...celebrate and the Dublin of our time" (v). Rather than celebration, though, which might have led some writers to strike false, cheerful notes, the authors here expresses strange mixed feelings. As a character in Joseph O'Connor's "Two Little Clouds" remarks, "Dublin was turning into Disneyland with superpubs, a Purgatory open till five in the morning" (13). In the one hundred years since the "Two Gallants," the leech Lenehan and Corley, with his "large, globular and oily" head, walked the city streets that Joyce detailed, many of the city's residents continue to live only slightly above a poverty line, foreigners are treated with contempt, and the inability of men and women to understand one another persists. Only one priest appears in these stories, and he's ridiculed (in Frank McGuinness's "The Sunday Father"). But these stories do depict characters with new money, as well as elderly individuals not adjusting to their new lives in nursing homes. Joyce might find many features of updated Dublin oddly familiar, and probably he would flee it again.

Joyce, so young when he wrote his stories, showed little interest in Dubliners in the lives of the elderly: Father Flynn's two surviving sisters and the Misses Morkan are the rare exceptions. Three of the stories in this new collection feature elderly characters who grasp, release, and grasp again both comforting memories and a clear comprehension of their present surroundings. Dermot Bolger's 91 year-old female nursing home resident (in "Martha's Streets") recalls reading--in a mood of fear and delight--a smuggled-in copy of Ulysses in St. Stephen's Green when she was young;...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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