Maya Jaggi
Yugonostalgia
In Pula, an Italianate harbour town in northern Croatia, I found James Joyce seated on a terrace beside a ruined Roman arch. The bronze is outside Uliks (‘Ulysses’), a little Art Nouveau cafe in what was once the Berlitz school. The 22-year-old spent five months teaching English there to Austro-Hungarian naval officers in 1904–5, living with Nora Barnacle – with whom he had just eloped – in a tiny flat across the street.
The young couple found their stay tedious. In letters home Joyce dismissed Pula, at the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula, as a ‘back-of-God-speed place – a naval Siberia … swarming with faded uniforms’. Istria, with its vines and olive trees, was a ‘long boring place wedged into the Adriatic, peopled by ignorant Slavs who wear red caps and colossal breeches’. Yet before hastening 70 miles north to Trieste, he wrote several chapters of Stephen Hero – some of which he adapted into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – in a cafe on Pula’s seafront. The novel’s serialisation began in 1914. One hundred years later, it strikes me that Stephen Dedalus’s vow not to serve home, fatherland or church but to fly past the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying
'This problem has dogged Labour’s efforts to become the "natural party of government", a sobriquet which the Conservatives have acquired over decades, despite their far less compelling record of achievement.'
Charles Clarke on Labour's civil wars.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/comrade-versus-comrade