Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

In the stories of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Thomas looks back and observes himself growing into the artist, the poet that he became in adult life.

The title, a deliberate nod to James Joyce's similarly autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, outlines the subject matter, stories of a misspent youth, of intellectual and artistic development, bouts of terrible poverty, and of great adventure.

Where Joyce's timeline is linear, however, Thomas's is more jumbled.

The 10 stories offering kaleidoscopic refractions of a life of which Thomas is often a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Professor John Goodby is the author of a biography of Dylan Thomas.

He's interested in the mechanisms of memory, how we misremember or embroider.

So it's about growing up in Swansea with specific moments pinned down, epiphanies if you like, where the narrator realizes something and grows, understands, and can go forward and become the adult.

The Joyce parallels are striking.

When Thomas began these stories, Joyce's Dubliners, his own portrait of the city he grew up in, was one of the most influential story collections in English.

The two books share a lot, non-chronological snapshots of life in a small community, each story self-contained, but cumulatively building a picture of a place and of the young artist beginning to form within it.

Both writers build stories around small humiliations, moments when a character is forced to see themselves through others' eyes.

But the differences between the two writers are significant.

Joyce keeps himself out of his own book.

Thomas is front and center.

Joyce's feeling for Dublin is deep but ambivalent.

Thomas's for Swansea is warm, nostalgic, and unembarrassed.

You can hear it in the prose, Joyce sparse and exact, Thomas a riot, chewy, dense, sensuous.

There's a sentimentality in Thomas that Joyce might have disdained.So what are the stories themselves? In A Visit to Grandpa's, the child doesn't understand why his grandfather thinks he's driving a carriage and horses when he's actually in bed, whereas we realize he's showing signs of dementia.

In Patricia, Edith, and Arnold, Dylan the boy can't comprehend what Dylan the adult can clearly see, that the park keeper has been two-timing the two maids who brought him there.

Perhaps most significantly, in Just Like Little Dogs, young Thomas, with a freedom long lost to today's children, roams around in the dark, observing the strange goings-on of the townspeople, all of whom seem to have a secret predilection, a skeleton in the cupboard, or some other comic or tragic failing.

It's an image that captures the central conceit of the collection.

One constant theme is how the young boy is dismissed as an oaf, an idiot, or inconsequential, but how that conflicts with both the character's desire for learning and his evident intellect.

This conflict pervades the collection.

Indeed, it seems to have pervaded Thomas's own life.