Nora The Real Life of Molly Bloom

توضیحات

Nora The Real Life of Molly Bloom by Brenda Maddox is the true story of Nora, the woman who, transformed by Joyce’s imagination, became Molly Bloom, arguably the most famous female character in twentieth-century literature. Nora The Real Life of Molly Bloom is also the story of Ireland, a social history encapsulated in the vivid recreation of Joyce and his small Irish entourage abroad. Ultimately it is the portrait of a relationship — of Nora’s complicated, committed, and at times shocking relationship with a hardworking, hard drinking genius and with his work.

In 1904, having known each other for only three months, a young woman named Nora Barnacle and a not yet famous writer named James Joyce left Ireland together for Europe — unwed. So began a deep and complex partnership, and eventually a marriage, which endured for thirty-seven years.

Brenda Maddox’s Nora intends to illuminate the shadowy figure of Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom James Joyce spent his life and on whom he modeled all of his important fictional female characters. And Maddox does begin well. She presents a lively view of the Irish ferry on which the twenty-year-old Nora and the twenty-two-year-old Joyce would have fled Dublin in 1904; then she pauses to give Nora’s Galway childhood. This early material is also lively and fresh and explains in part how the seemingly independent Nora could stay with Joyce, who managed to remain dependent on the charity of others his entire life.

Once the couple reach the Continent, however, and Maddox begins to detail their nomad travels from Trieste to Zurich, Rome, and Paris, readers begin to feel that they’re rereading Ellmann’ s James Joyce. Granted, Nora had no existence without Joyce, and where he went, she went (except for the solitary Dublin trip that occasioned the famous “dirty letter” exchange), but because there is no new material, Maddox has to resort to such speculative prefaces as “Nora undoubtedly thought that . . .” or “She probably felt . . . ,” and the readers are left with no new insights.

The substructure of the book is built on the similarities between Nora’s life and the lives of Joyce’s characters—the subtitle is “The Real Life of Molly Bloom”—but this kind of extrapolating life from fiction is always risky even when an author uses himself as source material. It seems more invalid than usual when he uses his wife.