It may be a classic, but it is a stinky, starchy, drunken, cuckolding classic. Enjoy it as such. We make too much of the “classics” in literature, to the point where we discourage ourselves from the reading of them.

I spotted one more minor, grammatical error: “He also make a stab at augmenting his meager income [...]“. Should be “made”.

On December 28, 1914, the Austrian police arrested Stanislaus as an Italian sympathizer AND interned him near Linz.

Aside from that, Mr. Mangiafico’s article is a marvelous look at the man and his family, as well as his environs. I have never thought of Joyce as a salesman of tweeds, a movie theater owner, a speaker of Italian, or a resident of Trieste. These facts are fine, humanizing threads in the fabric of a rather difficult man.

Just one correction. You write that Pola is 58 miles to the east of Trieste. In fact, it is almost due south. I recently visited both cities and had my wife take my photo next to the two Joyce statues.

Signor Mangiafico’s infatuation with Joyce is as puzzling as it is unwarranted. A more overrated literary mountebank has never (dis)graced English literature.

Such as those rendering the title without an apostrophe?

As the creation of another Dubliner might have said, twice looks like carelesness.

Also, I am not sure that Joyce, at that time, would have referred to Dublin, a city he considered the centre of paralysis, as his “beloved” (paragraph 4).

Thank you.