Breakfast, Anyone?

So, I was just able to get into the first few pages of the book and am currently watching (and hearing, and seeing, and feeling…) our hero have breakfast. I really like it so far. A couple of things right off the bat:

1) The prose is excellent. Tight, ultra-descriptive, and somehow feeling very different from your typical narrative. Although it is kind of gross at times, eh? This part describing the bowl in his mother’s sick room is downright revolting: “A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.” Nice!

2) I like the idea of this blog more and more as a companion to reading the book. Reading while trying to think of blog-worthy topics makes you like, pay attention and stuff. My desire to look like something other that a complete blithering idiot on these pages drives me to be the model reader. Imagine that.

3) Joyce weaves some great thematic references to motherhood in the opening pages, from the emotional bits about the death of Dedalus’ mother to the delivery of the “mother’s milk” by the milkmaid (the “wandering crone”). In a rather skillful way, he reiterates this theme (not sure what it means yet) tightly and with purpose, letting each reference set up the other, over and over, but not too much. Good stuff. It should be very interesting to see this play out.

Speaking of the milkmaid, how about this bit of prose describing her morning milking duties: “Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs.” What’s with all the sharp imagery?