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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/338798.Ulysses?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Ulysses" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173877044m/338798.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/338798.Ulysses?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Ulysses</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5144.James_Joyce">James Joyce</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/26289491?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars 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 published by taking the manuscript to some printers in Dijon, "the capital of the French printing press," according to Joyce.
 
 The book was exported to Britain and the U.S., but was seized by customs at New York and Folkestone. Thence all copies were literally burned due to its ostensible obscenity--after all, when "Part 11" of the novel was published in the Little Review in 1920, two writers were prosecuted and even fingerprinted just for writing favorable reviews of the excerpt. From that point on, Ulysses was considered obscene and therefore unfit for American readers.
 
 It wasn't until 1933, when the Honorable John M. Woolsey, a U.S. District Judge, managed to pick up a copy of Ulysses and actually read it (something the American censors before him had failed to do--they were only going on hear-say), that the ban was officially overturned and Joyce's masterpiece was allowed to be published in the U.S.
 
 This actually plays a big part in the history of U.S. law since it was the first "liberalization" of the censorship law. Were it not for Judge Woolsey's decision, we might not have Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn (and we would therefore also not have that great episode of Seinfeld, "The Library"), or much of anything from D.H. Lawrence.
 
 And that's just the story of the novel's publishing.
 
 Perhaps the reason censors have always had such a hard time with Ulysses is the fact that it is a no-holds-barred depiction of life, complete with hunger (both stomached and sexual), eating, the sly case of masturbation, reading and thinking whilst defecating, being jealous of just about everybody, the plethora of feelings on both sides of an extramarital affair, an extramarital affair, and--perhaps most damning--the depiction of how and why we alienate one another.
 
 There is young Stephen Dedalus, the hero from A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and the seed from Stephen Hero, who is gloomy, angry with the British rule of his country, who feels both indifference and hate for himself at the death of his mother (who supposedly died after he refused to kneel and pray by her bedside), who is alienated by his boisterous and spend-thrift father (and who is therefore looking for a worthy father-figure) and also his jovial but uber-aggressive friend and roommate, Malachi "Buck" Mulligan, and by just about everyone else he comes in contact with. He spends a lot of his time in the novel thinking about his existence, existence in general, his family, his attempts to be a poet, and the servile state of Ireland. Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique was definitely perfected by the time he got to writing Stephen's part of the novel.
 
 Then there is the ostensible hero of the novel, Leopold Bloom, the son of a deceased but still guilt-inducing Jewish father, the husband to a beautiful--and apparently oversexed (and not by him)--wife, and the father to a young but distant daughter and a dead son, who died while still a young boy. At the point of the novel (which takes place on one day, 16 June 1904), Bloom is no longer a Jew, having converted to Catholicism in order to marry his wife, Molly. His marriage is in fact something of a joke about Dublin since he is so quiet, neat, mild-mannered and a little effeminate and she is a social and probably sexually-straying singer who is popular with all sorts of men (and women, it seems) throughout Ireland. But his Jewish ancestry (in an excruciatingly anti-Semitic country) and laughable marriage are just the start of Bloom's alienation: he always seems to be the odd-man-out, and his peers make no efforts to prevent this. Perhaps this is why, when seeing how negligent and insensitive young Stephen's father is, that he decides to step in and look after the young man for a while (which nicely fulfills one of Stephen's needs, too). As he goes about Dublin that day, thinking about life, having an affair of his own (albeit literarily--he only conducts the affair through letters, and freaks out when his recipient suggests a meeting; and the nom-de-plum for our quiet, mild-mannered, and slightly effeminate hero? Henry Flower), he shows us who and what we humans really are--how we think about things, how we do things, and why. I think this is what most gets under the skin of those who have problems with this novel.
 
 The novel takes its title from Homer's ancient epic hero, who is by all means forward, aggressive, and uber-masculine--all the things that Leopold Bloom--aka Henry Flower--is not. And yet, while Bloom lacks the personality of Ulysses--aka Odysseus--he most definitely shares the epic hero's status as an "everyman." Ulysses/Odysseus is everything men aspire to be; Leopold Bloom/Henry Flower is everything we actually are, whether we'd like to believe it or not. 
 
 And women? How do they fit into Ulysses? On the one hand, you could just say that they are depicted negatively, as many have before, since the main female character conducts an extramarital affair behind her husband's back and the majority of other women in the novel are badgering old shrews. But Joyce does something at the end of his masterpiece that frankly throws a monkey wrench into the works of that line of thinking: he concludes the novel with a 45-page stream-of-conscious rant conducted not by Bloom or even Stephen but Molly, Bloom's supposedly unfaithful wife. In this extremely dense section of the novel (there is absolutely no expository narrative here telling us what is going on outside Molly's head--we only get her reactions), we come to understand that Molly sought out her affair only because she suspected her husband of having an affair first, or at least of falling out of love with her (the real reason, we learn from Bloom, is his fear of making--and losing--another child like his son, Rudy). We also see how vulnerable she is, how much she hates having to deal with the afore-mentioned old shrews and all of the drooling, salacious men who can't look her in the face because they're too busy looking about a foot south. And as Molly's thoughts come to their climax--just as she's falling asleep--she remembers how and why she fell in love with Leopold, how he proposed, and how sensitive and romantic he is and always has been. 
 
 So in a sense, by giving us the varying perspectives of young Stephen, middle-aged Bloom, and on-the-cusp-of-middle-aged Molly, Joyce gives us not so much a depiction of just an "everyman," but of an "everyhuman." We see the inner-workings of our minds and the reasons for our motives. 
 
 Honestly--what more could we ever possibly ask from a novel?
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1297814?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Michael's review
rating:
recommended 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 published by taking the manuscript to some printers in Dijon, "the capital of the French printing press," according to Joyce.

The book was exported to Britain and the U.S., but was seized by customs at New York and Folkestone. Thence all copies were literally burned due to its ostensible obscenity--after all, when "Part 11" of the novel was published in the Little Review in 1920, two writers were prosecuted and even fingerprinted just for writing favorable reviews of the ...more

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