Dubliners

Dubliners by James Joyce is one of the best collections of short stories. Maybe the best ever of all time. Yes, it's that good. 

This is a collection of short stories based on people, their lives, relationships, and the history of their times in which they're living in, Victorian era. It's based in Dublin, Ireland, which is full of alcoholics, Catholics, Protestants, Priests, school children, working people, and rich people of the Victorian style era in which this is written. 

What makes James Joyce's stories here so great and so effective is that he writes a simple style that is easy to read and understand. Not only that, but his stories go somewhere emotionally, something that is very much lacking in modern entertainment like video games, television, and movies where things simply just happen in a linear escapade. 

One of the stories that hit me hard was the one where two friends are talking. One is a bigshot that made it in Europe, traveled everywhere, has a great career, wife, and kid. The other didn't make anything of himself and never left their hometown. We get the idea that the other didn't appreciate his friend because he declined his friends' offer to see his wife and kid, thinking that his friend thinks he's better than him because he's so successful in life. But at the end of the story we find that the successful one with the wife and kid is actually miserable and doesn't like his life. Things like that are impressive in writing, that sort of contrast.  

There's a meta magical realism in James Joyce's writing that is unmatched even by other writers of the same period like say for example, Jane Austen. It's realism but there's always a little something extra, a twist here and there that makes the short stories pop and shine with luster unmatched by other writers of his time period, of even the entire western canon. I haven't completely tapped into and understood this writing style completely, but I will understand more when I read more of his works, the next one being Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. 

Lastly, a review can't be written without mentioning The Dead, the story at the end. Here we have a party where a wife and husband attend. The husband is ready to have sex with the wife in their hotel room, but he sees she's crying about something so it doesn't happen. It turned out that she was thinking about a boy she loved when she was younger, who was a great singer. Music is very important in Joyce's world. In Ireland. In Europe in general during this period. The husband realizes that his relationship with his wife is actually nothing in comparison with the boy who died loving her. The snow falls outside the window. It doesn't really get more meta than that. 

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of the western canon. I plan on reading much more of his works: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake.