Dubliners, by James Joyce
Although from the front cover this looks deceptively like a novel, Dubliners is in fact a collection of fifteen short stories. Reading it was a new experience for me; I think this may be the first short story collection I have ever read (certainly the only one I remember!). And while I would never turn away from full-length novels, I have to say that the 'short story collection' as a form of literature does have its merits.
What you get in a collection of short stories that you don't necessarily get in a full-scale novel is a sense of parts belonging to a wider whole. You get slices of stories, zooming in on a character and their life and their thoughts and their situation, as if it's a chapter of a novel, and then after a matter of mere pages you're torn away and flung into someone else's life, someone else's story. Put like that, you might imagine that it would be very disjointed, but these stories are often linked by their common overarching themes, or they're rooted in the same settings, or the characters experience similar situations, or there's some significance in the order in which the stories are presented. So what you end up with is not a series of uncomfortably truncated snippets, but a succession of thought-provoking morsels of literature that seem mysteriously and inexplicably connected. It's like walking around the outside of a building and looking in through lots of different windows. All the rooms belong to the same house, and they're each different in size and scale and in what they contain, but they seem to fit together, and if you look hard enough you can see the doors and passages that link them all up. So it goes with the fifteen stories in Dubliners.
As suggested by the title of the collection, these stories are all linked by their common setting: Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. And although all the characters are very different (impressively so) the connection between each of their chapters seems natural, because each new character is older than the previous one. The collection begins with schoolboys, and matures chapter by chapter until the final elderly man. It took me a while to spot this pattern, but I think it's a nice progression, and shows something of the care Joyce must have put into ordering his collection. (He didn't write them in the order we read them.)
There was also a thematic link, which is that most of the stories contained some sort of moment of realisation, and all the stories also revolved around the entrapment or paralysis of the main character. Sounds quite bleak phrased like that, but it was intriguing to see all the different ways Joyce portrayed these themes, the way he always seemed to weave in the same central ideas, but from a slightly different angle each time.
For example, in 'Eveline', we have a young woman trying to decide whether to elope with a sailor. She stands on the dock ready to embrace the freedom, but at the last moment finds that she cannot leave Ireland; she realises that her obligation to her family is a tie she can't break, and she can but stand in paralysis as the boat sails away. And in 'The Boarding House' we see three main characters: a girl and her mother and one of their lodgers. The tale begins with the discovery that the girl and the lodger are having an affair. Over the course of about a day, they all realise that they are caged and trapped by society's rules, and the only way to avoid disgrace for all three of them is for the lodger to marry the girl.
I won't spoil any more of them - the stories are so short it's virtually impossible to write about them without giving away the whole thing! What I will say is that the whole collection was extremely well-written. I was impressed with the way Joyce managed to make each character so captivating; even though we only spend a matter of pages getting to know each one, he managed to get us right inside their heads every single time. As a first foray into the genre of short-story-collection, I was pleasantly surprised with my experience!