Vit Babenco's Reviews > Dubliners

Childhood… Old age… Ages in between… Coming of age… Dying…

“Oh, quite peacefully, ma’am, said Eliza. You couldn’t tell when the breath went out of him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised.”

The first amorous admiration from afar…

I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

Dubliners is an opulent gallery of colourful personages and kaleidoscopic images… Truant schoolboys encounter an erudite vagabond… A young girl afraid of changes destroys her future happiness… Motorcar races… A penniless beau begging for money… A boarding house proprietress catching a husband for her seduced daughter… A reunion of two old friends who become just strangers now…

The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years, of finding himself with Gallaher in Corless’s surrounded by lights and noise, of listening to Gallaher’s stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature. He felt acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend’s, and it seemed to him unjust.

A rogue of an incompetent petty clerk whose only pleasure is drinking… A timorous service girl’s day off… A lonely man frightened of any human relationship… Empty talks and idle drinking… A despotic mother’s foolish behaviour… Drunkenness and piety… The Christmas celebration as a culmination of the year…

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef.

Celebrations end… Life continues…
Infants are born… The aged die… And traditions are kept from generation to generation.