Nora by Nuala O’Connor

426 pages

Publisher: New Island Books

Library book

Book Club Read

 

Blurb

Dublin, 1904. Nora Joseph Barnacle is a twenty-year-old from Galway working as a maid at Finn’s Hotel. She enjoys the liveliness of her adopted city and on June 16—Bloomsday—her life is changed when she meets Dubliner James Joyce, a fateful encounter that turns into a lifelong love. Despite his hesitation to marry, Nora follows Joyce in pursuit of a life beyond Ireland, and they surround themselves with a buoyant group of friends that grows to include Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and Sylvia Beach.

But as their life unfolds, Nora finds herself in conflict between their intense desire for each other and the constant anxiety of living in poverty throughout Europe. She desperately wants literary success for Jim, believing in his singular gift and knowing that he thrives on being the toast of the town, and it eventually provides her with a security long lacking in her life and his work. So even when Jim writes, drinks, and gambles his way to literary acclaim, Nora provides unflinching support and inspiration, but at a cost to her own happiness and that of their children.

 With gorgeous and emotionally resonant prose, Nora is a heartfelt portrayal of love, ambition, and the quiet power of an ordinary woman who was, in fact, extraordinary.

 

Review

This is going to be one of my ‘I’m not entirely sure what to say’ reviews.

Don’t get me wrong. Nora’s story captivated me. I loved her voice and the way she picked her words and formulated her sentences.

“Sometimes I crave a little alone time to just let my thoughts scatter.”

That’s just one example. I have a much longer list of Nora-sayings written down in my reading-notebook.

Nora was also an easy read in so far that I got swept up in the tale, found it hard to put the book down, and couldn’t wait to get back to it when I had to pause my reading. At the same time, Nora is anything but an easy read when it comes to the content of her story and in my mind, I retitled it…

The things we do for love…

Because you would need to love somebody deeply in order to put up with everything Jim Joyce put Nora through. From James refusing to marry her for the longest time, through the various locations where they lived in sometimes abject poverty dependent on others just to keep a roof over their growing family’s heads and food on the table, to a life led making sacrifices for James’s art, it takes someone special and an extraordinary level of love and trust to stay the distance.

I wonder if I would have had a better understanding of Nora and James if I’d known more about them and if it would have made a difference if I had read, for example, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.

 I’m not sure how to write this review without summarising the journey the Joyce family made, and honestly, if you're curious about that, you're far better off reading this beautiful book.

Ultimately, Nora was a gorgeously written book about an anything-but-easy life. I was happily surprised to discover it was universally loved and admired by the members of my reading group, even if one or two felt the need to remark on the more erotic scenes in the story. I’m very happy I read this story. And it just goes to show that it is indeed true that behind every great man there’s a great woman because it is hard to imagine James Joyce reaching the heights he achieved without Nora facilitating his life and art.