Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: Worst binding ever
Review: This is a fantastic novel...it is really beyond a novel and beyond reproach. The paperback Gabler edition, however, posesses what is quite possibly the most worthless and flimsy binding of any novel, great or small. If you read the entire book (a difficult task, but well worth it), it is guaranteed to crumble in your hands like the gilded pork kidney dome of new Bloomuselem. All that expensive German philology and bibliographic science bound with bubble-gum and rubber cement. I don't pretend to be fully apprised of the respective merits of the various editions (although I do understand that the original 1934 U.S edition was a pirated and notoriously erroneous text) but you might do well to consider the revised 1961 Ulysses(i.e. The Vintage Books and Modern Library text), over this, the scholarly standard, cursed with a nickel-dime spine.

Rating:
Summary: This is a literary masterpiece???????
Review: The book consists of an overabundance of mini-stories that are irrelevant to each other and there is no real plot. If you took this book into a publisher nowadays, he or she would probably throw it at you and then laugh in your face. If you want to read it, I would suggest going to the library. Don't waste your money.

Rating:
Summary: incomprehensible masterpiece
Review: First of all, I won't even begin to say what this giant hulk of a book was about, but it still remains my favorite work of literature of all time. The trick to enjoying this one, if you can use a verb like enjoying to describe it, is to simply let it flow and seep into you. It is like Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon in that, there's so much knowledge stuffed into the narrative you'll never be able to grasp every word... And that's okay. You don't have to. It would probably take you decades anyhow. Just sit back and take your time with this one and somehow, it will become clear to you, the same time it's confusing the hell out of you. A definite challenge between love and hate and both of them will win out by the end. But you will feel rewarded when you're finished, if only to say: "Yeh, I actually got thru the whole thing... Finnegan's Wake, which is really mindboggling, may be more of an experiment but this book is the more satisfying work. Don't let it discourage you. It wasn't meant to be read in one week, or even one month. Personally, I read passages of it in different locations, and somehow, that actually helped...

Rating:
Summary: Five Stars For An Over-rated Masterpeice
Review: Joyce was a master of language--at least some of the time--but he was also a very
flawed craftsman who could have used a decent editor and some plot-generating
software.

Joyce wrote words. He wrote lots of words, very slowly and painfully, but he
couldn't construct a plot to save his life. His words are frequently brilliant,
but just as frequently obscure, tedious and pretentious. It takes more than
language to carry a novel, particularly one of this length.

Ulysses has dazzling passages, most of them purely descriptive, but they are buried
in long stretches of tedious, 19th Century prose that are truly painful to wade
through. The book is extremely overwritten. For instance, I've never seen the point
to Stephen's longwinded Shakespeare theorizing in the library. This adds nothing
to what little plot there is, could easily have been cut to half its length, and
I find it hard to believe that this very long passage holds any interest for even
the most pointy-headed of Joyce scholars.

The book's most celebrated chapters, such as Oxen of the Sun, are almost
incomprehensible. The language, again, is brilliant, but it is a surface effect,
a reflection of Joyce's linquistic preoccupations. The book's symbolism is so
subtle that I suspect it doesn't really exist. Likewise with the
stylistic experiments--a change in style does not justify an additional 10 million
words.

I feel guilty panning Joyce. Anthony Burgess loved him and since Burgess is one

of my favorite writers, I feel like I should love Joyce too, but I don't. In my
opinion, academic literature is dead. There are dozens of mass-market paperbacks--dramatic fiction written in clear, transparent English--which are a
thousand times more interesting than Ulysses. Their use of language
is frequently just as brilliant, if not more so. For instance, compare Ulysses
with A Clockwork Orange by Burgess (a Joyce scholar, himself). A little
dramatic craftsmanship makes all the difference in the world.

Rating:
Summary: modalities of the visible
Review: Jorge Luis Borges once thanked Joyce and Picasso in the introduction of one of his books. It was a joke. Borges obviously felt both names had been evoked so many times as to make the mere mention of either of them seem ponderous. I kind of agree with that assessment.
Joyce certainly has received top billing by the academy and if your impression of him is, well, reverent, you are in good company. I read Ulysses first because I wanted to know this huge book which everyone talked about with such admiration and then I read it again in college in a Joyce seminar. I have to say the seminar was enjoyable but not altogether because of the author chosen. I think we students and teacher felt like we were conquering a mountain and were proud of ourselves every step of the way. In memory the actual book does not loom very large in the way other great works do nor do I feel much affection for it. The characters and plot are implanted in my brain but rarely do they move about nor do scenes get replayed in my imagination. Perhaps Joyce's work was so complete that it didn't leave much room for any other imagination to go to work on it so Ulysses never became one of my favorites. I don't suppose I can wholeheartedly recommend the book given my less than enthusiastic feeling about it. In fact I think I learned a lot more from other books by less revered authors. Joyce had talent to spare but I think for me he just loads Ulysses with too many apparently ordinary though symbolic so very literary things and the result is that I am not inspired by his art but rather put off by the excessive weight and meaning the work aquires as one works ones way through. So much has been said about the work that it almost comes to the reader with a feeling of having been pre-interpreted for you. Joyce I think contributes to this reaction because he left little room for "interpretations" of his work, its all layed out for you and there really is no latitude for an individual encounter with it. You either submit to its spell or you don't. Perhaps the net result is that in this case more turns out to be less. It can't be penalized for being too much of a good thing so five stars despite all just said.
Some have mentioned that this book benefits from being read out loud. Perhaps that is the Catholic interpretation of this very Catholic author. Ulysses as incantation. That approach does have its advantages with this book. There is available a recording of Joyce himself reading excerpts from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake(Anna Plurabelle). I've heard it and it is like hearing a fairy tale written by the unconscious for adults. His voice is musical and he reads like he is summoning the spirit.

Rating:
Summary: Idea is Idea of Idea.
Review: I only can say that nobody can write book as ULYSSES.
And everybody can't understand ULYSSES.
I think this is best stream of consciousness novel.
I think this is the best novel.
I think this is the best book of English literature.
I think this is the best book of world literature.
And last
"Idea is idea of idea" Stephan Dedalus(J.J.)

Rating:
Summary: If a book is a meal, this is Thanksgiving
Review: Few booka are as gripping, confounding, and ultimately satisfying as this vast novel. A true MUST READ for anyone serious about English literature or looking to grow a few new brain cells. Easily one of my favorites.

Rating:
Summary: Nest Stirring Hisstory at 10 AM in the school of CatSchism
Review: Nest-stirring Hi[s]story at 10am in the school of cat-schism

[This essay is a reflection on the second episode in Joycean Ulysses titled: 'Nestor']

Ire's (land) is the anomie conscientious of 'Trans-mythos' in affectation, floating in a sunken lemuria. Being sunken, is a struggle to trace an identity of conflict in the 'tangible' of being 'historically constructed and hysterically free'.
Stephen comments: "History is a nightmare from which I am constantly trying to wake up" Stephen can never wake up because of the power of sleeping in trance.
The 'nightmare' is tran [s] conscious and can't rationalize, the 'History' of being a nation 'within'. The rationale for it is not within the nation but 'within' the floating possibility of being forever 'Gaelic'.
The undercurrents of it are a conscious effort to unify a clashing opposite of being 'individuated' in ratiocination. Does Stephen succeed?
The 'ideo-graph' of a 'Blakian' vision of human partiality with an irresolved dogma of flesh and spirit are struggling repression's which accommodate the libertine myth of 'hyperborean' Gaelicism.
The secret desires of being rooted in faith clashes of apocalyptic reconciliation are projected to a 'cost' of being 'Pyrrhic' in victory. Utopianism, doxology, theology, dogma and happenings of history float in paroxysms of contemplation mating to be the 'ontic' of 'individuation's. The Gaelic Helen wants to project anthropo-graphs peculiar in egoistic units and Anglicized to a conservatory.
The institution of the archival in culture consciousness wages the dialectic of the personal, in the context of 'Blakian excess and pyrrhic success'. The possibility of being logical is shifted on to the childish of being idiotic in satisfaction.
The 'Pyrrhic' 'pier' becomes a Xantippe who resolves the logic as coming out with ease. Victorianism of being victorious is 'pyrrhic' in being stoic which is negated with the 'epicurianism' of 'Aristotlien' possibilities of imagining the actual as happened in History.
The 'ubermenisch' of being beyond the 'Roman Coin' and existing in the trance sentience of being neither Roman or Jerusalamian is riddled as anecdotal metaphors of being in a mode of 'Christ' whose bondage to the material was itself a 'concern' of being 'immaterial'.
The institution of 'Rome' betrays the individual's home and the riddle comprehends the need of 'Stephen's home' to be in a vision of his totality.
The flesh is flowing to 'homeland' in a grotto of volume fleshy and red- safe in a being of warmth. The intensity to be longing with maternity as a part of maturity in innocence is understanding rather than maturity in purity. The heavenly eternity is infused with a womb of experiencing possibilities. "Heaven starts and ends in it: hell begins out of it." "The sowed knows: but who sows?"
The little boy's hatred for mathematics seeks the revenge of being hermeneutic in 'algebra'. Al-Ja-Bar or the science of 'reuniting' is Arabic and gives the origin of 'algebra'. Alphabets and letters are united as symbols of meaning. Is the meaning justified in unity to be tool for quantification, which quantifies the boy in dread! Algebra 'schizoids' to represent the symbolic of what it cannot mean. Letters become heretic epistemologies of being defined rather than being tools or symbols to express meaning.
The sea's ruler is inebriated in mental urges of being real as 'archaic'. The sea asks who was before the sea? The 'archaic' wants to be legitimate as being a 'history-fair to Irishness. The theology of asserting, who is the 'Poseidon' is significant intensities of being spiritual about a topography that deviates in depression.
The laissez-faire of the 'agrarian' and the houte-coutré of being in the economy of parsimony, is a locus of reflection, where the fantasy to transcend the 'fallibility' of struggle is shifted on to the aesthetic of being a frugal Goth. Stephen reverts to the 'gothic anima' of 'Cassandra' mourning, over the truth of being real- but really believed.
The Hegelian cycle of Hi[s]tory to move to an absolute is contradicted with the little boy's shouts of shooting a goal. The 'goal can be a 'goal' when the boys grow up and become absolutes. The goal in question dichotomizes in a Hi[s]tory to be real with the imagined as existing only in possibilities.
Deary comments on Stephen's vocation to be born, not as a teacher is a reflection of Joyce's will to an actualization of being the master of 'pen-ship'. Cassandra was right! And the right continues the process of being the mortal of Helen.

Rating:
Summary: The greatest literary hoax of the 20th century
Review: Anyone who tells you they've read this so-called book all the way through is probably lying through their teeth.It is impossible to endure this torture.In fact the military would have already made POW"S read this waste but, I think such cruel and unusual punishment would violate the statutes of the Geneva Convention.It is not that this so- called book is so unmercifully long that ruins it, but that the characters are so boring.Who cares about the characters?Who can stomach the endless trivialities illuminated within the pages of this tomb?You cannot even call this the worst book ever written because a book would first have to be written in order for it to be considered a book,wouldn't it?This joke that the literary community has perpetrated for almost a century has highlighted precisely what a bunch of pompous,bleeting sheep lit crits really are.The joke is on whomever has bothered to waste a nanosecond on this devious farce.My goodness, can't anybody see that the emperor has no clothes?!Is everybody too thickheaded to get the joke or just afraid to seem uncultured or ignorant so they go along with a 80 year old gag and unintentionally show themselves to be pompous?This waste of paper is a genuine TEE-YOU-ARE-DEE,and Joyce the trickster of tricksters.

Rating:
Summary: A GREAT WRITER
Review: Joyce was a great writer. For first readers "Dubliners" and maybe "A Portrait..." are the best books to begin with. The later celebrated and larger books require help in the form of a companion or annotations (Burgess's books -ReJoyce-, and/or other Companions you can buy here at Amazon. In addition his life history is also important) to approach because the scene is a century ago and the references many. You also have to be patient and at the same time push on if you do not understand. You should not expect to take in a book at a sitting when a great writer labored years over it.