The turbulent 20th century is just beginning and the great Irish writer, fully aware of the anchored reality that paralyzes his country, burrows into the most unsuspecting corners of his beloved Dublin and with the simplest of fictional means – his effortless but unparalleled perspicacity, the hazy, realistic colors and the disarming hesitation of his heroes at the critical moment – he manages to compose perhaps the greatest collection of short stories in the history of English literature.
“He found insignificant all that would normally fascinate him and did not respond to the looks that provoked his boldness. He knew he would have to talk a lot, invent and entertain, but his mind and throat were too dry for such work. He couldn't think of anything else but to keep walking…”
James Joyce, the writer who defined modernism in literature, was born in Dublin in 1882 and died in Zurich at the age of 59. He spoke seventeen languages, abolished linear narration by perfecting the technique of interior monologue, and suffered from chronic eye ailments. Ulysses, his magnum opus and incomparable literary achievement, was labeled pornography in England and the US and was read illegally for over ten years after it was first published in 1922 in Paris.