Ulysses (1922)

NA

One of the hardest, most confounding books I've read. Brilliant in places, maddening and silly and boring in others. Like good medicine that tastes bad; I see why it's great literature, but there are very large chunks of it that I can't say I like very much at all. I can't really say I liked it, but I recognize its worth. ( )

This novel is mind-boggling.

It took me more than six months to read it, together with most of Shmoop's notes and analyses of chapters, themes and trivia. If you are going to read Ulysses, make yourself a favour and plough through it with a good companion text at hand from day one. Shmoop is not exactly an oracle of rigour and scholarship — but I found their informal guide surprisingly thorough and well researched; if you want something more serious, use [b: Ulysses Annotated|10543|Ulysses Annotated|Don Gifford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1166254003s/10543.jpg|13227]. I think a reference or summary for Ulysses is essential if, like me, you are not a native English speaker: I would have missed lots of details in the action and many allusions, subtleties and puns without it.

This is probably the most difficult text I have ever read. I had hard times with other books in their original language many times before (Il pendolo di Foucault, Il Principe, Heart of Darkness, The Lord of the Rings back when my English wasn't very good…) or even written in my mother tongue (Don Quijote with its 600 pages of Golden Age Spanish). But Ulysses is something entirely different.

Reading The Origin of Species or The Name of the Rose and finding those books difficult, then opening Ulysses — that feels to me like studying English or Italian and feeling frustrated because one is making very slow progress, then trying to learn German or Japanese. That gives one some perspective!

Another piece of advice: read at least these books, and in this order, before attempting Ulysses: The Iliad → The Odyssey → Hamlet. Of these, Hamlet is the least necessary: there are references to it (and to other works by Shakespeare) in Ulysses, but they are concentrated in a few chapters, and aren't essential to enjoying the novel. If you have time for one prerequisite book only, make it The Odyssey; it's the most important one and it is honoured, reworked and parodied endlessly in the novel, from cover to cover, starting with the title “Ulysses” itself.

I was a good boy, and did all that: I came to Ulysses having read those other books, and with the introductory Shmoop pages well digested and the Shmoop summary and analysis for each chapter in my bookmarks. I was prepared to be patient with the novel, and decided to overcome the frustration that I anticipated at a text that I imagined dark, baroque, dense.

In the end there was some of that, yes (patience and frustration), but less than I imagined. Barring the plethora of obscure allusions to Irish historical figures, place names, games and slang… the many quotes and verses in different languages (Latin, Gaelic, German, Italian, French, Spanish)… etc, most of my hours with Ulysses were of surprise, admiration, laughter, curiosity and emotion.

Joyce is an erudite reader and a virtuoso of language who spent seven years deliberately composing a masterpiece teeming with innovative ideas and playful devices that would dazzle readers forever. If ever a writer and his literary project were to achieve something amazing, that was it.

You can read about the many incredible stylistic inventions in Ulysses elsewhere (the stream-of-consciousness thing; the last chapter being entirely an internal monologue rendered in the form of just eight sentences without any punctuation at all; another chapter written as a catechism; all the unfinished, impossible-to-parse sentences and made-up words; and so on). I will just say that in spite of all these barriers (and like they say in Shmoop), Joyce's characters are alive. One can smell Bloom, hear Stephen, touch Molly. Love Stephen, pity Molly, despise Bloom.

Never before had I been so intimate with the character of a novel. I was overwhelmed by their humanity, their weaknesses, their animal instincts and their absolute love (for literature, for reason, for one another, for life). Joyce has written a comprehensive catalogue of all their neuroses, dreams, fancies, memories and small-mindedness (as well as their mundane actions, guilty pleasures and bodily functions and humours). As a reader, you are privy to their most basic impulses and thoughts. You love them like you love your family and your close friends: via intimate knowledge of most of their flaws and peculiarities.

Ulysses is pornographic, disgusting, touching, sincere, credible. And it is funny sometimes, very funny; and so clever in all the parodies and hyperboles. Episode 15, “Circe”, I found savagely clever, irreverent and hilarious. I had so much fun with that one that I was pointing my finger at the (virtual) page with eyes wide open, and laughing out loud.

Ulysses is something quite different of what I was expecting. It's not the heavy, pompous, highbrowed exercise I thought. Rather, it's the answer to the question: “what would an epic novel be like, if its subject were mundane people going about their daily lives, and one wrote it full of compassion towards those characters but also with radical honesty, with immense erudition, and with no prejudices about how language should be used?”

Definitely worth the effort. Read it. ( )

It’s sad to read a book that is as relevant today as it was over 100 years ago. Whilst the sexual imagery may no longer be so shocking, the rather unsubtle bashing of those of the Jewish persuasion may be more of a surprise. What’s more disturbing is that this feels quite familiar — I read similar comments on news articles everyday, except we’ve shifted our hatred towards one of the younger Abrahamic religions.

The story itself is rather empty with thoughts of death (Dignam’s funeral), sex (Molly’s affair), and loneliness (partying with Stephen) reigning supreme; quite standard for your average homo sapiens. This rather dull, but unconventionally recorded, day gives way to actually quite human characters — something I’ve struggled to find in classics. This is especially true of Bloom; we feel his hunger, desires, anxieties, hypocrisies, his bowel movement…

Whilst Ulysses may be the work of a genius, it’s a frustrating enough read that I would only recommend it to people I truly despise. Each episode is unique in its style, which, although initially exciting and refreshing, grows stale. It’s as though Joyce knew exactly how long to make each episode, and then extended it by 25%-50%, becoming the first and only author to literally murder through the written word. So after taking about three months of my reading time, which makes me feel both stupid and superior compared to the humans who haven’t had their brains eaten out with a spoon by Joyce, Ulysses deserves a decidedly average rating. ( )

The most surprising thing about the book was how modern it seemed - all other books I've read from that period gave a false impression of how different people were but this reveals the lie and shows how familiar and easily relatable people living a century ago were.
The story itself is not particularly interesting, being an extremely muddled (more about this in a moment) retelling of a day in a life of a 19th century advertising agent, a likeable but sad, serially cuckolded by his wife, timid man and a few other incidental characters. The conspicuously eventful day gives a unique general snapshot of life in Dublin which makes for a valuable record regardless of how fantastical the prose is.
What I didn't appreciate was the style it's written in which I understand was a bit of an experiment and I don't think it proved successful given how the style hasn't not taken off all that much since. The signal-to-noise ratio is so low that you can read *anything* you want in the book and be right. It's a bit like the bible code - given enough material to work with you can prove it contains any message you want. And there is plenty of material here as almost every sentence is bordering on gibberish and ambiguity abounds and I don't think this technique really adds anything to the story. In the end it's almost not worth the effort. I'm sure the author enjoyed himself immensely writing this but from a reader's perspective I'd rather optimise for information retrieval. You could've captured all the information using more structured prose which can be beautiful too, given enough effort. ( )