Ulysses, a novel by James Joyce, is a literary peregrination of Dublin that takes place on one day, June 16 1904, during which a host of Dubliners, some invented and many who once existed, come within the cynosure of the Joycean Odysseus, Leopold Bloom. In the course of this day, now celebrated annually as Bloomsday, Leopold attends a funeral, makes an assignation, suffers cuckoldry, masturbates and, at the end of the day, rescues Stephen Daedalus, a younger version of Joyce, from an altercation in a brothel and brings him home to his Penelope, the unfaithful Molly Bloom. Peter Costello extends Bloomsday to the three score years and ten of Bloom’s life, from May 6th, 1866 to January 31st, 1937. It is, for the most part, a dutiful compilation and tedious elaboration of the information Joyce included in the vast cornucopia of Ulysses. Molly Bloom dies around the middle of Costello’s symbiont parasite of a novel, when Leopold’s afterlife begins. The tedium is unalleviated. To any external observer, Leopold is an Everyman, Anyman, an average man. Anyman, an accumulation of externalities, is boring. What made Bloom fascinating in Joyce’s Ulysses was the protean exuberance of his inner life. Costello, observing Leopold from the outside, drains the life from him. To be fair, his last few pages, on Bloom in his 70th and final year, do manage to evoke a sympathetic, obituary closure. An insufficient consolation, worth only a few stars as a literary curiosity. ( )

A fine, well-told story. It was enjoyable to pick up on details from Ulysses, but I found myself mostly impatient to get to June 16, 1904. Once there, the day itself was a let-down (of course), and once the day was passed, my interest quickly faded.
A fun experiment, but not a particularly illuminating one. ( )