Marie Delaney answers “I have tried reading this book twice but...”

Deepak Pitaliya asked this question about Ulysses:

I have tried reading this book twice but could not get past 30-40 pages. I even read Iliad and Odyssey before starting this book as the book is supposed to draw some parallel with Odyssey. Is it readable?

Marie Delaney I just finished the work. I faked it in college, but finally sat down to give it my best try after 30 years. Why? Because I felt I owed it to myself a…moreI just finished the work. I faked it in college, but finally sat down to give it my best try after 30 years. Why? Because I felt I owed it to myself and the work which is considered the greatest novel of the 20th century. I'm over 50 years old now and it was hard sledding. I hated it many times. I wanted to quit, but because I had announced my intentions to several good friends, they held my feet to the fire and I endured and triumphed at the end. Like a marathon, I am proud that I finished it. I did a number of things in the tackling of the project: 1) I listened to each section aloud via an audio book, then went back to read the section from the text (I had the original Sylvia Beach edition [reprint] which I think is better than the later academic "improved" edition.) 2) I listened to some of the Frank Delaney podcasts of the first 2 sections and then I was on my way. 3) I looked at some external or secondary sources both before and after each section and often found them helpful but not altogether vital. 4) There are 18 sections of Ulysses which correlate to the sections in the Odyssey. In my opinion 9 of these sections are easy to read and in fact quite enjoyable, they can be read or listened to exclusively without the other 9 sections and one would understand and enjoy the primary principles or themes of the novel. Of these 9 sections, 5 are excellent. Conversely, the 9 other sections are extremely difficult to understand and of those 4 are plain awful. The points of the work are numerous and in order to appreciate it (if I can use that word), you should expose yourself to the entire work in some manner, knowing right away that half of the sections are very difficult and often incomprehensible. I believe the difficult parts are meant by Joyce to confound linguists and academics and the other parts of the novel are to present a universal theme on humanity to us more common readers. I'm not into the complex Joycean literary, historical puzzles and conundrums, but I am into the Joycean poetry of the work that exposes his characters, citizens and people of Dublin, Ireland on June 16th 1904 to the world. I can offer more help and give my list of the 9 cogent sections if you are interested, but give it a try and a lot of time if you want to appreciate the work as it was intended. Just remember it is not a Stephen King or Robert Ludlum novel…in fact there is no other novel I know written in English that is as great as Ulysses or as difficult to tackle.(less)

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