The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (2 of 2) & James Joyce
El Dorado, Trieste and Dartmouth
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s dry dock you will find:
Birthday wishes to François-Marie Alouet, better known as Voltaire;
A round-up of new classics published yesterday, including two Edna O’Brien reissues;
A little about James Joyce’s life ahead of our Dubliners read-along, which starts next week;
A preview of coming attractions;
And our last discussion of Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace from the Sea – with a note on the 1976 film adaptation.
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Happy Birthday Voltaire
In other news, today, 21 November, was the French author Voltaire’s birthday. He would have been 331 years old today.
François-Marie Arouet wrote a staggering quantity of books and letters under the nom de plume Voltaire. After spending time in the Bastille for writing satirical verses, he embarked on a self-imposed exile around Europe, staying in England and the French countryside, at the Prussian court of Frederick the Great and finally near Geneva. Throughout his life he attacked the Catholic Church and advocated freedom of speech. He was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment period, perhaps best remembered for his satirical novel, Candide, or Optimism.
Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire (1759)
In Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of the Enlightenment to create one of the most glorious satires of the eighteenth century. His eponymous hero is an innocent young man whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that ‘all is for the best’. But when his love for the Baron’s rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own fortune. As he and his various companions roam over the world, an outrageous series of disasters – earthquakes, syphilis, the Inquisition – sorely test the young hero’s optimism, holding a mirror up to all fanatics, zealots and moral reformers of humankind.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 155 pages | translated by Theo Cuffe | introduced by Michael Wood
What’s new this week?
There weren’t very many classic published yesterday: Faber reissued two Edna O’Brien titles that have been out of print for some years – and Pushkin Press rejacketed two existing titles in their current classics livery.
House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O’Brien (1994)
Josie O’Grady is an elderly woman, living alone in her dilapidated big house on the outskirts of a rural Irish village. Then one day her bedroom door swings open to reveal McGreevy, an IRA terrorist on a bloody crusade, who has chosen her isolated house for sanctuary. As days pass, these two outsiders develop a grudging respect for each other, which grows into affection and friendship, but the police net is closing in and, with dawning horror, Josie starts to suspect that McGreevy is not only using her house as a refuge. Based on interviews with the IRA leader Dominic McGlinchy in Portlaoise Prison and published four years before the Good Friday Agreement, this thrilling, political, poetic novel is a portrait of the state of the Irish nation at the height of the Troubles.
[UK] Faber & Faber | 272 pages
[US] Picador | 240 pages
The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien (2006)
Ageing Dilly Macready lies in her hospital bed in Dublin, awaiting a final visit from her estranged daughter, Eleanora, an author who fled rural Ireland years before, after her sensual first novel caused a local scandal. Through memories and journals, both mother and daughter find themselves reliving the strains, disagreements, expectations and disappointments of their complicated relationship, ultimately finding that their enduring connection remains powerful and true. This is a late novel by O’Brien at the height of her powers, in which she delves deep into the beautiful but intense relationship that exists between mothers and daughters.
[UK] Faber & Faber | 368 pages
[US] Picador | 304 pages
Poems to Night by Rainer Maria Rilke (1916)
In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented his friend Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems meticulously inscribed in his own hand and bearing the title Poems to Night. This evocative sequence of poems, which echoes some of the great themes of German romanticism, is now thought to represent one of the key stages in the creative breakthrough and spiritual evolution of the preeminent European poet of the twentieth century. This translation was the first to bring all the poems together in English and is enhanced by the translator’s valuable introduction and a rich selection of further poems Rilke dedicated to night at various stages of his life.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 96 pages | translated by Will Stone
Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz (1934-7)
The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. Over a city forever altered by the vagaries of history and imagination, great flocks of birds soar, obscuring the sun. Individuals transform into doorbells and insects, seeking shelter from an endless storm. The year sprouts an unexpected thirteenth month. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, weaving a darkly modern tapestry of memory, myth and reality, Schulz’s stories confirm his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 240 pages | translated by Stanley Bill
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
I’m very much looking forward to reading James Joyce’s Dubliners with you in December. We’ll start reading next week, on Friday 28th November. All the details are here.
First, though, here is a little about Joyce himself.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born and raised in Dublin, the setting for all his works. He was born into a middle-class family and attended the Jesuit school Clongowes Wood College.
In 1902, at the age of twenty, Joyce met W. B. Yeats, who was 37. ‘We have met too late,’ said Joyce. ‘You are too old for me to have any effect on you.’
In 1904 he eloped to Europe with a chambermaid called Nora Barnacle. Initially he taught in Trieste, where Italo Svevo – the author of Zeno’s Conscience (1923) – was one of his pupils.
While attempting to find a publisher for Dubliners (1914), Joyce began work on a coming-of-age novel. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15) follows the artistic, religious and intellectual development of Stephen Dedalus, the pen name that Joyce had used for his earliest essays and stories.
Joyce spent most of the First World War in Zurich writing Ulysses, his masterpiece. It was first published in its entirety in Paris on Joyce’s 40th birthday, 2 February 1922.
The narrative of Ulysses follows the mostly mundane activities of two central characters, Stephen Dedalus again and Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, as they wander the streets of Dublin over the course of a single day: 16 June 1904. Its highly patterned sections are modelled loosely on episodes from Homer’s Odyssey, and employ a staggering array of literary techniques and allusions. ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries,’ wrote Joyce gleefully.
Today 16 June is celebrated around the world as ‘Bloomsday’.
Joyce suffered from glaucoma in his left eye and frequently wore an eyepatch.
After publishing Ulysses, he spent the rest of his life constructing his Work in Progress, which was eventually published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake.
Written in a unique vocabulary, incorporating 65 languages and thousands of puns, Finnegans Wake has almost no distinguishable plot or characterisation. It roughly describes a family called Earwicker from Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb. The opening sentence begins on the final page of the book, rendering the entire volume cyclical. Joyce said the ‘ideal reader’ would have ‘ideal insomnia’, starting at the beginning again each time they finished.
I look forward to reading Dubliners with you, starting next Friday.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
Over the course of 2026, we will be reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from January to December. This read-along will be available for free for all subscribers. More details to follow soon. For now, here is a discussion of the various English translations available and which one I’ll be reading.
And if you’re still hunting for the perfect Christmas present, look no further than the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription. You (or a friend) could receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish. To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (2 of 2)
This week we finished reading Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Here are my impressions:
