My Little Ireland is an intriguing puzzle of factual and fictional narration. Dirce Waltrick do Amarante picks up the various threads of James Joyce, the writer of Finnegans Wake, and Jim Joyce, the lover of Nora, and weaves them into a masterly play. Nora Barnacle, Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle are the three women who occupied Joyce’s imagination, life and writing. The threads of truth and fiction (“reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction,” U 17.323) are carefully entwined with the female discourse of the two washerwomen from the ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ chapter of Finnegans Wake. The chittering waters of Anna, Joyce’s last creation, a mythic Eve, the strength of Molly’s monologue and Nora, his lifelong
partner and wife, the mother of his children, are all celebrated in Dirce’s My Little Ireland, the Irish goddess Ériu or Erin.
Marija Girevska