A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man is in almost every respect one of the top 10 books of all time. Joyce was a genius ...
... but when he
really got serious about stream of consciousness (works like
Ulysses), he was a mean-spirited jerk. A genius, still, but Joyce once remarked, with a hearty laugh, that scholars would be struggling to make sense of his SOC-centric works for a thousand years
