Finnegans Wake has defeated me, although guilt has driven me to dip into it over the decades. I read Ulysses in a little octagonal house on Omey Island in 1976, but got disenchanted and disheartened at the entrance to Nighttown. I have gone back to it over the years, feeling not only guilty but alarmed. They are the two ticking bombs of Irish literature.
But I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Back Square when I was a student at Trinity College, standing all day in the weak summer sunlight, and crazy in the head with admiration and gratitude at the end of it. Similarly Dubliners, given to me by one of my grandfathers, whose taste otherwise ran to Kipling.
I chose "Eveline" to read because, 40 years later, I am still not over it. The beautiful and threatening set-up, family horrors half-alluded to, and the happinesses so fairly itemised … The "manly" man that comes to rescue her. The full and heartfelt understanding and encouragement of the reader. The scene at the dockside. I am still inclined to cry out the same thing I cried out the first time I read it, aged 17: "Get on the bloody boat, Eveline."
