Echoes of Joyce

During Sandy, the much too diminutive name for what was called the hurricane of the century, my neighborhood in lower Manhattan lost power for five nights. I kept a flashlight in my pocket for the dark stairway, filled my tub with water, threw out the spoiled food, walked a few miles uptown for supplies. One night, chilled and clammy, desperate for a bath, I boiled water and cleaned myself in a turkey pot for the week as my mother said her family had in Dublin where she grew up during World War I.

The hardest part was in the evening as the dimming light disappeared. We had half a dozen candles, but it got so cold that I wanted to read in bed by 8:00, both to stay warm and because there was little else one could do. I used the flickering candlelight as well as my flashlight to illuminate the page and focus on words and sentences.

On a shelf I was reserving for summer reading I had a novel called Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas whom I had never read, much less even heard of previously, although the Catalan writer was reputed to be one of Spain's leading novelists. Despite that reputation and his translation into thirty languages, Vila-Matas had only recently been brought before an American public, thanks to the agency of New Directions, a small house that specializes in such corrections of our insularity.

I have a propensity for Dublin and James Joyce. I often use Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916) in classes, though my students usually find Stephen Dedalus, its protagonist, too precious for their tastes, and Joyce's language too rich and rambunctious, too self-consciously poetic. I even devoted a semester in a seminar to Ulysses (1922), a novel set in Dublin over thirty-six hours, which is still considered to be the masterpiece fiction written in English in the twentieth century.

My predisposition for Dublin was also a matter of personal heritage. My mother spent her refugee childhood in Dublin and could have been a character in Dubliners (1914), Joyce's early book of realistic stories. I had told her story of bathing in a wooden tub and fetching a wooden bucket of stout for her father on the way home from school in The James Joyce Quarterly. With the first almost fatuously funny words of Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas defines his valiantly quixotic narrator, Samuel Riba, as belonging to "an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated literary publishers." For the 30 years that Riba has been in the book trade, he has watched its members—"publishers who still read and who have always been drawn to literature"—"gradually, surreptitiously dying out."

He sees himself as the last genuine publisher. Riba tells us his firm has gone bankrupt because he refused to exploit the cheap Gothicism of vampire stories. If such failures can ever be regarded as surreptitious, it is because they are considered insignificant from both the business and human perspective, as negligible as the farmer selling his fields to a suburban real estate developer, though much less profitable.

Riba takes great pride in the novels he has published, though he has never managed to find the unknown genius he wanted to publish for the world. All he has is a lot of unsold and out-of-print editions he has published, and a literary catalog which is like the transcript of his achievement and the record of a lifetime of selection. He has been a compulsive reader, and he even reads his own life as a literary text. He sets a higher bar for reading and writing than for living:

The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fail readers but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.

For Riba, reading is a "way of being in the world: an instrument for interpreting, sequence after...