customer Review: Best Kindle edition of Joyce's "Portrait"
There are many editions of James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" available, but this is easily the best Kindle edition. The text is based on Chester Anderson's 1964 text. There are also a good number of annotations by Seamus Deane--fewer than in Anderson's Viking Critical edition but sometimes more detailed and aimed at a less scholarly audience. best of all, this edition is a very well constructed ebook, with a good table of contents to facilitate navigation to the beginning of chapters and with an excellent implementation of endnotes. Annotated items are marked witha superscripted number that links to the endnotes. The notes are all placed together, so you can read other notes rather than having to go back to the main text to go to other notes.
All in all, this is the best Kindle edition of Joyce's classic. The text is based on a standard version, the notes are helpful, and the implementation highlight the advantages of the Kindle format.
Customer Review: Disappointed
After having just finished reading Ulysses (and loving it) I decided it would be rewarding if I read 'A Portrait' next in order to delve further into Stephen Dedalus' character. (Moreover, I had also just finished reading Ellmann's famous biography of Joyce and felt inspired to read Joyce's own semi-autobiography). Unfortunately I was extremely disappointed with the dry, tedious narrative tone that Joyce adopted in writing his novel, especially within the overdrawn third chapter in which we learn the terrors of hell and damnation. Yes, I know the sermon sequence had great significance in Stephen's development from the primordial muck of biological existence to the more rarefied air of the soul, of human conscience and (above all) of the powers of artistic creativity. Nevertheless I found my thoughts wandering elsewhere when I was reading this book and many times I had to re-read whole pages because I had realized I was just reading the words without absorbing their content. While Ulysses drew me immediately into the consciousness of Bloom and Dedalus, 'A Portrait' was bland, cold and uninviting. I felt by the end of "A Portrait" that I was solely reading the book because it was Joyce and because it was deemed a classic. Perhaps I ruined A Portrait by reading Joyce's masterpiece first. Even if Ulysses can seem (at times) even more glacially abstract and opaque to the reader than A Portrait, Ulysses at least challenges you in such a way that you want to understand more about the text (its various allusions, its satire, its narrative experimentation, ect). I do not feel compelled to read A Portrait again, in fact (in the process of writing this review) I now feel compelled to re-read Ulysses and perhaps even Finnegan's Wake.
Customer Review: terrible, terrible, terrible book
I don't know where to start. It's pretty difficult to review a book in which nothing takes place. This book lacks... well, just about everything. It lacks half a sentence of substance. Nothing in the story is connected; I read the book and wondered, "What is this about? What was the story?" Actually, I have a confession to make: I didn't actually read the book in its entirety; I read the first half and was so disgusted by it that I had to read the summaries for the rest of the chapters online. It is that bad.
Normally I listen to other people's opinions but I am making it a fact in my mind that this book is the worst book I have ever read. If you disagree, you are wrong. That is how terrible this book was. It was a complete waste of my money. It was required reading for school. I always read the books regardless of whether I like them or not, only reading summaries after finishing to make sure I understood the whole story. This is the first book I have ever relied on reviews to finish. My teacher worhips this book but there is nothing good about it. If anybody can explain to me what this book is about in a way that makes sense, I will give them ten dollars.
So far, everyone in my school has failed to explain it to me. This book is everything Flowers for Algernon tries to be (that's not a good thing).
Customer Review: challenging but worth it
As many do, I read this in preparation for tackling Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus makes a return appearance. This has been called Joyce's most accessible work, however I found Dubliners faster paced reading personally.
The style of the book changes as the title character matures from a young child to a young man. The part that affected me most was the episode at school where, after he has fallen to immoral ways, a speech is given on Hell that is as riveting and detailed as Dante's Inferno. The fiery pits are described as an abomination across all the senses, where not just pain from sensory touch is there but in smell, sight, taste, hearing - and quite effectively described.
Stephen's subsequent change after confession and struggle to achieve harmony with God is inspiring even given the eventual outcome of that attempt.
The latter part of the book bogs down considerably as it falls into philosophical debates on questions that many a young (and old) person ponders. The ending is hopeful but uncertain.
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