Senior Center Book Discussion: Dubliners and The Dead

It closes Dubliners, runs past fifty pages, and is really a novella pretending to be a short story.

This discussion takes on James Joyce's The Dead, the last and longest piece in Dubliners. Its centre is a Twelfth Night dinner party where the conversations and small collisions between guests gradually open onto love, loss, life and death. Gabriel Conroy may be something close to a self-portrait, and there is a persistent suggestion that Greta Conroy was modelled on Joyce's own wife Nora. As with most of Joyce, the vignettes of Irish identity keep surfacing throughout. T.S. Eliot called it one of the greatest short stories ever written in the English language, and John Huston's 1987 film adaptation, starring Angelica Huston, was a critical success.

Good to know. Free. The group meets on the fourth Tuesday of the month from September through May, skipping December. Call the Senior Center on 203-834-6240 for details and to register.

Where to go. This one is not at the library. It meets at the Comstock Community Center, 180 School Road, Wilton.