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Monday, June 4, 2012

Review of new James Joyce biography

The Wall Street Journal's Saturday book review section (an excellent resource) runs a review by Joseph O'Connor of a new James Joyce biography, James Joyce: A  New Biography by Gordon Bowker.

The nut graph of O'Connor's review: "This is a well-researched, accessible book for the interested amateur reader of Joyce, not for the academic specialist. It is refreshingly free of the jargon of literary-critical theory, which has done Joyce no favors at all. Surely no author in history has been so beslobbered with postgraduate drivel. Mr. Bowker's book contains no sentence that is hard to understand: more than can be said of the work of some Joycean critics and more, for that matter, than can be said of its subject's fictions, increasingly baffling as they became."

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