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Ulysses

By James Joyce, Declan Kiberd (Preface)

(263)

| Paperback | 9780141182803

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Book Description

Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession". None of these descriptions, 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 its own 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 astonishing 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 could 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 inforgettable Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, loiter, 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 accordion-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 naïve 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

Critics

McCrum on Ulysses

Even as it was printed, the text of Ulysses was flawed. The combination of Joyce's failing eyesight, the textual palimpsest of the manuscript, and the inevitable glitches of foreign printing produced a version of Joyce's authorial intentions (if thos ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sun, 26 Sep 2010

Newlysses

The book remains difficult but entertaining, and the difficulties will not have been erased by the carefully edited text. To Joyce scholars the situation will be somewhat different: there will be new areas of illumination and a sense of having arrive ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sun, 26 Sep 2010

See all critics

17 Reviews

2 people find this helpful

It was great, but I am afraid I won't do it again :)

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Meeshell said on Jan 28, 2008 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

Jun/16/2010: I'll give the Ulysses the n+1-esim try. This time in English. I really do not have any high expectations, but you never know...
Jun/18/2010: Two pages, so far. Not a great advance but at leas I understood everything this time. I'll see what else I can do.
Jun/20/2010: I've came out with ... (continue)

Jun/16/2010: I'll give the Ulysses the n+1-esim try. This time in English. I really do not have any high expectations, but you never know...
Jun/18/2010: Two pages, so far. Not a great advance but at leas I understood everything this time. I'll see what else I can do.
Jun/20/2010: I've came out with an strategy: read at least one page per day. This way it will take me almost two years to complete it, but I will be able to say that at least I deciphered all the symbols stamped on the pages...
Jun/24/2010: A man is shaving his face. He is talking nonsense things to another man while he shaves. From now on, I will only update this post if anything interesting happens in the book.
Jun/27/2010: Something awesome has happened! I understood one idea in this book: one man is unhappy because he thinks that the other one made fun of the death of his mother.
Jul/02/2010: I am very proud to say that I reached a line with several stars that seems to be some kind of division. I have understood pretty much all of what has been said, but the only thing that really made sense to me was a criticism of the way americans eat, which looks exactly as though it was written for today's american eaters.

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ariadna73 said on Jun 17, 2010 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

not ready for this masterpiece yet...

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AW said on Jan 5, 2008 | Add your feedback

Could not keep reading

Sorry but the characters did not grab me enough to make me want to keep reading and the style was not exactly user friendly either. You can't complain about something you haven't fully read but there are few books that grab me so little that I abandon them

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Tui said on Sep 30, 2011 about the Others edition | Add your feedback

It took me several months to read. I started to really like it and (sort of) understand it only at about the second half.
But it's enormously rewarding. It's an amazing book, maybe the best I've ever read. So moving, so impossible to define. Genius.

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Matteo Pittoni said on Jan 4, 2011 | Add your feedback

I'm sorry...

but the emperor has no clothes. Joyce throws in everything but the kitchen sink, so it's bound to have some appeal, at some point, to just about anyone. Sure, it can be clever and witty. But not in a way that makes you smile to yourself. More in a way that makes you cringe at the deliberateness ... (continue)

but the emperor has no clothes. Joyce throws in everything but the kitchen sink, so it's bound to have some appeal, at some point, to just about anyone. Sure, it can be clever and witty. But not in a way that makes you smile to yourself. More in a way that makes you cringe at the deliberateness of the joke. In my opinion this entire book (up to page 400something at least) comes across as overtly self-conscious; trying so very very hard to be difficult and enigmatic and deliberately verge just short of incoherence. Inventive or not, I simply found the stream-of-consciousness prose to be tedious. I threw this in the bin at page 400-something.
Unless you need to say you have read this, I'd recommend that you don't start. For what its worth...

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jp0001 said on Apr 25, 2010 | Add your feedback