Conversations with James Joyce

This is the first paperback edition of Arthur Power's unique and fascinating account of his friendship with James Joyce during the 1920s. Power, a young Irishman working as an art critic in Paris, first met Joyce in a Montparnasse dancehall, and the two men maintained a prickly friendship for several years. Power re-creates his conversations with the master on a remarkable range of topics, literary and otherwise. We read of Joyce's thoughts on writers past and present: Synge, Ibsen, Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gide, Proust, T. S. Eliot, Tennyson and Shakespeare. Joyce also speaks of the looming might of America ('Political influence, yes, but not cultural'); of religion ('Do you believe in the next life?' 'I don't think much of this life.'); and of his own work.