The Years of Bloom

Reviews / Votes

'The Years of Bloom is an engaging, readable, and mericulous study. By scrutinising unpublished material and undertaking an elaborate survey of local sources McCourt has added much to our sum of knowledge about Joyce. More importantly, he has enriched our reading of Joyce's works... this absorbing book encourages us to expand the contexts in which we engage with Joyce's fiction.' - Anne Fogatty, The Irish Times 'John McCourt brings to his task a uniquely rich and balanced sense of the real city inhabited by Joyce and the remembered city about which he was always writing. Joyce is given to us in this book in the kind of loving detail his talent deserves, though without papering over his often reprehensible behaviour and character.' - Bruce Arnold, Irish Independent 'McCourt has opened a whole new vista on Ulysses. No other critic or biographer has so clearly identified the cosmopolitan, indeed, the Oriental, aspects of Joyce's great symphony of cities..... His book is a revelation.' - John Banville, The New York Review of Books 'John McCourt has lived and worked in Trieste for the past 10 years. His researches into its life, and the politics of the intensely interesting period when it was the major Austro-Hungarian seaport in the Mediterranean, have yielded a rich and well-told narrative.' - Daily Telegraph 'John McCourt's book is a must for all Joyce scholars, but it will interest and entertain many common readers as well.' - Masolino D'Amico, Times Literary Supplement 'One of the many delights of McCourt's book is the way he makes creative curiosity a literary imperative in the Irishman's self-exiled life....McCourt is even in judgement, generous in opinion, and wonderfully informative about events and attitudes in Europe a century ago.' - Hayden Murphy, The Herald 'McCourt's excellent local knowledge of Trieste is documented to great effect in The Years of Bloom. It provides a compelling case for re-evaluating the importance of Trieste for Joyce's work by relating his artistic development to the cosmopolitan life of the city.' - John Nash, Sunday Business Post 'This book changes out entire view of Joyce's Trieste. It establishes the city as a vibrant crossroads of cultures, languages and religions. Joyce was born in Dublin, but as McCourt shows, he grew up in Trieste.' - Colm Toibin 'The Years of Bloom is a fundamental contribution to the study of Joyce's life and work, presenting it in a largely new light. The outstanding feature of the work is McCourt's ability to see all the background material that he has unearthed in Trieste as a major contributory element in Joyce's creative faculty. The publication of The Years of Bloom is an extremely important cultural event.' - Giorgio Melchiori 'As an Irish scholar living in Trieste, McCourt has uncovered a wealth of information on Joyce that others have missed. McCourt's detailed study of Joyce's life in Trieste illuminates the creative process that informed his work during this crucial period when Joyce came to maturity as a writer.' - Michael Patrick Gillespie