Ulysseses

Joshua Cohen made a list of cultural Ulyssi:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-15/a-bloomsday-celebratio...

Read anything from here? Can you name other cultural doorstoppers?

The Russian Ulysses: Petersburg (1913) by Andrei Bely

The British Ulysses: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf

The German Ulysses: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin

The Japanese Ulysses: The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) by Yasunari Kawabata

The Hungarian Ulysses: Prae (1934) by Miklós Szentkuthy

The Indian Ulysses: All About H. Hatterr (1948) by G.V. Desani

The Argentine Ulysses: Adán Buenosayres (1948) by Leopoldo Marechal

The Turkish Ulysses: A Mind at Peace (1949) by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

The Welsh Ulysses: Under Milk Wood (1954) by Dylan Thomas

The Brazilian Ulysses: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956) by João Guimarães Rosa

The Israeli Ulysses: Past Continuous (1977) by Yaakov Shabtai

The Spanish Ulysses: Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel (1983) by Julián Ríos

What about Walcott's Omeros as the St Lucian Ulysses? And The Good soldier Švejk as the Czech one?

French Proto-Ulysses: We'll to the Woods No More by Edouard Dujardin

American (United States) Ulysses: Gravity's Rainbow and/or Infinite Jest

The Anti-Ulysses: How it is by Sam Beckett

True History of the Kelly Gang can be the Australian Ulysses.

Ulysses Redux: Finnegans Wake which I haven't read but whose reputation preceded it.

Karl: great catch on the Dujardin novel. I read somewhere it was a big inspiration for Joyce's interior monologues.

True-that, Karl, Thomas Pynchon is Joyce on steroids. I'm half-way through AtD (my first Pynchon) and feel it's an intensely concentrated mix of Joyce and Vonnegut, with a dash of Douglas Adams and methamphetamine.

Ulysses had some speedbumps related to political/historical references and literary styles. I've forgotten the title, but that maternity ward chapter blew me away.

There are good annotations available for Pynchon's AtD references. But the numbers of characters and changes in settings are blowing me away.

Sometimes this experience makes me feel like, compared to AtD, Ulysses was as readable as Good Night Moon. 'Still bulling though it, though.

I read Ulysses back in college over one summer vacation. One hell of an experience. (Luckily it was an annotated version.) Just read a little essay by Borges on Ulysses. A fascinating assessment, especially since he contextualizes the book within the tradition of Irish literary iconoclasm (Swift, Sterne, etc.)

Irish Proto-Ulysses: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXzuUJZuqUI

My copy of AtD has a blurb that describes Pynchon having "an apocalyptic sense like Dostoyevsky, but with better jokes." Cracked me up. Pynchon, like Joyce, creates a maniacal tapestry of the tragic and the comic, down to the atomic level of language itself.

So, anybody read/planning to read Witz? I'm pretty curious given all the comparisons to Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, et al.

#7 "I read Ulysses back in High School..."

Whoa. Snobbus quintessentialis maximus. As for me, I think I recall reading "Cracked" and "Heavy Metal" In High School.

One of these days I keep threatening to read Gargantua and Pantagruel followed by The Anatomy of Melancholy, culminating with The Life and Adventures of Tristam Shandy. One of these days...

9: Did I say high school, I meant college. Same difference, anyway.

Gargantua and Pantagruel isn't a hard slog as some might think. It reads like one scatalogical epic. You should be well prepared with "Cracked" and "Heavy Metal," since there are giant battles and fart jokes abounding.

I read Gargantua and Pantagruel at what I think is the correct age for that book, fourteen.

Despite its cachet in the Western Canon, there's a lot of poop and dick jokes. It follows in the tradition of Aristophanes, Petronius, and other smut-mongers.

8> I haven't read Witz yet, but I read another Cohen novel (A Heaven of Others). It was very, very good.

Found Sartor Restartus by Thomas Carlyle the other day at a library book sale. The book is a bridge between the Romantic and Victorian time periods. It is also the link between Tristram Shandy by Sterne and Ulysses

Very interesting list. I'm ashamed to say I haven't read a single book in it, I have never even heard of most of them. I do have a contribution to make though, another Hungarian Odyssey by Sándor Márai. Unfortunately I don't know the English title, the French translation is Paix à Ithaque (Peace in Ithaca). It's a retelling of the story from the viewpoints of Penelope, Telemachus and Telegonus, Odysseus's son by Circe. It's an interesting book, I enjoyed it.

Re: different takes on Homer, how about Alessandro Baricco's AN ILIAD? That was fun...

Well, in that case how about Illium? I liked it, although the second part seemed to drag a little. Being completely lost in the complex intrigue didn't help, though lost is something I am used to being.

Almost embarrassed to mention it, but there is the hillbilly Odyssey popular some years back, Cold Mountain.

A case might also be made for that classic ne plus ultra, The Divine Comedy.

Has anyone mentioned the Latin Odyssey, The Aeneid?

Could Israel Potter be considered an odyssey? Or is it a picaresque? Or a bildungsroman? I think it's more picaresque than anything.

There's a new translation of THE AENEID by Robert Fagles, who supplied my favorite versions of ODYSSEY and ILIAD. AENEID has never really grabbed me so I'm hoping Fagles can work his magic and make it cry and sing--I read the W.F. Jackson Knight translation some years ago and was utterly unmoved.

18> I loved Cold Mountain, although I completely missed the reference to the Odyssey when I read it...

OK, hold on a tick: What do we mean when we are talking about "Ulysseses"?

1. Books that have the Odyssey as their basis for a plot? (Is literary cachet required?)

2. Books that have had a memorable impact for their literary experimentalism?

Not necessarily an either-or proposition, but we might do a little sifting and winnowing. Margaret Atwood wrote the Penelopiad -- telling a tale of the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view. (John Updike did the same thing with Hamlet vis a vis the POV of Claudius, you see?)

In other words, when it is an Oscar-award winning performance and when it is stunt casting?

When they invent their own category of doorstop?

When Language is a protagonist?

When they divide their readers into (i) cultists or (ii) the traumatized?

When they divide their readers into (i) cultists or (ii) the traumatized?

That's everyone I encounter when I drop the name Atlas Shrugged

I just don't see the connection between Pynchon and Joyce. Literary Snobs? Phew!

#18-22
Ok, I'll continue this OT, topic. How about Huckleberry Finn or better yet my favorite Oh, Brother, where art Thou?. I mean ya gotta love John Goodman.

26 > I remember watching O, Brother, Where art Thou? with a few friends who hadn't read The Odyssey and knew very little about it. They had no idea what was going on.

> 24

You have a point there. Atlas, Shrugged may be the special case:

Books that invent their own category of doorknob.

Language is an antagonist.

They divide their eye-lolling readers into (i) cultists or (ii) occultists.

If Ulysses were a cake it would be 'Death by Chocolate' to be consumed in small quantities on account of its richness.

#12: Poop and dick jokes from Joyce? The hell you say.

http://loveletters.tribe.net/thread/fce72385-b146-4bf2-9d2e-0dfa6ac7142d

31: All the ladies of "society" and country club gentlemen would be surely offended at such verbal tomfoolery. Good thing the Upper Crust never allowed their fine establishments to be soiled by Papists or Gentiles.

(Warning: May contain sarcasm and social satire to make an obvious point about Country Club WASPs.)

Another addition: The trilogy Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias

Joyce clearly didn't really die, he is in hiding and currently writing most of the erotica on the Internet.

34: With Elvis and Osama bin Laden, probably in a soundproof rumpus room in Area 51

I would like to see some fanfiction based on Finnegans Wake

35> Ask and you shall receive: Gilligan's Wake

I have that one but have yet to tackle it.

37: You should probably read Inside Gilligan's Island first.