Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: THE greatest novel of last century--sans peur, sans reproche
Review: The lovely, talented Erica Jong confessed to having skipped large parts of this momentous work, yet told people it was her favorite book. Hemingway did it a similar injustice--Ulysses deserves to be read, reread, and studied as infinitum. Joyce devoted eight years of hard work to it, and nothing like its stream-of-consciousness narrative has been seen since. Scholars take note--Faulkner never read this book!
Space prevents me from gushing the way I would like to, but look for the passage in which Stephen Dedalus and Poldy Bloom are getting blasted in Dublin as a baby is being born above them, and Joyce's language begins with the Angleish of Beowulf and travels through time, touching downe with Chaucer and Sir Thomas Browne, among others. In truth, it's hard to believe that a single living human being actually sat down and created this out of nothing; to my poetic heart, it has always seemed as sacred and immutable as the sea or its stars...

Rating:
Summary: pretentious drivel, deliberately obscure and icky
Review: while most readers claim that samuel beckett was talented but no james joyce, i'd say that james joyce was pretentious and negative but no samuel beckett. while beckett's plays and stories are difficult to pentrate, they do have a recognizable theme and a coherent message that is conveyed after some rewarded persistence by the intelligent reader:the incomprehensibility and meaninglessness of the larger part of our experience. joyce, on the other hand, wants to play bohemian and toy with being an alienated 'intellectual' whereas it seems fairly obvious from just dipping into ulysses that not only does it not have a message, the message is that it's oh so cool not to have a message. avant garde writing can be great and, in my opinion, is greater and more authentic than traditional 'literature' when done right, but this is just mystification and nonsense sprinkled with some negativity and obscenity. i'll never forget that profound quote of joyce's from this mealy mouthed toilet of a 'novel':"the grey sunken c**t of the world." splendid!

stay away.

Rating:
Summary: In Bloom
Review: Reading what a twentysomething musician, such as myself, has to say about Ulysses might be like listening to what your high-school math teacher has to say about Quantum Mechanics. High Lit...It's not my field of expertise. But I did get a lot out of this book. Joyce writes in four dimentions; with omniscience + individuality. I really enjoyed the simultaneous casting of the characters as social constructions and as owners of free will. I also enjoyed the extremely well choreographed, or shall we say synergistic, interplay of the people involved, as well as the deeper meanings suggested throughout. I couldn't have grasped much without the cliffnotes, but I do consider this book a very rewarding read.

Rating:
Summary: Tough but a good read
Review: Ulysses has got to be the most difficult thing I have ever read. Being as tough as it is to read, I can see why their is a lot of negative reviews about this book. Most people feel for a book to be good it has to be action packed and fastly paced with a bunch of characters that you like.
Well Ulysses has really none of those things, unless you can identify with Bloom or Stephen then you'll probably like them. When you pick up Ulysses you need to get some help. I read the guide by Gilbert along with the text and it helped me a lot. Without a guide Ulysses can be even harder than than it normally is.
You also should not expect any major or huge events to happen. Nobody dies or anything exciting like that.
Lastly you need to get into a mindset that what your going to be reading is extremly hard, but with a little patience it can be extremly rewarding.
Now, without further ado, I will review Ulysses. I gave the book five stars, but it is not an unqualified five star review. When reading Ulysses in it's entirety, some parts are classic while other parts just seem unneccesary. For example, the Hades episode is the best in the book and probably the best example of realistic writing in the english language. Most of the other episodes are also great, but a few are just a burden to read. The Oxen of the Sun episode in my opinion is pointless. Joyce seems to like the fact that he can write in middle english, so he does. I'm no expert on middle english, but it's damn hard to read and it disrupts any flow the book had. If you can sort out the slang at the end of Oxen of the Sun then I congragulate you, because it was totally lost on me. The Ithaca episode is another example. It is told with a series of questions and are answered in the most drawn out and scientific way possible. Maybe Joyce could have been best served using a diffrent style. Stephen's Shakespeare rant also seems unnecessary and the episode where Bloom is trying to sell an ad to the newspaper is hard to follow.
Ever other episode is expertly written and is a delight to read. The pitfalls of a few episodes are more than made up for with the 14 or so episodes that are expertly written.
What Joyce does with language in this book is amazing. He is a true master of the english language and a master of a multitude of diffrent styles. He writes magnificently but sometimes he can't seem to help but show off his skills.
And to those who think this book is utterly impossible and if anyone says they finished this book is lying, well I swear to god in heaven that I read this book cover to cover. It was no easy task, it took me a long time, but I did finish it. I don't claim to come close to total comprehension but I did read it all the way through.
I would recommend this book to anyone who isn't analytically challenged, has an attention span of at least one hour, and won't be offended if a writer changes styles every chapter. I highly recommend it. If you get through it you can be a literary snob for the rest of your life. Did you finish Ulysses, I did.

Rating:
Summary: Choose Your Edition Carefully
Review: When you're dealing with a book as daunting to the casual reader (assuming there is such a thing as a casual reader of this particular book) as James Joyce's Ulysses, you're going to need every break you can get.

For years I was put off by the Modern Library's 1961 edition of Ulysses, and with good reason. When Judge Woolsey decided in the 1930s to institute what Morris Ernst decreed "the New Deal in the law of letters," making Ulysses legal to own and distribute in the U.S. (before that it was contraband, smuggled into the country as if it was bootleg scotch by, among other people, Ernest Hemingway), Random House, which had locked up the U.S. rights, decided to act fast, while the book was hot (Joyce even made the cover of Time magazine). So they rushed their now-legal version into print as quickly as possible, using in the process the ugliest, most unreadable typeface known to man.

In 1961, they revised the text, getting rid of some obvious errors (if I'm not mistaken they were in such a rush originally that they used Samuel Roth's 1927 pirated edition as copytext!), but for some reason they kept the same repellent font, probably because resetting the whole book in a new font would have been too expensive.

When I finally read Ulysses complete, it was in the 1960 Bodley Head edition, which is miles ahead of its American counterpart in elegance and readability. Unfortunately, the text is not nearly as good (Joyce scholar Hugh Kenner's comment on it is particularly apt -- suffice it to say that it's the title of Jacobean playwright John Ford's most famous work).

So if you're planning on taking a stab at Ulysses, this is what I would suggest. Forget about the Vintage Paperback edition (as well as Hans Walter Gabler's so-called "Corrected Text," for textual reasons too cumbersome to get into here), and go with the Everyman's Library hardcover . The Everyman's Library edition is really the best of both worlds. You have the Modern Library 1961 text, arguably the best one out there at the moment, in a large and readable font. That's the edition to get if you've never tried Ulysses before (although Dover has recently put out a reproduction of Shakespeare and Co.'s 1922 First Edition that's worth looking into).

And if you haven't read Ulysses before, I would suggest that before you do, you: a) read Joyce's earlier and simpler novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, b) try a biography first (Richard Ellmann's is the authoritative one, especially in its 1982 revision, but I'm rather partial to Stan Gebler Davies' shorter biography from the 1970s, which sounds like it was written by a character in Ulysses). Also: c) find and read a good commentary first, such as Edmund Wilson's chapter on Joyce in Axel's Castle, or Hugh Kenner's book, entitled Ulysses or Harry Blamire's The Bloomsday Book. If you're a Joycean newbie, you will need help. Plenty of it.

Even then it won't be easy. But Joyce, with the possible exception of Proust, wrote the greatest novel of the last century, and if you're any kind of a serious reader you really owe it to yourself to take a whack at it. Clifton Fadiman once compared reading Ulysses to climbing Mount Everest. Not many people make it to the summit, but the ones who get to the top are afforded a view that's hard to beat. Reading Joyce is less a matter of reading a book than of having a life experience, and a precious one (although some might wonder in which sense of the word) at that. Good luck.

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly COmprehnsible with a dash of preparation
Review: If you want to understand Ulysses, you HAVE to read Portrait first, by JOyce of course. Try to get some portrait commentary so you know where Joyce is coming from, preferably an essay or two on JOyce's aesthetic theory and on the role of Stephen. If you can, read Dubliners too. I listened to an audio book lecture series on Joyce before i began his work ... it spoke of how the book begins in this oddly shaped tower the likeness of which can only be found in Ireland, hence, an American reader would most likely be ignorant as to where the books begins. As you read, consult the ANNOTATED ULYSSES for vocab and sentences that just seem too complex ... like the first sentence of the Bloom section and the ineluctable modality... - most people would not pick up the Jakob Boehme reference in the sentence, and when you do, if you dig Boehme as i have, let's just say it is a pleasant experience. I suggest the Everymna LIbrary series edition, it is a beautiful edition and has some very insightful supplements, including an introduction, the statement by an American judge that has become so renowned, a history of how the book has been printed(and more oft, destroyed) and a helpful chart on the structure of the book. I suggest one reads as much of this book as one can, even if it is just the Stehpen section, else one might die without at least experiencing part of this genius. Knowing a dash about Aquinas and Aristotle and reading some Berkeley will also sharpen one's mind to what's going on here.

Rating:
Summary: Ezra Pound
Review: Ezra Pound's "Cantos" are the best analog for this failure of Joyce. Spending so much effort trying to show how much he knows, his actual content is thematically unsuccessful. In the end, only the excellent macro-structure saves this novel.

Rating:
Summary: The 20th Century Novel
Review: Why haven't you read this book? There are two types of people in the world: those who love _Ulysses_ and those who despise it. It always astonishes me the degree to which some people loathe this book. One of my very best friends cannot read past an early description of the sea as "snot-green." Go figure. Joyce challeneges our notions about the ordinary. The ordinary is not always beautiful. It is not always remarkable. But seen through the life of one ordinary man, a single day is an epic, albeit an ordinary one. And what's so wrong with that?

Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedelus are perhaps the most intriguing characters in 20th Century art. They are opposites of a sort. Bloom is an everyman, Daedelus wants to be the Ubermensch, but he is far too Gallic. Bloom (the Hungarian Jew - anything but Gallic) triumphs in his epic, this day in Dublin. Stephen, well, he doesn't quite triumph. There are lessons here that one can explore for eons. Why is Bloom successful in his odyssey? Why isn't Stephen? Stephen is trapped in emerging Gallic existentialism, dark, "sinister" as Buck Mulligan describes it. Bloom is, well...Bloom. He is the good kind of existential...the Teutonic rather than Gallic.

Read this book, for God's sakes. Don't take my word for it. Love it, hate it, I don't care. It is life in a nutshell.

Rating:
Summary: A deeply flawed edition
Review: (This was written in response to the Gabler edition of the text, but the website has it crossposted to all editions of _Ulysses_. So ignore this unless you're looking at the page for the Gabler "Corrected Text" edition.)

This is a review not of Joyce's masterpiece but of the Gabler edition. Gabler's "corrected text" is an appalling defacement of a classic book; it should not be used. For an excellent account of Gabler's edition--of the legal reasons for its extensive modifications of the text, of the dubious textual methods employed, of the subsequent scholarly controversy--read Bruce Arnold's excellent little book _The Scandal of Ulysses_. Joyce's book has now twice in recent years been messed around with by dubiously-motivated editors--more recently, the "Reader's Edition" that was the subject of a wrangle in court to suppress it--which is an absurd indignity to be visited on one of the touchstones of 20th-century fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Indisputable work of genius
Review: Ulysses is book that takes literature to it's maximum
extremes. James Joyce is a writer whose peers in the canon
are few: Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy,
and maybe one or two more. Those who claim that "anyone
who got through this is lying" is obviously trying to rationalize
their own shortcomings, many high schools and nearly every
accredited university teaches courses in Joyce. Anyone who
complains of this book's "lack of plot" should leave real literature alone, and go read Grisham. These people are as myopic as those who criticized Dante for his use of the vernacular, or Milton for his eschewal of rhymed verse.

The fact remains: Joyce is certainly the most important writer in English since Milton. Whether or not one likes his work, it towers above all other achievements of its century, and perhaps of the two prior to it as well. Ulysses is a work of such innovation, such invention, such lucidity, insight, and beauty, that a criticism of its virtues is simply a fault of the reader, not the artist. No matter; Joyce will remain, and preceptive readers will too.