Where Literary Ghosts Linger: A Book Critic Goes to Dublin

14.10.2024 - 19:03 / nytimes.com / Oscar Wilde / James Joyce

This summer, my wife, Cree, and I went to Dublin to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. We chose it over more exotic destinations because it made sense to us: I’m a book critic and she’s a writer. How could we not go to Dublin, perhaps the most literature-soaked city in the world? The literary ghosts still stalk the medieval streetscapes — so many ghosts that they collide into one another and seem to make up a spectral and talkative rugby team.

The city’s Nobel laureates alone include the poet Seamus Heaney, the novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (“Waiting for Godot”), the poet William Butler Yeats and the playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (“Pygmalion”). Among those who grew up here are Oscar Wilde (“The Picture of Dorian Gray”), Jonathan Swift (“Gulliver’s Travels”) and Bram Stoker (“Dracula”). James Joyce (“Ulysses”) is in a category of his own. And then one must pay heed to the great wit Flann O’Brien, the ombibulous poet Brendan Behan, the novelist and playwright Maeve Binchy (“Circle of Friends”) and the novelist Roddy Doyle (“The Commitments”).

Is a book critic’s Dublin different from other people’s? Not if you are paying attention. There are the bookstores, for one thing. The city is filled with them, new and used. They are among the oldest and best-stocked in the world. Cree and I both like books published in Ireland and Britain: They’re sleeker and better designed, most of the time, than their American counterparts. We crammed our luggage with them — editions we’d never seen from Colm Toibin, Edna O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elizabeth Bowen and others — as if we were smuggling truffles back from Siena.

And, of course, there are the pubs. It has been argued that the slow and steady intake of Guinness stout, which has been made in Dublin since 1759 and is served in almost every bar, has long lent rhetorical velocity to this city’s writers, in the manner that the Green Bay Packers are powered by Wisconsin cheese.

And everywhere are the shrines. You can’t turn around in Dublin without bumping into a writerly plaque, painting, poster or statue devoted to a writer.