Out of order

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the stories in this collection seem to be in the wrong order. Joyce was very particular about how he arranged his work and I am quite sure something of the Dubliners experience is lost when the stories aren’t in their original order.

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7 people found this helpful

Great book.

Great book ,I thoroughly loved it! I think it's worrth every penny. In fact I'm going to start it again.

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Beautifully written and beautifully read

but why are the stories out of their correct sequence? Each story is a gem, but the collection does not work as a whole as presented here.

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2 people found this helpful

Dreary

Well written & performed but all the stories seemed the same. I found I zoned out.

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Glorious but...

Glorious story only marred by narrator's mouth noises. Maybe an old recording. Very much worth listening to

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Amazing collection of short stories

Dubliners is an exceptional and beautiful collection of short stories. The stories are well read by T.P. McKenna. I dont know why the collection is not in the same order as the stories appear in the text. This is irritating if you want to find a particular story to listen to and Joyce makes it clear that he placed the stories in order for a reason - there is progression from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. Despite this I loved listening to these stories as they are read here and would recommend the title.

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28 people found this helpful

Wrong Order

As others have said the stories are in the wrong order and its very frustrating - surely this would be easy to resolve and update?

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3 people found this helpful

Pity the narration is not done by an Irish voice.

Pity the narration is not done by an Irish voice, the English accent removes so much of the atmosphere and the pleasure from the stories.

I gave up and downloaded a version narrated by an Irishman.

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2 people found this helpful

Life, Death and Dublin

As they stand, each one alone, you could listen to these 15 stories of life, very truly lived in Dublin around the start of the last century, for a long time, and many times, and still hear something new, even though nothing very dramatic happens, because the writing is so precise and, through TP McKenna, the speaking is so right for what James Joyce himself described as a series of epiphanies.



McKenna acted for may years at Dublin's Abbey Theatre and appeared in film versions of Ulysses and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and his restrained tone lends itself gently to these glimpses of moments of subtle revelation.



Only one complaint, and the meticulous Joyce mght share it, because the author himself, and he should know, said this of Dubliners, "I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the convition that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard."



Unfortunately, some bold or, more likely, careless individual, has deformed this beautifully-spoken version of Dubliners, or at least has altered the presentment of what he has seen, so that we hear the stories in the wrong sequence. Because Joyce's scrupulousness extended to insisting that they appear in a certain order in the published version of the book.



He classed them into four aspects: Childhood (conisting of The Sisters, An Encounter and Araby); Adolescence (Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants and The Boarding House); Maturity (A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay and A Painful Case): and Public Life (Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace and The Dead).



There is not too much lost by the apparently random order of this audio version, but it is simply right that any rendition of Dubliners should start with the news of a death in The Sisters and should end with the beautiful reflection on last things in the longest and richest of the stories, The Dead.

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72 people found this helpful

Masterful tales of Ireland

Certainly this is no Ulysses, thankfully. I have perhaps avoided Joyce due to a failed attempt to come to term with his "masterpiece". So pleased that I gave this a chance and I will look, carefully, for more of his writings. This is a collection of well crafted tales of chapters in the lives of ordinary irish folk.

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1 person found this helpful