Ulysses in Read a book from each country

Apr 11, 2010 Ben rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literature, comedy, religion-true-believers, brilliant-characters, religion-non-believers, historical-fiction, surreal, unorthodox-writing-style, imperialism, my-top-100-novels

The first time I read Ulysses, the version I read had no annotations, translations, footnotes, introduction, and the formatting was best described as deformatted. I am it in as a txt document, doing the translations myself (google translator is an extension of my brain), researching events, locations, people, tree types, and trying to parse syntax where the lack of paragraph/sentence breaks made it impossible to tell who, if anyone, was talking, when they stopped, and when the action moved to a The first time I read Ulysses, the version I read had no annotations, translations, footnotes, introduction, and the formatting was best described as deformatted. I am it in as a txt document, doing the translations myself (google translator is an extension of my brain), researching events, locations, people, tree types, and trying to parse syntax where the lack of paragraph/sentence breaks made it impossible to tell who, if anyone, was talking, when they stopped, and when the action moved to a new person or place was something incredible. Not surprisingly, I didn't retain much from the first go at Wandering Rocks. Remarkably, I think this self taught crash course was the best way for me to have read Ulysses for the first time. The struggle with not just the grammar and vocabulary, not just the 1904 Irish music literature and political lexicon, not just the changing writing styles, not just the accidental Finneganization of the substratum of the language through deformating, but also being forced to create a cohesive interpretation of a book that goes out of it's way to mislead the reader, even when reading it the most clear and thoroughly notated version, led ultimately to a complete overhaul of the way I viewed language. Perhaps, a big bang of language where what I viewed as possible just blow up and expanded infinneganitely.

How would I summarize this explosion?

Language, much like the visible, has a modality that one could go as far as calling ineluctable (whatever that means) and there isn't just one proper way to interpret a book or chapter or sentence or word, etc. in fact multiple interpretations can be true simultaneously. Furthermore, even typos or misreadings can reveal discoveries in spite of and because they are anathema. It's hard to put into words how beneficial these thoughts have been to me since then.

Reading Ulysses a second time over a decade later but with essays proceeding each chapter, proper translations, extensive historical footnotes, a much larger vocabulary and knowledge of history, and perfect formatting allowed the plot to take precedence over the language this time. History really does appear as a nightmare for each of the three protagonists in ways that I was able to recognize much better in my 30s than in my twenties, and in ways that are all too familiar. The other point I think is worth noting is that I have read a lot more literature from the time Ulysses was written and proceeding it than the first time I read it where I hadn't read a whole lot, and the more I have to compare it against, the better it compares. It's a book that seems to only gets better as you, yourself, become more knowledgeable, and that is truly rare. ...more

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Sep 15, 2010 Chris Johnson rated it it was amazing

Besides the "Nigger Lips" and all that, this is the most, STRESSFUL BOOK I've ever had the Displeasure/Pleasure of reading. It's too "Out there" but its genius stuff, but still. ...more

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