Andreas Fischer: James Joyce in Zurich: A Guide. Cham: Springer Nature & Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

• Ronan Crowley

Zurich bookends the nearly forty years that James Joyce lived on the European mainland. The city was his destination when he and Nora Barnacle left Ireland together in October 1904 on the understanding that a job in the Zurich Berlitz School awaited him. That the promised vacancy was a fib is the story of ten years spent in and around Austro-Hungarian Trieste. The Joyce family returned to Zurich to weather the war years in neutral Switzerland and, from 1930 onward, Joyce visited the city almost every year to consult with Alfred Vogt, the celebrated ophthalmologist. Finally, some thirty-six years after their week-long stop-over of 1904, Joyce and Nora returned to Zurich intending to sit out a second world war in familiar, safe surrounds. A little over a year later, Joyce undertook a final journey. He died in the city Rotkreuzspital in January 1941, and his remains were buried at Fluntern Cemetery near the Zürichberg.