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Chapter 18 / PENELOPE - What next?: Bob You asked whether I am ready for Wake. I feel a bit diffident still. Feel that I should know Joyce more before I attempt that book. That is why this path - reading Nora, hopefully Ellmann - the problem is that Ellmann's book is real expensive, here in Zurich's bookshops - and restart the entire journey with Dubliners. Will look forward to reading that with you and the rest starting January.. What about Nora? Is anybody reading it? Plan to? I have right now this feeling of loneliness -kind of feeling lost having closed Ulysses! Anybody understand that? Chandra Dubliners is a great idea. Count me in. The great work on Joyce's life is by Richard Ellmann. It has errors and a good correction is John McCourt's The Years of Bloom. Peter Costello and John Wyse Jackson are very poor. I do not recommend them at all although their two books (Peter Costello's The Years of Growth and Costello/Jackson's John Stanislaus Joyce) contain material available nowhere else. The Reader's Guides by William York Tindall seem to have passed their shelf life a tad but they are still enjoyable and useful. Indeed yes I can understand your feelings about concluding Ulysses. It is like parting with a friend or completing a great task and finding its completion a let down. Maddox's Nora is neither the best nor the worst book ever written. It has positive merits in that it deals with the sexually aberrant behavior of the Joyces straight on and without palliation or censoriousness. On the other hand it has little sensitivity regarding Joyce's work and -- let's face it -- without that the matter of Nora would not be particularly interesting. My copy of Ellmann is paperbound and still costs $23.95. The hardbound edition is of course more. If this would help you the ISBN on my copy is 0-19-503381-7. I'm sure you could get a copy from abebooks, amazon, powells or alibris pretty easily. About Swahili in Wake: In Roland McHugh's Annotations there are a number of references to Kiswahili words. Ten? I believe there may be more than that. I once suggested that a searchable McHugh would be a real aid but someone else commented that I wanted things too easy. I assume he was joking: the Wake is difficult enough. Bob Williams Spegulo ne helpas al malbellulo, Mi kredas ke vi estas prava, Via dote la vizago rispondas fraulino. A mirror does not help an ugly person, I believe that you are right, Your endowingly the face answers an unmarried woman. I don't know whether Joyce erred or intended these grammatical and orthographic changes. There is no double l in malbelulo, but who knows what ...bell... rings which Angelus? The last phrase omits a preposition or other indicator so we can't tell which is the subject and which the object. Maybe a maiden answers your face or the other way around. Vizago requires a circumflex or other marker to indicate that the g is soft as in george, but vizago resemble virago. Rispondas should be respondas, but ris means rice here and there in the rice pond of our language pool. If anyone has more information about this passage, I'd like to hear it. Bob? Thanks, Jack Wilson HOME! |