Reviews for Distances: A Personal Evocation of People and Places

The average rating for Distances: A Personal Evocation of People and Places based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-09-06 00:00:00 William Crowley Of course Marcel Proust would have frown at my reading this. He would have been also irritated when I had read his Marcel Proust: A Life. He would have felt dismayed at the prospect of yet another reader who uses a biography as shaky clutches in the futile attempt to approach to a writer. He may have also felt troubled at anyone deluding oneself that one could approach his inner being - as if he had not tried to do that himself. At least Joyce would have not minded being the center of attention. After all, and when he was still relatively young, he sought a biographer to record his life. My interests are not only literary. I am fascinated by history and as I have some difficulties with absolutes, I prefer to approach art works considering them in their context. It helps to form my viewpoint. Or to escape from it. And then, to add to the pertinence of these two biographies, both Joyce and Marcel Proust constructed their works out of their own lives. Their lives became their works, as their lives were devoted to their works. From early on for one of them and as a late epiphany to the other. So in this extraordinary biography of this extraordinary writer we have Ellmann extracting the Self out of the continuous representation of the Self or Selves of James Joyce. We recognise him in Steven, in Molly, in Bloom, in the Liffey... Apart from commanding an overwhelming amount of data, so much more than my bombarded brain could absorb, the strength of Ellmann's account lies in his nature as a literary man. And a very sharp and bookish one at that. In this account of a life, we never lose sight of Joyce's writings. In moving through the roller coaster of his financial worries, his publishing quests, his riddled obsessions, his emotional penuries, his health issues, his anti-religion fundamentalism, his routes of exile, we are also picking pieces of the magnificent literary puzzle. And the puzzle is not just a play on pairs of correspondences, but a meditation of what language, an array of languages, can offer. Not having read Finnegans Wake, sections of this biography I will have to revisit if I ever embark on that work of the night in Joyce's own language. An additional attraction of Ellmann's version is that he is keen in pursuing the writers Joyce met and what he read, as well as in collecting his comments and views on literature. This biography then offers a rich knot of additional literary threads that I long to disentangle. No Gordian solution envisioned. Books, which open up doors to more books and more reading, become magical objects. Is there a better tribute to this wizard-of-words? One can either contemplate Brancusi's version of James Joyce, as seen above, or read Richard Ellmann's account. Or both.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-16 00:00:00 Judy Taylor A truly masterful acheivement. Not only did it shed light on Joyce's life but gave really useful insights into hos work. I especially appreciated the parts relating to Finnegans Wake. This is pushing me to reread that and Ulysses at some stage.