Do you know someone like that? They're very fake... this book is just ammo if you hate fake people.

>>25362619

A Painful Case is easily one of the best in the book, and Joyce himself regarded it as one of the weakest stories. Which just goes to show that artists can't always be trusted to evaluate the quality of their own work, for the simple reason that they're too close to it.

There are a large series of gratifying rhymes carefully carefully interspersed throughout. "Yellow/yellowing" is routinely used throughout to indicate decrepitude, old age. An old priest's yellowed teeth, a yellowed photo, etc. There is also an unusually frequent mention of people's nostrils, starting with Flynn and his snuff. The notion of a dirty old man runs through the first few stories. We sort of imagine that Flynn might have been up to no good and his character is easily transferred onto the pervert in the next story, although they're two distinct characters, we're meant to associate them. Characters named Tom have a hard time. the son Tom is the one who is selected for dad to wail on at the end of Counterparts, Tom Kernan starts Grace having just taken a very bad fall down some stairs, and Gabriel's son Tom, mentioned once but otherwise absent in The Dead, is described as being sickly, presaging the teenager who pined after the wife toward the end.