ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This is just a quick review because I am a bit preoccupied with rescuing some data from a trial software program before I lose access to it. (Because #LongBoringStory I am not going to pay for it all over again!)

Nora is, as the subtitle says, a love story of Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, known to booklovers as the author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, even if they haven’t read them. Nora was selected for the One Dublin, One Book program and I won a copy of it in a giveaway for Reading Ireland Month from Cathy at 746 Books.

#Digression: Intrigued, I looked up the previous books chosen for the One Dublin, One Book program. It turns out that I’ve read or have on the TBR some of the titles chosen over the years, and a couple are reviewed on this blog:

• 2006: At Swim Two Birds (1939) by Flann O’Brien
• 2007: A Long Long Way (2005) by Sebastian Barry, on the TBR
• 2008: Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, read ages ago
• 2010: The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) by Oscar Wilde, read ages ago
• 2012: Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
• 2019: The Country Girls Trilogy (1960) by Edna O’Brien, on my wishlist

Sales must be wonderful for the contemporary authors whose books are chosen. This year’s choice BTW is an historical novel called The Coroner’s Daughter by Andrew Hughes.

Ok, back to Nora…

The novel is written entirely from Nora’s point of view, in first person. Blurbers suggest that the portrayal is reasonably faithful to real life, and the story traces the couple’s meeting in Ireland in 1904, and their peripatetic, often poverty-stricken lifestyle in Europe and the UK.  It shows Joyce’s determination to live by the pen, and the extraordinary impact that publication had on their precarious finances.  It also shows Nora’s loyalty in the face of (a-hem) unreasonable behaviour by Joyce, and it makes the case that she was his muse and that, without her, his masterpieces would not have been written.  Although she was an uneducated, unsophisticated woman who (under sufferance) read only bits and pieces of his work — and she never contemplated helping him with the writing even when his eyes were intolerably bad — she was intelligent and made good company when they were gadding about socially.

(I have a bio of James Joyce by Richard Ellman but I haven’t got round to reading it yet.

Nora begins with one of ‘quite a few’ explicit sex scenes, which suggests that the relationship with James Joyce began with and was sustained by physical attraction.  But since the narrative includes countless (somewhat wearying) grievances, it also suggests that there was an element of entrapment on her part.  Joyce refused to marry Nora until late in their lives together, for philosophical reasons (especially his hatred of religion in general and the church in Ireland in particular). When he did agree to marry, it was for pragmatic reasons to do with the legitimacy of his forthcoming grandchild (and his son’s concern about the inheritance.) So when Nora was utterly fed up with his drinking, his spendthrift ways, his ingratitude and his lack of concern for the family’s welfare, she could not contemplate leaving him and going back to her mother in Ireland with two illegitimate children in tow.  Apart from anything else she had no money, and taking in washing was her only source of work. She always recovered from these bouts of exasperation, and the novel makes a convincing case that though they had nothing much in common,  theirs was a solid bond.

Still, James Joyce does not come out of the novel well.  Not at all.

Nora appears to have coped reasonably well with moving around in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, but their children less so.  She had a fraught relationship with her daughter Lucia, who was only diagnosed with schizophrenia in adulthood, and the couple did not agree on her treatment.  Nora had a horror of asylums because of a childhood visit to a relation, but Joyce — with some justification since Lucia was violent — insisted.  (To read the real life story of Lucia at Wikipedia is to be reminded how primitive health care was, for people with mental illness in the 20th century.)

Joyce and Barnacle lived through both world wars, but apart from relocating from Trieste to (neutral) Zurich in WW2, these tumultuous events don’t feature much in the narrative.  Perhaps from an Irish point-of-view WW1 history is subsumed by the declaration of the Republic in 1918 and subsequent events, and Ireland was neutral in WW2.  But still, to be living anywhere in Europe in WW2 in particular is to be under the existential threat of fascism.  Still, at 400+ pages, Nora is long enough!

Kim reviewed it at Reading Matters too.

Author: Nuala O’Connor
Title: Nora, a Love Story of Nora Barnacle and James Joyce
Cover design by Milan Bozic (I don’t think it’s a photo of the real Nora Barnacle but am open to correction).
Publisher: New Island, 2022, first published in 2021
ISBN: 9781848408500, 431 pages including some Book Club questions
Source: won in a giveaway at 746 Books, thanks again Cathy!