One Dublin One Book 2022: Nuala O'Connor on Dublin, Joyce & Nora
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Loading... - Erika Zambo
- 30 Mar 2022
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Each of the five novels I’ve published is set partly in Dublin – my hometown – and partly elsewhere. Writers need their elsewheres. James Joyce was the embodiment of that fact. He whirled away from Dublin in 1904, only to spend thirty-seven years gazing back at the city, with a potent mix of disdain and love.
Dublin is a seductive place, one that – whether you’re from it or not – pulls on your senses and stirs you up. Ulysses – Joyce’s masterpiece – is a book of city-worship, a salutation to Dublin’s architecture and streets; businesses and churches; museums, libraries, and schools; waterways and green spots, eating and drinking houses, sound and smell-scapes. And Ulysses celebrates, too, the people of Dublin, in all their messy, cordial, emphatic, and brash ways. But we can’t celebrate one hundred years of Ulysses, and Dublin, without acknowledging the debt owed to a different Irish city, my other home – Galway. And we must thank Nora Barnacle, a daughter of Galway, for giving so much of herself and her city to Joyce.
I, in my turn, thank the visionary librarians behind One Dublin One Book for choosing Nora, my novel about Nora Barnacle, to celebrate the centenary of Ulysses – the novel is my homage to the extraordinary Galwegian who helped an extraordinary Dubliner become the man, and the writer, he was meant to be. Nora was exactly the life-partner that Joyce needed. She was a robust, cheerful woman who, though she enjoyed books and reading, didn’t worship at the altar of literature.
For myself, I have always worshipped books. Virginia Woolf wrote, 'I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure’ and though there was no library in my west Dublin hometown when I was growing up, I worshipped libraries too. We used go from Palmerstown to Clondalkin Library and, later, Ballyfermot, to dredge up treasure. Luckily, though, my parents loved books, and the shelves at home were well stocked, as was the big wooden library press in Scoil Mhuire, Marlborough Street, where I went to school.
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