Gordon Bowker, “James Joyce: A New Biography.”
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 608pp. $35. Illustrated.
San Francisco Chronicle, July 15, 2012
By Martin Rubin
In many ways, James Joyce is a literary biographer’s dream: a rich, complex oeuvre; a complicated and peripatetic life, much of it in exile; a multi-faceted character made for skilled excavation. Yet he also presents problems for those attempting such an enterprise . . . . But no matter how good Ellmann’s “James Joyce” was – and it still stands in many ways as a model – the world and with it literary biography and criticism have moved on since 1959. So it is a great boon that British biographer Gordon Bowker, who has written lives of Malcolm Lowry, George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell, should have taken on this task and better yet that he has produced such a fine portrait of the artist and the man who was James Joyce.
For Martin’s full review, click here or visit sfgate.com.