“…so beautiful and sad, like music.”

The truth is that I am a bit of a perfectionist and generally never satisfied with something I do, and blogging is no exception. Whenever I think about writing in this blog I imagine writing a 1000 word technical analysis of a book and proofreading it for like hundred times. Obviously,I can’t do it because I don’t have the knowledge nor the time. Consequently, I decided to change my approach, and from now on I will just write a couple of short paragraphs to introduce the books that I read just to have the record and I think in this way it will become easier to post every week.

Ah, you know how some bloggers are obsessed with writing about not writing in their blog?  I am one of them.

OK,the book that I am gonna write about today is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

 

After the enjoyable experience of “Dubliners” I started reading another book from James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, on December last year when I received it from a dear friend of mine,  and last month I decided to give up when I still had 30 pages to finish it.

Well, I knew from my previous experience that James Joyce is not the easiest author to read, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, being a poetic autobiography was a lot more difficult.

I also realized that it is in fact not an autobiography, but an “artist’s novel” or as they call it in German a “Künstlerroman” which is a narrative about an artist’s growth to maturity (I love how they have specific words for literally everything in German).

 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the story of Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of 19th century and how he  decides to free himself from all the social, religious and familial constraints and devote his life to the art of writing.

If you are into reading about Catholism and Irish nationalism (which I wasn’t!), I highly encourage you to read this book, because as the story progresses you can see how Catholic faith and Irish nationality influence Stephan as a young boy.

 

* The title is part of a quote from book:

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”