Loose Leaves/Sadbh: Being related to a famous writer can have its downside. Academics may even write books about you when you're long gone.
The latest in this genre, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, by Carol Loeb Schloss, Richard Ellmann Visiting Professor of Irish Literature at Northernwestern University, will be published this year. The early signs of Lucia's mental illness are the subject of an extract from the book in the current issue of the James Joyce Bloomsday Magazine and makes very sad reading. Furious at what she saw as the personal betrayal implicit in her parents inviting Samuel Beckett to a party after it was clear that her relationship with him was going nowhere, she threw a chair at her mother, Nora, and was admitted by her brother Giorgio to a maison de santé. Also outlined are efforts by the Joyces' friends, Paul and Lucie Léon, to get Lucie's brother, Alec Ponisovsky, involved with Lucia although he was in love with and had an affair with Hazel Guggenheim, younger sister of Peggy. Towards the end of this particular debacle in Lucia's life, she became psychotic for the first time, according to testimony given to one of her doctors.
Meanwhile, Cara Lucia, a new work centring on Lucia's life and death was premièred in New York last month by the Mabou Mines theatre company. Billed as a theatrical ode, the magazine describes how it navigates her final journey "through her imagined afterlife facing her tumultuous past and her legacy as a literary reflection in her father's final work, Finnegans Wake". But that's not all. Also in the US last month, a show called James Joyce is Dead and so is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret played in Philadelphia. "A hybrid of rock, cabaret and psycho- pharmacology", it takes place,
we're told, in Lucia's mental hospital in England and looks at her relationships with family and lovers. Poor Lucia.
The James Joyce Bloomsday Magazine 2003 (3) is published by The James Joyce Centre in Dublin. www.jamesjoyce.ie; e-mail: joycecen@iol.ie
Hot topic
It sometimes seems that no sooner has one book relating to Roger Casement been reviewed than another appears. This weekend, as barrister and author Frank Callanan reviews Sir Roger Casement's Heart of Darkness: the 1911 Documents (see W13), with introduction, commentary and footnotes by Angus Mitchell, news reaches us of Mitchell's forthcoming biography of Casement from Haus Publishing, which is billing it as a book about "Modern Irish History's Turin Shroud". Whatever about the analogy, Casement certainly continues to fascinate as one of the 20th century's most controversial figures and if the public thought the question of whether the Black Diaries were authentic or not had finally been settled, Mitchell's publishers maintain that as far as this book is concerned, it's still an unresolved question and that in this new biography it's "the informed reader" who'll be permitted a decision. The book will be launched in Dublin in July by poet Medbh McGuckian.
Intrigue as Gaeilge
"Brimming with sexual tension and romantic intrigue" - that and no less is what's promised in Sorcha sa Ghailearaí, a novella by Irish Times journalist Catherine Foley. It's one of six books published by Comhar in a series for adults who want to brush up on their Irish. The others are by Pól Ó Muirí, Colmán Ó Drisceoil and Mícheal Ó Ruairc and some of the titles are already out on CD and tape. A native of the Ring Gaeltacht in Co Waterford, Catherine Foley's
book was launched there, back on the home turf, last weekend in
Mooney's pub.
Sorcha sa Ghailearaí le Catherine Foley is published by Comhar Teoranta, €6.50
Jury blinded by science
Aliens and atoms, statistics and stars, they're all there in the books shortlisted for the £10,000 General Prize of the Aventis Prizes for Science Books 2003. Jury panel chairwoman Margaret Drabble and her team have until the June 25th to deliberate on the list, the most high profile title of which is The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
Up against him are Small World by Mark Buchanan, Reckoning with Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer, The Extravagant Universe by Robert P. Kirshner, Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus and Where is Everybody by Stephen Webb. www.aventisprizes.com