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John McCourt. The Years of Bloom: iames ioyce in Trieste 1904-20. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2000. xi + 360 pp
In this absorbing book, John McCourt, an Irish scholar living in Trieste, convincingly demonstrates that James Joyce, in his years spent in that city, was touched by a myriad of influences and attitudes that profoundly influence the character of his work from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. Over the years there has been considerable if scattered work, mainly by Italian Joyceans, on the social and cultural forces that influenced Joyce in Trieste; here this work is synthesized and greatly extended. A contribution to the renewed biographical interest in Joyce and his family that began with Brenda Maddox's Nora, and all of which exists in the shadow of Ellmann's 1959 biography, this book is, first, a biography spanning the years 1 904-20. It extends and nuances Ellmann's information in fascinâting ways, for example going into much more detail than did Ellmann on the possible identity of the "dark lady" of Giacomo Joyce.
The book's...