Then “they put the bag of plums between them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.”įrom the April 2022 issue: Ireland’s great gamble They buy a lot of plums and climb the pillar. He tries to impress them with a story about two middle-aged Dublin women who save their money for a day out. I came to an episode in which the author’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is passing Nelson’s Pillar with some other men. But back then it was still-as it should be-a thrillingly strange and dirty book, full of provocations and subversions. The centenary of the novel’s publication is being marked in Dublin with official enthusiasm climaxing on Bloomsday, June 16. I was reading, for the first time, James Joyce’s Ulysses. The adults clearly thought there was some meaning in all of this-but what did plums have to do with Nelson?
I found this deeply unsettling because I did not know my father could be like that, that he could joke about something I was sure would get us into big trouble. He and my father started laughing about how they could spit the stones down on the people below. When we got to the top of the pillar, he opened the brown paper bag and gave us each one. Vincent had bought half a dozen plums in a fruit shop. I had never before seen the city from a vantage point so high that you could take in the whole place, the bay to the outlying mountains.īut there was, for me, an edge of unease. One day, when I was 8 years old, my father and his cousin Vincent led me and my brother up the 168 steps that wound through the hollow interior of the monument we Dubliners called Nelson’s Pillar. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
0 kommentar(er)
