Re-Joyce

As far as I understand it, which is not particularly far, it's niece Ayu's birthday today, or a day for celebrating it, so we are heading for a kunduri to do exactly that in Melaka soon. Accompanying us will be Rozita and our other nieces (well, two of them) as they intend to make jolly along with the rest of the family. Rozita asked me last week to pass on to her my Life of Pi and I was wondering if Fifi might be of an age to enjoy it. But then I thought of the pretty unpleasant bits involving the consumption of various living creatures and thought maybe not. The book I have got in mind for her is Watership Down which every right-thinking teenager should read before they, sadly, consider themselves too old to do so. Unfortunately I haven't got a decent copy to pass her as things stand.

I also think that every right-thinking teenager should read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when they are too young to really grasp it, but old enough to be mesmerised. This is on the grounds that it will mess them up forever. This is not a long held belief of mine, being formulated only today, but it's one that might well last. It came to mind as I'm now well into a recently acquired edition of Joyce's Stephen Hero, which is not really a novel at all, being the fragment that survived of the original very long manuscript of the work that he threw into the fire that eventually 'became' A Portrait. Oddly I read Stephen Hero as a youngster before A Portrait simply because Denton Library had a copy of it (which is quite peculiar considering how out of the mainstream it is) and I mistook one for the other. I think I was around thirteen at the time so the mistake is forgivable. I'm not at all sure then that I knew what it was all about but it certainly did something to me from which I've been benefiting or, perhaps, recovering ever since.

I'm not carrying too many books up to Melaka today since we're coming back tomorrow and one of the books being carried is the aforementioned Stephen Hero. I'm enjoying it so much that everything else I'm reading pales into insignificance.