James Joyce - Rome and other Stories

About the Book

“James Joyce, Rome and other Stories” outlines the months in which Irish author James Joyce (“Ulysses”, “Finnegans Wake”, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”) lived in Rome, between 1906 and 1907. Accounts of meetings between Mr. Joyce and detective Herr David Mondine, and the letters written by Mr. Joyce to his brother Stanislaus, as well as and a diary kept by Herr Mondine, lead to an enthralling reconstruction of those days. Joyce becomes frustrated with life in Trieste --then part of Austria-Hungary and today part of Italy-- and so he, with his unwedded wife Nora Barnacle and their little son Giorgio, flee s the port town on the Adriatic for a fresh adventure to Rome, that most Catholic of capitals, which he loathes on account of its vulgar ritualism and immoderate liturgical pomp. Mr. Joyce wanders about like a wayfarer captured by a city he finds ghastly, ghostly even, hanging about the taverns and inns, eating and drinking. The artist draws fascinating similarities between his native Dublin and Rome, the legitimate daughter of a city of old myths and mummified glories set amid majestic ruins and ridiculous buildings erected in honor of a new century. "The book is enriched with about 140 old photographs that show people and places frequented by James Joyce and Mr. David Mondine, his alter ego."

About the Author

Born in Naples, he spent his childhood in various Italian cities since his father was a banker. In Bologna he began to attend intellectual circles at Roberto Roversi ‘s renowned Palma Verde bookstore. It was in one of the magazines published by this cultural center that the first part of “James Joyce, Rome & Other Stories” was first published. He later worked for various radio producers, especially Radio Capodistria and the Italian Swiss Radio so he moved to Tuscany. Finally he was able to devote himself to reading and to pursue his literary work. His main literary influence was Calvin, author of extraordinary literary intellectual subtlety and intelligence. Giuseppe Cafiero continuously reads Borges, another great sublime, inimitable author who also worshiped Joyce. Yes, Joyce is intriguing, beautiful, but Borges ... Giuseppe Cafiero has written renditions, free adaptations, reductions for the radio, translations from French. The spectrum of names is extensive, from Shakespeare to O'Neill, from Raspe to Daudet, from Toller to Brecht. But his strongest point is the "bio-fiction," as this book about Joyce in Rome, another published in 2008 about Vincent van Gogh, and one about Monsieur Gustave Flaubert in 2010. The three characters were revolutionary in their own field. Van Gogh, with his extraordinarily beautiful explosion of colors. Joyce, who broke with the literary realism of the 1800's. Hence, his books boast a great command of his characters’ voice thanks to his experience writing for the radio. Giuseppe Cafiero wrote such a program called "James Joyce in una notte in Valpurga” in 1990 and after that he finished the fictionalized story about Joyce’s stay in Rome in 1906 and 1907. Giuseppe Cafiero lives in the Tuscan countryside, in Lucignano, Italy.