Ulysses

published	June 16th 1990 by Vintage
binding	Paperback
isbn	0679722769 (isbn13: 9780679722762)
pages	783
description	Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book-...more [close] Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language. Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism. Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus [close]
date added	03-14-07 edit book

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | more...

discuss this book

topics	replies	last activity
Really??	3	08/19/2007 07:37PM

new topic

groups with this book

friend reviews (0)

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

Best Books of the 20th Century

327 books | 1079 voters

Best Books Ever

556 books | 578 voters

More...

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 6422)

Michael rated it:

07/11/08

Read in December, 2003

recommends it for: anyone unafraid of 768 pages and hear-say

You can always tell a book will be timeless when it's got a story all of its own:

Joyce first tried shopping the colossal Ulysses manuscript around Paris in 1920, but was turned down by nearly everybody. Then 1922 came along and an adventurous young entrepreneur named Sylvia Beach--who owned a little bookshop called Shakespeare and Co., which attracted the likes of young Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and even our anti-Semitic poet-at-large, Ezra Pound--managed to have it publis...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

Nick rated it:

06/19/08

bookshelves: lingeringfavorites

at one point in my life, i thought i coined the term "phallophagism":

Like the "obese grey rat," the minnows in Stephen's
description are growing fat off the flesh of the dead. The analogical implication of this analysis is that Jesus is feeding on the flesh of the dead, specifically on what can be assumed to be the penis of a bloated corpse (a "spongy tidbit" behind "his buttoned trouserfly"). The minnow, analogous to the scavenger rat, is here repr...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

Scott rated it:

(review of isbn 0394743121)

06/24/08

6/16/2008: Happy Bloomsday!

I’m a little disturbed by Goodreads’ clear bias against the Gabler edition. Type Ulysses into the search field and try to find it. Collusion between Goodreads and the Vintage paperback? I wouldn't be the first to suspect it.

This year I’m rerererereading episode 14. One of my faves. Every year I think that I know Ulysses well enough that I will have no reason to lean on Blamires’s Bloomsday book, but then every year I’m surprised that it actually can s...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

Kyle rated it:

(review of isbn 0394743121)

05/27/07

bookshelves: fiction, literary-fiction

I don't know why but this part of Ulysses has always amused me terribly:

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its s...more I don't know why but this part of Ulysses has always amused me terribly:

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon....less

Like this review? yes (3 people liked it)

1 comments

Jared rated it:

(review of isbn 0141182806)

03/22/07

bookshelves: alltimefavorites

Read in January, 2003

recommends it for: not everyone

Maybe my favorite book and definitely a strange obsession of mine. I knew next to nothing about Irish history before reading this but had a masochistic streak of reading insanely difficult books, so that was enough to get me going. If you read "The Bloomsday Guide" along with it, it's actually not so hard, but Joyce is definitely an acquired taste, and I would recommend NOT starting here with him. The logical order in which to read him would be chronological: Dubliners, Portrait, t...more Maybe my favorite book and definitely a strange obsession of mine. I knew next to nothing about Irish history before reading this but had a masochistic streak of reading insanely difficult books, so that was enough to get me going. If you read "The Bloomsday Guide" along with it, it's actually not so hard, but Joyce is definitely an acquired taste, and I would recommend NOT starting here with him. The logical order in which to read him would be chronological: Dubliners, Portrait, then Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake... well... nevermind.

I think the reason I like Ulysses so much is that I love reading/watching/hearing things that just BLOW my mind. Ulysses is so incredibly inventive, meticulous, passionate, and above all, HUMAN. It's easy to label writing like this as pretentious, but if anything, the so-called pretentious sections were intended by Joyce as either an affront to the stuffy literary ideals of the time, or just to be FUNNY. And that's what most people don't realize, that Joyce intended this to be a "comic novel." Essentially it is just the story of two outcasts who wander the city-- one, the young Stephen Dedalus, pushed out of his own home by two "friends" who are mooching off him-- the other, the middle-aged Leopold Bloom, pushed from his own home because his wife is busy "practicing" her musical performance with her male singing partner--or, actually, busy having sex with him. So we stay in the thoughts of the two men throughout their entire day until they meet each other at night. Along the way they eat, drink, masturbate, cry, get into fights, hallucinate, sing, talk and think. In other words, they do the shit all of us do everyday. Nothing about the plot or action of Ulysses is remarkable, and that's the point. The whole purpose of the grandiose design of the book is that ALL people's lives are grandiose. The novel ends inside the head of Bloom's wife, a monologue presented in one 40+ page sentence which is probably the most famous passage in the book and arguably the best. Trouble is, I fear, most readers don't even get that far. I for one will never regret the time I put into it... and still put into it. By the time I kick, I'll have probably read it cover to cover more than ten times....less

Like this review? yes (7 people liked it)

1 comments

Steve added it

03/27/08

recommends it for: Anyone Wanting to be Well-read

This Will Make Sense - Eventually!

When I started this book, I must admit it was slow going. I was never a big fan of Joyce. Dubliners was cold and a bit too precious for me. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was likewise nothing to get too excited over. So it was solely with a sense of responsibility to literary tradition that I finally opened my age-old copy of Ulysses to see what all the fuss was about.

Immediately I hated it as I've hated few books before. Dense and uncommunicative...more This Will Make Sense - Eventually!

When I started this book, I must admit it was slow going. I was never a big fan of Joyce. Dubliners was cold and a bit too precious for me. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was likewise nothing to get too excited over. So it was solely with a sense of responsibility to literary tradition that I finally opened my age-old copy of Ulysses to see what all the fuss was about.

Immediately I hated it as I've hated few books before. Dense and uncommunicative. Sure it had stream of consciousness and all that - but this really was perfected by Faulkner, etc. - or so I thought.

I kept reading - and reading and reading and reading. There came a time about 150 pages into this almost 700 page monster that I seriously considered doing my book physical harm. I thought of throwing it or ripping it or even burning it. However, good sense prevailed and I just kept at it.

Then, the epiphany!

Joyce's Ulysses doesn't just mirror Homer's epic but the reader actually reenacts it in the very process of understanding the book. Sure, the text is hard and Joyce doesn't take you by the hand - but it's meant to be that way. In the very difficult process of making meaning out of the text we become an integral part of the text and its meaning. The book is about the experience of literature more than it's about Mr. Bloom or Stephan Dedalus. In effect, you become Ulysses, yourself, and your very difficulties in understanding parallel the hero's difficulties finding his way home.

What emerges after such a discovery is still a difficult and - at times - frustrating book. However, it is unquestionably a work of genius. Moreover, it goes far beyond the generation of stream of consciousness. The modes of communication are so varied here that each chapter almost reads like a new book. View points are important as well as the parallel structures they build cumulatively, however, the very mode of communication, itself, is ¾ of the story. Moreover, the honesty of the character portrayals is shocking. These are real people to a degree we rarely if ever see portrayed. We see everything Bloom does - from pontificate to use the bathroom.

To anyone having difficulty with this book, I advise you keep reading. Promise yourself that you'll finish this book. Then you can hate or love it - whatever you want. Just finish.

Now that Joyce actually makes sense, I wonder if I should go back to his early work or on to Finnegan's Wake - that monster of textuality that goes even further than Ulysses. I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet - but I will be. I will be....less

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

Justin rated it:

12/08/07

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: Whoever is willing...

The Vintage Classics is a great version to get because it includes the Supreme Court ruling from Judge Woolsey lifting the ban on "Ulysses" which allowed it back into the United States. Besides, it also contains the Joyce's corrected text.

It's true that this book revolutionized and refined stream-of-conciousness but it's almost too easy to get caught up in that fact. Really, though, Joyce is doing nothing more in his writing than what people do every day in their lives. When I fir...more The Vintage Classics is a great version to get because it includes the Supreme Court ruling from Judge Woolsey lifting the ban on "Ulysses" which allowed it back into the United States. Besides, it also contains the Joyce's corrected text.

It's true that this book revolutionized and refined stream-of-conciousness but it's almost too easy to get caught up in that fact. Really, though, Joyce is doing nothing more in his writing than what people do every day in their lives. When I first started reading this book I re-read over passages but later realized it was better to go on, to follow the certain thought process the character had, just to help realize how complex and subtle some things really were. The book is dense but mimicks how a person thinks and feels within the context of every day life. With that said, the plot is only there as something running in the background which allows various thoughts to be provoked by the action. What makes it a difficult read (this is what the writer of preface to "Finnegans Wake" said as well) is the readers wanting to piece things together systematically so that they make sense, but no story written so heavily in stream-of-conciousness (or any type of psychological plot structure) can be looked at in the same chronological manner. Have you ever had a discussion or been walking down the street when something random seems to remind you of something else completely unrelated? Often times a path may be traced to how or why something reminded you of something else and the same goes with this book. But I think the hardest part is accepting that everything fits together even though we don't immediately understand it as we're reading.
As others have said, the last chapter is worth reading the book alone. The inward struggle Molly has with herself, along with her reconciliation at the end, is absolutely wonderful. Without the initial 740 (!) pages written in his difficult style I don't think I would have gotten as much out of this chapter. I have to say, I was literally breathing heavily after I read this and felt as though I were feeling exactly as Molly. It's certainly a lot of pages to wade through but worth every minute and gives perfect reason for enjoying a second reading.
This is by far the most enjoyable and rewarding book I've ever read. When I put it down I thought to myself, "What the hell just happened?!" and I wish every book could do the same.

Be like Molly, say "yes!"...less

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

Matt rated it:

01/31/08

as a bloke with an english degree, i guess i'm supposed to extol all thing joycian and gladly turn myself self over to the church of joye. after all, that's what english grads do, right? we revel in our snobbery and gloat about having read 'gravity's rainbow' and 'ulysses' start to finish.

well, i may be in the minority when i say i didn't care for this book at all. i get that it's a complex book with innumerable references to greek mythology, heavy allegories, dense poetry wacky structures,...more

Like this review? yes (7 people liked it)

1 comments

Arsalan rated it:

03/25/08

bookshelves: always-reading, currently-reading, favorites

Everyone knows that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, but as a psychiatrist what I find most valuable and fascinating about it is how Joyce describes the events of the same day from the point of view of a hundred different narrative voices, pushing realism to where it collapses upon itself, till you come to the conclusion that there is NO objective reality, there are REALITIES as perceived by different nervous systems, and all of us see the world through our own little keyholes, colore...more Everyone knows that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, but as a psychiatrist what I find most valuable and fascinating about it is how Joyce describes the events of the same day from the point of view of a hundred different narrative voices, pushing realism to where it collapses upon itself, till you come to the conclusion that there is NO objective reality, there are REALITIES as perceived by different nervous systems, and all of us see the world through our own little keyholes, colored by our imprinting and conditioning.

The importance of this neuro-psychological relativism can only be brought home in a psychiatric clinic or by reading this book. For those who have done either, it seems manifestly evident that all of our reality constructs are models or allegories for what's 'really' going on and we live in a world where we are all continually negotiating on behalf of our stories, yearning to be understood. When we realize that each individual is looking through the point of view of their own 'reality tunnel' it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from and the ones who do not have the same 'reality tunnel' as us do not seem ignorant or deliberately perverse or lying or hypnotized by some mad ideology. They just have a different perception than ours and every perception might tell us something interesting about our world, IF we are willing to listen and be accepting. After reading this book reality as a singular noun makes no sense at all.

Also, Ulysses is a microcosm of human life: Bloom defecates in chapter 4, masturbates in chapter 12, urinates in chapter 17. During the course of the same day he goes to a funeral, he goes to a maternity hospital to visit a woman friend who is in labor, he visits a whorehouse, he visits a church, he visits a newspaper office where they're all quoting outstandingly hilarious examples of pompous political speeches, and he passes through the library where people are discussing Shakespeare. Every aspect of human life is happening simultaneously in this book, and often while reading it you'll experience what Jung calls synchronicities, you'll be reading about something, however innocuous, and it'll happen to you! I'm not kidding, you have to read it to know what I'm talking about.

I'm on my second re-read and don't think I'll ever tire of it.

...less

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

Dale rated it:

10/03/07

Read in July, 2007

This is the eighth book I read on my commute, and the first one that took longer than a week to read. This is a big, heavy, dense book, in terms of mental effort and also physically (I read a prestige-format hardcover edition, the kind with gilt pages and a built-in cloth bookmark like a Bible).

A while ago my dad and I were talking about the fact that we were both English majors but we both had major gaps in our personal reading histories with respect to the canon of classics. We did some ...more This is the eighth book I read on my commute, and the first one that took longer than a week to read. This is a big, heavy, dense book, in terms of mental effort and also physically (I read a prestige-format hardcover edition, the kind with gilt pages and a built-in cloth bookmark like a Bible).

A while ago my dad and I were talking about the fact that we were both English majors but we both had major gaps in our personal reading histories with respect to the canon of classics. We did some research and found some lists of "greatest novels of western literature" (so this was probably around the year 2000 when everyone was doing millennial retrospectives and whatnot) and started picking out ones we had never read but felt like we should have read. Ulysses was on both our lists. Dad bought the big expensive hardcover edition, read it, and then loaned it to me.

I actually had Ulysses at my house when the new job and new commute started, but I decided to ease myself into the reading-on-the-bus thing. For all I knew, I might give up on mass transit after a month, but I didn't want the fact that I was reading Ulysses to be a factor in that (which, given the book's reputation for being almost impenetrable, I figured was a strong possibility). So I read Dungeons & Dragons books and Harry Potter, and then dove into James Joyce once I knew I'd be doing the Metro commute long-term.

Ulysses really is a great piece of art - but in my world I often use the word "art" to mean "cool, interesting, beautiful, and over my head." I bought the Cliffs notes before I started reading it and they helped a lot. I thought parts of the book were transcendent, and parts of the book were trying too hard, but overall I gotta respect Joyce for writing something so challenging and provocative and sticking it to the literati. It's definitely a product of its times (the 1930s) which added another layer of amusement. Overall I'm glad I read it, because it felt like an accomplishment and it did bring me some pleasure along with the challenge. Not sure I would recommend it to anyone else, but I'm glad I read it.

(There will be other "classics" added to my reading list soon, once I work my way through a bit more of the pop trash I've been gorging on.)...less

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

2 comments

Alex rated it:

02/03/08

bookshelves: the--best-

Lucky for me, the first encounter I ever had with Ulysses was with an actual 1930's edition of the book (ancient artifact!) stuffed in the shelf of the library of a university where a writing workshop I attended took place. And it was one of the strangest experiences to crack it open expecting something like most other books, only to find a huge S and a lot of dashes where there should have been quotes. (Perhaps I'm getting my facts mixed up because I can't remember if that edition had the big S...more Lucky for me, the first encounter I ever had with Ulysses was with an actual 1930's edition of the book (ancient artifact!) stuffed in the shelf of the library of a university where a writing workshop I attended took place. And it was one of the strangest experiences to crack it open expecting something like most other books, only to find a huge S and a lot of dashes where there should have been quotes. (Perhaps I'm getting my facts mixed up because I can't remember if that edition had the big S or not.)

The coolest thing about Ulysses is that it seems to have no influence; an entirely new and original thing. Sure there's Odyssey and the Hamlet parallels, but the only indicator of that is the title.

Joyce's unique style is incredibly subjective. Not once does some friendly external narrator break in and say "Okay, this is what's going on." Nope, it's all action and dialog and fragmented monologues. It took about a month of an adaptation period to get used to this poetically labyrinthine method of storytelling but once I did, I enjoyed it immensely and didn't quite like objective fiction much.

Whenever I pick up a copy of Ulysses, I can flip open to a random spot and I'd go: "yup, that's the Cyclops episode." Joyce was very versatile, and each episode is in a different narrative style and each one is so unique you can identify one just by looking at a page. That's not something you can do with any author.

Ulysses isn't perfect. It's a very ambitious experiment in which Joyce tries to transcribe everything that goes on in his character's heads. We see Dublin through their eyes in this stream-of-consciousness writing. It's very cool because the characters feel a lot more realized. But if I recorded everything that goes through my mind in a day, there'd be more than words, there'd be sounds, music, images, emotions etc. Also, while his earlier work was a bit more objective, Joyce's characters in his short stories were original and vivid people, whereas Stephen and Bloom just seem like autobiographical pasties in his fiction, but these blemishes don't deteriorate from the awesomeness of this masterwork.

...less

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

5 comments

Ed rated it:

(review of isbn 0394743121)

03/12/08

recommends it for: adventurous readers who like a challenge

I found Ulysses to be the single most challenging and the most frustrating good book I've ever read. There were times when I just wanted to throw Ulysses against the wall across the room. In the end, however, it was well worth the effort. The final chapter of Ulysses is one of the best in the book, so don't give up on it.

In any event, I can't even imagine reading either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake without the help of a reading group. I also suggest that you read as many critical essays as poss...more I found Ulysses to be the single most challenging and the most frustrating good book I've ever read. There were times when I just wanted to throw Ulysses against the wall across the room. In the end, however, it was well worth the effort. The final chapter of Ulysses is one of the best in the book, so don't give up on it.

In any event, I can't even imagine reading either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake without the help of a reading group. I also suggest that you read as many critical essays as possible that have been written about these books concurrently while reading them. If you don't, you'll miss a ton of stuff and barely scratch the surface really. If you don't look for and find the underlying meanings in these books, they are not worth reading.

I would suggest working your way up in difficulty: Start with Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (which is fairly short and something of a prequel to Ulysses), then hunker down and get serious with Ulysses and some related critical essays and commentaries, and finally move on to Finnegans Wake, assuming you aren't sick of Joyce by then. Many consider Joyce's The Dubliners to be the most interesting and fun to read. It might be a good place to start as well.

Many literati consider Ulysses to be the greatest English-language novel of the 20th century. I disagree (see Gravity's Rainbow), but it's definitely worth reading. If you read only one Joyce novel, I would recommend Ulysses. Make sure you read the Hans Gabler edition, published in 1986! It contains many very important corrections to errors in the text that other editions still have. For critical essays and commentaries, my reading group recommends the book edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman and the book by Harry Blamires and the book by Stuart Gilbert. There's also Gifford's Ulysses Annotated which is nothing but a humongous collection of footnotes explaining the text in minute detail, but I frankly didn't find that worthwhile reading and used it only as an occasional reference for the particularly obscure passage.

Before you start reading Joyce, let this Joyce quotation be a warning to you:

"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles [in Ulysses] that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." --James Joyce...less

Like this review? yes

add a comment

Rick rated it:

(review of isbn 0394743121)

07/30/07

bookshelves: classic

Read in January, 1989

recommends it for: everyone who is human

No greater book, certainly in the 20th century. Dead, white male. Yes. If you have to choose, there is Proust, Mann and Joyce. However, even Thomas Mann said that Joyce was the better craftsman.

I have read the Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) in both English and German once each, Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) did not keep my attention for more than 100 pages. Ulysses, on the other hand, I have read now around 20 times.

The Date. June 16. Bloomsday. An...more No greater book, certainly in the 20th century. Dead, white male. Yes. If you have to choose, there is Proust, Mann and Joyce. However, even Thomas Mann said that Joyce was the better craftsman.

I have read the Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) in both English and German once each, Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) did not keep my attention for more than 100 pages. Ulysses, on the other hand, I have read now around 20 times.

The Date. June 16. Bloomsday. Any date. Any year.

The Plot: Bloom's Journey. Stephen's journey. Everyman's journey. Your Journey.

At 5:00 am start out, stately and plump, with three eggs, a metaphor, and a black mass, consider how the English have despoiled the Irish, recite a poem by Yeats, brood on love's bitter mystery, take a cold swim in the bay and a warm philosophical walk along the beach, think about Aristotle, Plato, Schopenhauer, Blake, Christ, Hamlet, Kant, Boehme, Vico,... think about nothing, the Ding an sich, figure out what that Shout in the street is, attend a funeral, ponder your cat (what does that meow mean?), place a newspaper add, go to the library, fret over your spouse's lover and your own paramour, consider being a vegetarian even though you relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, have a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy, debate Shakespeare with people who know his works, debate Shakespeare with those who don't, wander about the streets of your city, have a Guinness or two and respond to your paramour's letter, (what's that soap in your pocket?), get in to a bar brawl with Polyphemus, masturbate on the beach, visit a maternity ward, get stinking drunk, visit a brothel, better yet, be recognized there, see your dead mother's face, break a chandelier, get punched in the face, lose your ego, save your soul, find your son, find your father and together urinate beneath the stars.

Now return home knowing that despite all of this chaos, despite all that you have experienced in one pedestrian day in the middle of June, or any month, that there is indeed one word known to all men (love) and that you can say to your life, no matter how stinking ordinary, "yes I (say) yes I will Yes."...less

Like this review? yes

add a comment

Samuel rated it:

03/31/08

bookshelves: favorites, to-re-read

Read in June, 2004

Yes, I've actually read it. Yes, cover-to-cover. And yes, even Circe.

I was introduced to Joyce at a very young age, by my older brother. I remember him talking about it with my parents and with his friends, and it made me want to read it so badly. I attempted to tackle it in high school, but got to Proteus and stopped. It was only after I graduated, when I really decided to get into Joyce.

A friend and I had found out about a Joyce symposium taking place in Dublin that summmer, no less o...more Yes, I've actually read it. Yes, cover-to-cover. And yes, even Circe.

I was introduced to Joyce at a very young age, by my older brother. I remember him talking about it with my parents and with his friends, and it made me want to read it so badly. I attempted to tackle it in high school, but got to Proteus and stopped. It was only after I graduated, when I really decided to get into Joyce.

A friend and I had found out about a Joyce symposium taking place in Dublin that summmer, no less on the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. We quickly made the decision that we had to attend. Our parents furnished us with plane tickets, thinking that it was to be an academic vacation rather then an alcohol sodden romp through western europe. It was in the weeks approaching our impending departure that I decided to get serious about finishing Ulysses.

I poured through the first dozen sections feverishly, only to get sidetracked by my new found lack of academic responsibility. So thats how it went. The day of our departure came and I still hadn't finished what was supposed to be the impetus for my going abroad. Luckily, I had a nine hour flight to look forward to, and fueled by the bottle of whiskey under the seat in front of me and about a gallon of shitty airline coffee, I finished Ulysses before we touched down in Dublin.

The thrill of having accomplished what I thought was the be-all end-all of english lit (and about half of it in a single sitting)was intoxicating. I was also good and drunk. Being able to walk the streets of Dublin following the paths of Stephen and Bloom was amazing. Resting my arms on the disused gun turret and looking out across the "snotgreen bluesilver" sea was an experience I won't soon forget.

A few years have passed since then and I've made my way back through the old beast one more full time, and a few jaunts through the first 200 pages once or twice. Ulysses is something that should be read by anyone, regardless of whether or not they grasp its implications.

N.B. Don Gifford's superb companion Ulysses Annotated is a must have if you've ever scratched your head in confusion when reading Ulysses. ...less

Like this review? yes

add a comment

Kelly rated it:

(review of isbn 0394743121)

05/23/07

bookshelves: favorites, fiction

Read in April, 2007

recommends it for: People who have a lot of time on their hands and a masochistic streak

I don't feel really worthy to review this book. It's Ulysses. It's the greatest modern novel in the English language. It's a love letter to it and a history of it and has a sick, twisted relationship with it's readers and has actually driven people to a lifetime of studying just a few chapters of it. I know I missed a thousand things in every ten pages I read, and if I went back again, I'd see things completely differently.

And nonetheless, I /did/ read it, and I feel the need to mark that do...more

Like this review?