Dubliners
Fifteen short stories of everyday life in turn-of-the-century Dublin, arranged to move from childhood through adolescence and maturity to public life, ending with the long final story "The Dead." First published in 1914 after nearly a decade of disputes with publishers over its frank material, the collection is often read as an entry point to Joyce, and several of its characters recur in Ulysses.
Somewhere around the tenth story that builds toward something and then just stops, the flat endings quit feeling deliberate and start feeling like a shrug. Anticlimax is the house style here, and the gloom accumulates until it numbs: "nearly all of them utterly forgettable, and skimmable," one detractor writes, reserving mercy for maybe three of the fifteen. The politics make it worse. "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and "Grace" run on local names and grudges a century dead, and a reader without footnotes admits "I felt extremely lost." Meanwhile the men are petty rather than tragic, small fellows whose "resentments fester" through page after page of drink, squalor, and "moist mouths and propensity for spitting."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
