James Joyce: Reflections of Ireland Book

James Joyce told a friend, "I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world." At the age of twenty-two he left that city and, apart from three fleeting visits, he never lived there again. But Joyce's years of self-exile were passed in recalling, reimagining and reworking successive versions of his home town. Obsessed with Dublin though he was, Joyce did turn his imagination to other parts of Ireland too, moving beyond Phoenix Park to the Clongowes Wood of his childhood, into the not-so-distant Wicklow Mountains, farther away to his wife's native Galway, and down to Cork, where his father came from. Alain Le Garsmeur's camera has captured Joyce's world in all its living variety. The original and evocative images reflect extracts chosen by Bernard McCabe, extracts that display Joyce's quick-shifting ventriloquist's skills in slipping from voice to voice, the better to render a complex love-hate relationship with his chosen world. Altogether this is a rich literary and visual feast for any Joyce-lover and for all lovers of the city and the country that James Joyce the exile never really left behind.