Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room.

There is psychological insight as Gabriel, who will be making a speech at the party, turns himself inside out with the fear that the erudite references he has planned will seem like snobbery, and alienate the other guests, drilling a perverse inferiority complex into himself as a result.

There is politics (this is Ireland, after all) in Gabriel’s confrontation with Miss Ivors, an Irish nationalist. Where Joyce succeeds in ‘The Dead’ is in bring together so many elements almost in a showcase of virtuoso story writing. Visitors are plentiful, including Freddy Malins (“they were dreadfully afraid might turn up screwed”) and the hostesses’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta. The setting, to try to whet the appetite without spoiling it, is a house party held by two elderly Dublin women, referred to as Miss Kate and Miss Julia, and their niece Mary Jane. Despite its formal simplicity and beauty, I had to start it twice, just to get a handle on the flurry – one might say blizzard – of character Joyce refers to and introduces in the opening pages. And I don’t plan to say much more about it now, other than: read it. It was years since I’d read ‘The Dead’ and I remembered almost nothing about it, apart from those extraordinary closing lines. Anyway, this is the edition I read: plain and handsome, and irresistible with a matching design bar of chocolate. (I hereby salute my fellow book blogger Lizzy Siddal for introducing me to them.) Is it really a novella, at 64 pages? More cost-effective anyway to pick it up as part of his collection Dubliners, or indeed there is no shortage of places where you can read it online for free. I can’t resist a handsome volume, and ‘The Dead’ is published in a standalone edition by Melville House Publishing, in their series The Art of the Novella. As someone who has failed over and over with Ulysses – but who hasn’t? – I couldn’t resist returning at the weekend to Joyce’s most famous story, which is that rarest combination of qualities: the work of a genius that you can get through in one sitting.

The Dead by James Joyce