Slowly working through Dubliners. Who else found "The Sisters" to be terrifying...

Slowly working through Dubliners. Who else found "The Sisters" to be terrifying? I actually laid awake thinking about it the night after reading it. It unsettled me more than most actual horror stories have.

There's quite a bit of that throughout. They're almost like existential haikus.

the one about the pure nun lady brought me to tears and i cannot even tell you why

When reading through the stories so much goes unsaid, it's a masterful technique used by Joyce. He's a genius

I've noticed he's also so good at composing paragraphs. Being a writer myself, I've learned a little about how to arrange words in sentences; I've slowly begun to figure out how to arrange things so that the syllables harmonize into a pleasing sentence. However, Joyce goes further, and is then able to take those harmonious sentences and arrange them into harmonious, pleasing paragraphs, where each sentence interacts with the all the others to good aesthetic effect. It's teaching me how much I have to learn about writing.

The Sisters was one of my least favorites. Painful Case is where it's at.

The one about the drunken father and his frustration at the end of the story before he beats his son is the one that stuck with me

Any particular paragraphs you like?

The old priest was a little creepy. Laughing to himself in the dark.
But then priests are kind of creepy in general since so many of them like to fiddle young boys.

I vividly remember the cuckolding from beyond he grave in The Dead.

Wasn't it sort of implied in the story that the priest was creepy toward the boy too? Even though it was decades before the scandal was it still common knowledge, albeit taboo, that priests were child molesters

different user but here's the ending to Araby

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

That's not a paragraph

I love Araby. It's a nice one to read when you need a bit of grounding from the go getting materialism everywhere.

Araby and The Dead are GOAT

So the old guy in "An Encounter" is a pedo, right?

I finished The Sisters 5 minutes ago.
I like how Joyce can write a relatively simple paragraph, yet so aesthetically pleasing and implying a lot of information with only a couple of words.

How is Portrait? Is it similar to Dubliners or a pop culture wank like Ulysses?

It's literally right in between in terms of style and technique.

"She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue."

The whole collection is full of them. Here's a short example from "An Encounter":

>After a long while his monologue paused. He stood up slowly, saying that he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahoney exclaim:

A totally average, ordinary paragraph in the story, but there's such harmony, such order to it. The sentences, the syllables, the commas and clauses all unite into something that I can only describe as 'coherent.' You can feel it.

imo the first three stories about children weren't great and The Dead fell just short of my expectations (still really nice), but everything in between, from Eveline to Grace, is gold. Really looking forward to Portrait, just gotta find a decent copy