NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce
Seventy years ago, on April 10, 1951, Nora (Barnacle) Joyce breathed her last in Zürich. She was then buried in the same cemetery—Fluntern cemetery—as her beloved, the great modernist writer, James Joyce. Years later their remains were moved from their separate graves to a more prominent shared grave in which their son later was also buried. There are even those in Ireland, hoping to see their remains return to Irish soil before the 100-year anniversary of Ulysses’s publication next year. Nuala O’Connor’s brilliant, moving, and yes, delightful, NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (2021) gives today’s readers a first-person narrative through which to meet and admire Nora Barnacle Joyce. From her own perspective, O’Connor’s Nora shares details of her life with legendary James Joyce, from courtship, to shared self-exile, parenthood, chronic illness, literary success, and, ultimately, death.
This first-person historical fiction perfectly begins with Bloomsday—June 16, 1904—the day of Nora and James’s first romantic (read: physical) exploit. This is also the day James Joyce chose immortalize as the setting for his most famous work, Ulysses; the day his hero Leopold Bloom makes his way across Dublin trying to return to himself and his marriage, just as Odysseus meanders across the Mediterranean for a decade attempting to get home to his wife, Penelope. (Hence the term “Bloomsday.”) O’Connor’s NORA appropriately progresses chronologically from June 1904 to Nora’s death in April 1951. It is, essentially, the story of her life with James Joyce in her own fictionalized words.
While James Joyce is known as one of Ireland’s great writers, he wrote very little from the Emerald Isle itself. In fact, he and Nora fled Ireland for the continent not long into their courtship. Their unconventional relationship—living as a married couple for decades before actually making matrimonial vows—reflect Joyce’s fanatic refusal to conform that would heavily influence his writing. Nora and Jim’s travels took them to cities like Paris, Trieste, Zürich, and Rome. O’Connor titles each of NORA’s chapters, thus, with a single word followed by its date and location as the novel moves chronologically through time and place. As chapters and years pass, Nora reflects on the struggles, intimacies, and joys that come with life by James Joyce’s side as he creates and eventually publishes his great works beginning with his short stories in Dubliners, then on to his novella of Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, and finally his masterpiece of Ulysses, and beyond with his dreamscape of Finnegan’s Wake.
NORA includes something for everyone. Because O’Connor crafts NORA from Nora’s own perspective, the cast of characters centers on the Joyce’s domestic relations and includes myriad intimate and relatable moments. It also echoes many of Joyce’s themes in his own works and meanders through the family’s dark times as well, not shying away from their struggles and demons, nor their physical desires and passion. Jim’s brother, Stanislaus, and his sister, Eileen, play important supporting roles; and, of course, Nora and Jim’s two children, Giorgio and Lucia, do as well. Lovers of literature will enjoy the cameos of characters like Ezra Pound and Earnest Hemingway, as well as literary patrons like Harriet Shaw Weaver (known to the Joyce family as Saint Harriet) and art collectors like the Guggenheims. Finally, Joyceans like me will appreciate the attention O’Connor pays to significant moments in Joyce’s creative process and writing career. Ultimately, this is a novel every mature reader will likely admire and enjoy.
In fact, I’d argue that O’Connor’s NORA is an ideal starting place for anyone who aspires to someday read Joyce’s works. All of Joyce’s writing includes plenty of fictionalized autobiography, so meeting him and his family on intimate terms is a perfect starting point. For those, like me, whose personal and academic lives have intertwined with the works and life of James Joyce (I did, it’s true, name my eldest daughter after Joyce’s life partner, Nora, after spending years of my twenties studying and writing about Ulysses, censorship, and Victorian sexology), NORA is a charming portrait of Nora Barnacle Joyce. What’s more, it reflects the monumental role she played in supporting and encouraging the creative life of James Joyce. NORA also explores the great personal sadness that punctuated the Joyce’s later years, as well as the global tragedy of both the World Wars. Suffice it to say, I cannot recommend this novel enough.
A Few Great Passages:
“I shrug him off. ‘It isn’t funny, Jim. Dying is not one bit funny.’
‘It’s not, Nora. Death descends so lightly but it’s the hardest thing of all’” (22).
“I feel stung that he sees me as coarse and uncaring. ‘If you could feed us, we might have an army of children,’ I mutter and continue on to the kitchen to wet the teapot. Isn’t it nice for men to want babies, I think, when it’s not them who has to be weighted down by them for new ten months, or who have the care of them after for twenty years or more? I clank and bash my way through the tea-making, irritated by Jim and his lofty words. Truncated existence, indeed. Of course it would be very grand to have a scatter of children, but that’s a rich person’s game. With little money we’d be mad to have a be mad to have a big family. [. . .] I need to be practical, the way my mother was, and I mean to be just that” (177-178).
“And I’m suddenly astonished to realize that Lucia will grow to be a woman just as I once did, just as la Nonna did, and we don’t know, nor will we for a long time, who she’ll be or where she’ll end up. The idea undoes me and I rush after Lucia, scoop her into my arms, and cover her head with kisses” (198).
“’This life is nothing but a wander through the wilderness of Ziph, Nora, and none of us know what it’s for.’ Jim’s at a very low webb when he’s quoting from the Bible and we hold each other and cry fountains of tears for poor Mammy, who love us both well” (446).
Bibliography:
Cain, Sian. “Bid to repatriate James Joyce’s remains ahead of Ulysses centenary.” The Guardian: October 15, 2019. Retrieved on 4/11/21: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/15/bid-to-repatriate-james-joyce-remains-ulysses-centenary
O’Connor, Nuala. NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce. Harper Perennial: 2021.
