The Standing Stones

A language dies in a famine, and something strange grows where it stood, as John Banville hears it: an English with Irish bones, oblique, dreamy, half in love with evasion. Banville closes his series on James Joyce's Dubliners with the language Joyce heard in Dublin and the nerve it took, at twenty-two, to write it flat. Then the reckoning this series has been saving: Banville has grades for everything Joyce wrote after this book, the sacred ones included, and not one of them is the grade on file. His last word is about these fifteen small stories, and where they finally stand. Not beside the monuments. Apart.