Suffering

Just lately my reading has been ricocheting between three excellent works of non-fiction, in those periods when I've not been enjoying various comic books. In addition to the excellent biography of Brahms by Jan Swafford I've mentioned here before, I've had a jolly good time reading Ziauddin Sardar's eminently sane commentary, Reading The Qur'an - the Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam, and Kevin Birmingham's very lively The Most Dangerous Book - The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses. (Isn't it odd how publishers these days seem to go for these double-barrelled kinds of title? Useful for a quick summary of what's something's about though.)

The last-named has been holding my attention since yesterday afternoon and I'd strongly recommend it to all you Joyceans out there in the unlikely event you haven't heard of it. It covers material I thought I knew quite well about the publication (and subsequent censoring/banning) of the greatest novel of the last century and does so in an entirely fresh, often downright exciting, manner. For one thing it's a reminder of just how extraordinarily radical Joyce's novel actually was - and I think still is, as a matter of fact.

But the thing that's hit me hardest is the powerful rendition of the monumental physical and mental pain Joyce had to contend with whilst writing his magnum opus (the Wake notwithstanding) and subsequent to its publication. Birmingham horrifyingly makes clear how much of that pain might be seen as self-inflicted; perhaps most horrifying of all that Joyce almost certainly regarded his suffering as such. In a way that adds to our received image of Joyce as the heroic artist, but The Most Dangerous Book also makes it abundantly clear what an infuriating man he could be and invariably was to all who got close to him. Wonderfully human, as is Ulysses, of course.