When I first came to Dublin in the summer of 2004 the city struck me. It was unlike anything I had known before but at the same time it felt so oddly familiar... Like a place you were born to..
It was June 2004 and the city was still celebrating the Bloomsday Centenary.
And here is a litle digression: as an English literature student I knew Joyce, I had read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and was very proud of it back then) but I didn't know Ulyssess and hence had no idea who exactly Bloom was and why the city celebrated him.
It took me a while (half a year to read Ulysses and two weeks to savour Dublliners) to understand that the 'prick with the stick' - as Dubliners affectionately nicknamed James Joyce (or more precisely his statue in Earl Street) - simply "presented Dublin to the world".
Yes, the year 1904 was a "defining literary moment" for Dublin. Not only because of this guy...
...who spent the whole day of 16 June 1904 wandering around the city (and this one day was enough to become a literary icon celebrated in the years to come!) but also beacuse of this volume...
.."a chapter in the moral history of my country", as Joyce himself descibed the collection written in most part in 1904-1905.
For these two reasons June 2004 was a perfect moment for Joyce fans to visit Dublin, for Dubliners to celebrate their city and for ignorants like myself to start to discover this "oddly familiar place" and its literary representations..
A year or so later, when I was revisiting Dublin, I stumbled upon this book:
The back cover description (or blurb, if you will) says: "In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Dubliners, eleven foremost Irish authors revisit Jams Joyce's 'dear dirty Dublin' in this inspired collection of luminous, new short stories."
Sure I had to no choice but to buy the book and see how these authors "celebrate Joyce and the Dublin of our time" (as the editor Oona Frawley put it in her introduction).
Meave Binchy's "All that Matters" is probably the weakest story in the collection. It could be basically summarized like this: A teenage girl named Nessa lives in a shabby house in Dublin. She lives there with her hard-working Ma, lazy Da and two brothers. Every summer her aunt from America comes over. She is classy, cultured and she knows "all that matters". And more importantly, she is "able to reinvent Nessa". So Nessa becomes Vanessa because "all that matters is the image you create of yourself" and "if you are to ammount to anything, then you must have respect for the way you appear to others". Apart from the name, the reinvented image includes new clothes, new hair style, rearranged bedroom and a Saturday job. Oh, and some cultural outings that help Vanessa meet interesting people. Next summer the aunt is proud of her neice and the niece thinks her life without the aunt would be, oh so miserable. But then she gets pregnant. Dublin is not a place for a pregnant teenager but neither is New York. Having arrived in her aunt's apartment, Vanessa realizes that all this time her aunt has been "making up some fake existence over here in America." And it starts to dawn on her that "going home again, back to Dublin, back to Chestnut Street and to herself, that was all that mattered."
I have never been Binchy's big fan. Well, to be honest, I don't like her writing at all. Maybe it reads well for some people, but for me her lines are just so..not intriguing. Maybe the idea behind the story is good (then why does it seem so repetitive?) but the plot alone doesn't make a good story. Maybe it works like that in a novel but definitely doesn't work in a short story... "All that Matters" lacks at least one dimension, which is particularly visible in the closing passage. "Aunt Elizabeth seemed to talk in capital letters a lot", says Nessa in the beginning of the story. Reading the final epiphany, however, gives me a strange feeling that it is Meave Binchy who overuses capital letters... And I don't seem to like it.
