I’m going to start this by saying I was not a huge fan of James Joyce the man BEFORE reading Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce. After? Hold me back, folks. Author Nuala O’Connor takes readers through a fictional account of Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, their brief courtship, and then how Nora may have become a muse of sorts for Joyce to create the character Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Nora Barnacle is just barely twenty, and working as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel in Dublin. She is a Galway girl at heart, but has become slightly embittered after her relationship with a Protestant man is ended fairly abruptly by her uncle threatening to kill him. On June 16th (which literature snobs will known as Bloomsday if they are obsessed with Ulysses), Nora meets James “Jim” Joyce, and their encounter turns into a life long relationship. Jim is hesitant to marry, but he’s not hesitant to take Nora to the European continent where they play house and are forced to move from place to place as Jim grows bored with a work assignment or starts drinking heavily.
URGHHHHHHHHHH. There are so many times in this book that I desperately want to pick Nora up, put her in counseling, and insist she never see “Jim” again. Not only is he super gaslighty, he is almost perpetually drunk and a complete asshole. Though they end up with a kid fairly quickly, he sees no need to grant Nora any type of security of the day and refuses to marry. Nora is insanely self sacrificing, and feels that believing in Jim will help him become a famous author, even as he treats her and their children like utter garbage. While Nora is a fictional account of their relationship, it rings pretty historically true based on what information is out there about Joyce and how he treated the people in his life, including his contemporaries. After all, the man straight up told William Butler Yates that he was too old for Joyce to learn from.
Please, please, please do not use this book as a how-to. As someone who has studied some of the literary greats, please remember that a lot of these well-praised authors were absolutely garbage human beings.
Nuala O’Connor does a fabulous job of constructing a fictional narrative. She is an incredible writer, but I still want to throw this book against the wall.
Nora comes to book stores January 2021.
