Ulysses

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

View other editions of Ulysses.
View books by James Joyce.

The greatest book by the greatest author - period - Rated
Ulysses stomps over other works of literature like a brontosaurus. No book before or since has matched it.

In two minds... - Rated
I'm in two minds about this book.
On the one hand, this is quite obviously a work of genius at some level, full of beautiful poetry, humour and truth about the human condition, all filled into a day in the life of the two (or three including the last chapter) main narrators.
On the other hand, there are so many allusions to things the average reader will be ignorant of as to render meaningless, which allied to the difficult narrative makes this a highly frustrating read.
In trying to understand parts of the novel that passed me by, I did some literary research and discovered the amazing depth this novel. Each chapter for example (apparantly!) has a theme based on colour and body part, and for this to be successfully woven into a story is a great achievement. The different styles and techniques used to tell the story is also highly impressive, while at the same time adding to the difficulty of the read.
The book is full of riddles and puzzles, some of which the answers to remain elusive to minds greater than mine. And there-in lies the problem; who has the time to spend reading and re-reading a book that is already close to a thousand pages long in order to fully understand it?

I have given this four stars rather than anything lower (and I very nearly did), to acknowledge that many of the problems of this book are down to the ignorance and lack of patience (or intelligence) of the reader, and indeed there are parts that are genuinely enjoyable through being funny, truthful or touched by genius.
However the nagging doubt remains that this book and the praise it has engendered is a partial case of the emperor's new clothes (and indeed the same could be said of modernism as a whole). At the very least, it seems that in being so tremendously ambitious, Joyce fell slightly short, as he himself is known to have admitted.

The subject of the book is humanity - Rated
The subject of Ulysses is simply humanity, the fact of being human. But then, Ulysses is full so of music, that it becomes a book which is almost possible to listen to. And Ulysses has so many poems embedded within the text that it should be called a poem, and not a novel. Finally, Ulysses has a lot of memory, but it is not the memory of the author, it is your memory. Every line, every page will make you remember episodes and moments, happy or not, of your life. At the end, Ulysses is a book about yourself as a human being.

Great concept, suffering read! - Rated
Fashion usually falls into two categories: one is conceptual - you will appreciate it as something to look at or even wear at a club - and the other is practical - you can actually wear them daily and the clothes suit your practical needs. Same with literature: one you will admire for the dare and conceptual quality, the other you will simply enjoy. The best literature, IMHO, is the one that manages to do both with panache. People like Flaubert or BEE at their best always have my undivided attention. Joyce I can respect, but don't ask me to read his stuff after Potrait of the Artist (a nice book, but not that amazing to begin with). I tried reading Ulysses and stopped halfway. This is prose-poetry sustained by a theoretical framework about what literature should really be like. It is meta-fiction. The last chapter is worth reading out loud just to try and understand what the modernists - Woolf, et al - had to rise up to in challenge. But after the first few chapters, this book becomes unbearable. Sure, it has wonderful paragraphs of sublime music - the sounds Joyce produces out of english syllables are miraculous - but I'd rather listen to music itself than read such a boring, boring book.

Looks great on the shelf! - Rated
Of all the editions of Joyce's fattest book available, this is perhaps the best edition. The elegant silver spine shows sophistication at a glance, and the image on the cover is both artistic (black & white photo of a tower) & shows that it is literary (there are words imposed over it). The overall impression that having this book in one's sitting room gives is of intelligence and taste. Bravo!