The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920

If we regard biography as a kind of archeology, Joyce's Richard Leakey is unquestionably Richard Ellman, whose 1959 opus James Joyce established the terrain for all future biographies of the great Irish writer. And there have been many. Few, however, quite measure up to McCourt's informative, lucid and wholly engaging record of Joyce in Trieste, which in Joyce's day was as polyglot as Ulysses, as multicultural as any cosmopolitan city of today. Firmly in control of his subject and material, McCourt effortlessly interlaces the details of everyday life--marital storms, economic worries, work habits--with larger historical and cultural concerns: Jewish life, the emergence of the futurists, socialist politics. In this milieu, the alchemy of Joyce's most potent art transformed many of the people, places and incidents of Trieste into important sections of Ulysses, which Joyce himself described as ""the epic of two races (Israel and Ireland)."" Laboring in relative obscurity, Joyce struggled not only with Leopold Bloom, but also with timid publishers who balked when it came to releasing Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While honoring the work of his predecessors in Joyce scholarship, McCourt (who was born and educated in Dublin and now teaches at the University of Trieste) also examines material that was until recently unused or unavailable. This, along with his understanding of the culture and dialect of the once-vibrant port city, deepens our appreciation of Trieste both as a crossroads of cultures and as a profound influence on Joyce's thinking and writing. As one critic has it, ""Joyce was born in Dublin... [but] grew up in Trieste."" (July)