City Streets and Summer Haze
Half Penny Bridge, Dublin. Photo courtesy of Clara Boothby.
James Joyce's numerous works have long acquainted the world with Irish culture and landscape through use of historical references and descriptive language. As the most celebrated Irish novelist of all time, Joyce has a truthful tone that puts us in the thick of city life in Dubliners.
"Jimmy set out to translate into days' work that lordly car in which he sat. How smoothly it ran. In what style they had come careering along the country roads! The journey laid a magical finger on the genuine pulse of life and gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to answer the bounding courses of the swift blue animal.
The drove down Dame Street. The street was busy with unusual traffic, loud with the horns of motorists and the gongs of impatient tram-drivers. Near the Bank Segouin drew up and Jimmy and his friend alighted. A little knot of people collected on the footpath to pay homage to the snorting motor. The party was to dine together that evening in Segouin's hote and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who was staying with him, were to go home to dress. The car steered out slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers. They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening."
This entry is excerpted from Dubliners by James Joyce.
MORE BY JOYCE
Ulysses
Finnegan's Wake
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man