Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: A genius Artist - Joyce
Review: A marvellous form of art with the help of english Words, perhaps. Several times i get lost between the pages, still continued to get something and i got a genius in the end. Wonderful ways of expressions of thoughts. You may feel that you are reading Bloom's mind. Every nervous processes happening in Bloom's mind will be yours. Joyce's innocence, honesty and his complete denial to change himself for the sake of all of us, made an impression deep inside me.

Either you accept him as he is or leave him. That's upto you.

He is not forcing anyone to accept him either.

All through the pages I was delighted in his astounding mastery of words. Somewhere on the way, it made me smile too. Especially at the end of the book where he abandoned all the conventions of English Literature. Wonderful. Even now i don't have the words to define this book titled "Ulysses".

But be prepared to have a tough time ahead when you start the book. Honestly, speaking i could not understand many of the pages.

Rating:
Summary: A Day In the Life
Review: The best introduction to James Joyce is James Joyce. He did everything so well he only had to each thing once. One short story collection: Dubliners. And one great novel: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On the basis of these two works alone Joyce would be legend. But he did not stop there, he went further than anyone had ever gone with literature and wrote a new kind of novel, Ulysses. And after that another new kind of novel, Finnegans Wake. Ulysses is a work which every reader must face once in his life. Or twice. No other novel so sums up the reason novels are written. Ulysses is an epoch about culture but told lyrically through two characters, the familiar Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Both will win you over. Dedalus for his scholars apprenticeship at life, and Bloom for his well versed walk through the very reaches of modern life. Irish this is in the very best sense. The language is real but the words are not coming from everyday talk but from the inside, the waking consciousness' dialogue with itself. That is the magic of this book. It is completely original born from nothing but inspiration. It is a great move to have Stephen, the character from his last novel, collide with Bloom, this new novels creation. Joyce has the teachers good will to introduce you to the new work via an old companion, brilliant stroke. The modern world really makes no sense is Stephens Tragedy and Blooms comedy. If you are a young man you will probably share Stephen's sentiments and if you are beyond youth you will share Bloom's. Or both which makes it all the more wonderful. No book is more insightful in leading to an understanding of the western predicament and no book has yet come close. Joyce writes in a sometimes hard to decipher prose but it is all worth it. In the end you will feel you have collided with the one who understood first what it was to be a modern life. Make it easy on yourself and read this after Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young man. For the best readers there is no other way. As for Finnegans Wake, I am still preparing.

Rating:
Summary: Oh, please...
Review: The same people who put this book at the top of the "Best Books of the Century" list are the same people who put "Citizen Kane" at the top of the "Best Movies of the Century" List.

Rating:
Summary: By God Kinch, what does it all mean?
Review: I've read the reviews. I've seen the complaints. "It doesn't mean a thing... I can't understand it... It's just a bunch of drivel..." All are opinions that anyone who has read the book is certainly entitled to. As for all the scholars out there who say that there are hidden meanings in every sentence, well, that's your opinion too. And you're more than welcome to scour "Ulysses" for the rest of your natural life looking for pieces to Joyce's grand puzzle. But I'm going to offer something a little different - those who would scour the novel for such meanings are missing the point in almost the same way as those who toss it aside as incomprehensible.

In "Ulysses", we are given access to the inner-consciousness of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom. They are normal people living ordinary lives in early 20th century Dublin. They go to work, go to the bathroom, walk the streets, greet people, and think about their lives. They mull over details of their own lives that are so personal to them that they could mean nothing to anyone else. And if you think about it, isn't that what we all do? If someone were to open up your head and read your thoughts, they might say the same thing - "What the heck is this?" But we also consider the things that affect us all; love, death, loss, and hate, among others. Those are the thoughts that would carry weight and meaning for anyone, and the characters in "Ulysses" ponder these things as we all might. We cannont completely become them, and thus we cannot completely understand everything they think of. But they hit upon enough major truths so that there is meaning for anyone. Their adventures through Dublin would have made an interesting story on their own - being able to see inside their minds takes the novel to a completely different level.

Rating:
Summary: Ulysess is art, bow
Review: James Joyce is not a great writer, but it is his anti-conformity that makes him the greatest literary genius of all time.

Rating:
Summary: Unreadable, at least for me.
Review: I loved Don Quixote, still the greatest of novels. (6 stars!) I loved The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest work of the greatest novelist who ever lived. (5 stars) For sheer reading pleasure Crime and Punishment beats anything I have ever come across.(5 stars) I enjoyed War and Peace, though to me it was a bit dated and didactic and not nearly as convincing and satisfying as DQ, BK or CP. (4 stars)

But for some reason after three tries I can't get past page 20 of Ulysses. I find it boring, mannered and well nigh incomprehensible. If it wasn't for the fact that so many learned people say it is a masterpiece I would say Joyce is a fraud. (I read Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man but didn't think it very enjoyable or profound.)

Why is it that I can enjoy so many other classic novels yet find Ulysses so repulsive?

Rating:
Summary: A Labored Work...To Read That is
Review: James Joyce is a genius. Let's all say it together, loud and proud. Maybe he is so much of a genius that he has created in a novel, Ulysses, a work that is so far above anyone's heads that since the majority of the reading public doesn't understand, well then, by God, it must be supernova brilliant. Was it just me? Did my intellectual shortcomings not allow me to truly enjoy this work that makes everyone's top 10 books of the century list? Or was Joyce just playing around? A writer with mastery of the language decided to fool around a little and release a novel that is an exercise in experimentation on what you can do with language but nothing really more. To harbor my fragile intellectual ego, that's the theory I'm going with. Greatest book of all time or not, I just didn't get it.

This book is supposed to be about Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus and a day in the life of Dublin in 1904. I really had to read the other reviews or cliff notes to be able to discern what happens on that day despite reading the book thoroughly. I know I sure didn't get it from the book. If cryptic meaning, having to read other books so you understand the book you're reading, and spending months slogging through a book is what your looking for in a read, by all means tackle Ulysses. Should we have to labor so hard to enjoy a book? I don't think so. The unique language and wordplay stand out above the rest of the white noise fray making this book redeemable, like a 783 page poem with no plot, if you can imagine enduring something like that.

Maybe Joyce, from an Irish heaven, 70 year later is having the last laugh, as the intellectual world hails his "playing around" as THE modern masterpiece. Maybe it takes an English Literary Doctorate and many years to get enjoyment out of this book. I don't have either though, so the enjoyment wasn't there. Joy is the reason I read. I didn't find it with Ulysses.

Rating:
Summary: the literary version of the modern art hoax
Review: Joyce's later works are aimed at that type of person who likes to theorize about the forms of "art" endlessly, without ever being able to point to any meaningful specifics this type of thing may have. In fact, much like the splatter-painting of Jackson Pollock, or the black-on-black canvases of Ad Reinhardt, or the silent compositions of John Cage, or the cut-ups of Wm. Burroughs or the pop lyrics of Bob Dylan, Ulysses has no real meaning at all--and that is its secret to success. When an artist has something important to say, he (or she) expresses himself with as much clarity as possible, just as a person who is shouting "fire" or "wake up" would. When he has little or nothing to say, he writes or paints or plays either right-brain stream-of-consciousness gobbledygook and calls it "metaphor" or "exploring the unconscious", or presents minimalist nothing at all and calls it "conceptual". He can then sit back for decades and watch the pseudointellectuals and tenured humanities professors invent endless meanings where there are none, whereas books that contain any clarity will slip into obscurity, since their meanings are obvious and leave the masters (and doctors) of hot air nothing to debate. Ulyssess is the all-time champion of this sort of thing; while many of modern art's similar hoaxes have long since been relegated to the proverbial dustbin, Joyce's obvious genius for manipulating words keeps this thing at the top of the charts among those influenced by academic pretense. The fact that those words are all surface and communciate not one idea of any significance to anyone is a something of a shame for serious people (who might waste time seeking them here, due to its reputation), but an absolute goldmine for the people who like to write glorified term papers about this glorified crossword puzzle and its like. At least the more general reading public has never been swayed by such frauds, preferring mere entertainments like Lord of the Rings--which indeed have more going for them, on any level, than anything Joyce and his kind have ever done.

Rating:
Summary: 2 star performance of a 5 star talent
Review: Imaginative literature can't afford to dissociate itself from its readership because the "lay-reader" is the very rationale for its existence! Joyce is not a model to be followed by any writer. Granted that it is the reader's prerogative to choose and pick - it is not up to the author of imaginative literature to be selective about his readers. This extremely gifted man had set out to surpass everything produced in literature up to his time, and if his goal had been tedium to the max, he achieved it. I am the first to give Joyce due credit for the linguistic scope and the skill with which he engineered the plot in Ulysses - but answer me honestly: does any of the characters come to live the way - say - Tolstoy manages to animate his people with a much more primitive technique? I seriously doubt it. Joyce the human being had limitations which got in the way of Joyce the writer which prevented Joyce the artist from living up to the full potential of Joyce the talent. Style is a direct reflection of an artist's temperament - obviously the writer of "Ulysses" could never make up his mind what kind of style it is going to be - the book lacks unity and appears in places unnecessarily oracular due to the style, but not necessarily for the subject matter, which can be looked up in a good reference! And if that wouldn't be bad enough, more than once Joyce went off on a rather revealing tangent: take for instance the masturbation scene in ÒNausicaa.Ó Superbly written as it is, it gives us the whole deficiency of Joyce in a nutshell. He imitates the presumptuous and pompous phrasing in certain fashion magazines of the period, but just tell me to what end? Is it to poke fun on the cliche beset thought-process of the crippled girl? Well I fail to see the joke, this is just cruel. Satire either attacks a subject that has the capacity to bite back, or it is merely an act of a certain and in JoyceÕs time very fashionable "anti-philistine" snobbery. Or perhaps the only reason for writing this way was that Mr. Joyce wished to flaunt his stylistic versatility? I am not objecting to have readers making an effort to get into a difficult text - not at all. But the reward should offer better things than the gratification of a crossword puzzle. We talk about participation. Participation in the artist's temperament to see things the way they present themselves to the artist. This does not prevent us from disagreeing. (I disagree with many things Tolstoy had to say when he couldnÕt resist to step on his collapsible soap box. But I also appreciate his artistic genius whenever he spares us the lecture.) To give another example: Compare ÒOxen of the SunÓ in Ulysses with the moments when women break their water in TolstoyÕs novels. Giving birth is not a linguistic exercise. Joyce's choice of style (in fact a display of 60 different styles and modes of speech) is just clever but completely detached from the event. What is to be expected at the very least, is a certain coherence of artistic vision, which I find utterly lacking in Joyce. He can't make up his mind, so he throws at us all the imitative bits and pieces from a (very talented) schoolboy's exercise book. Ulysses is the portfolio of a writer's versatility - it is not a work of art. When I was much younger and naive, I had read every single line of Joyce, including his letters and poems and even Finnegan's Wake (what a waste of time). I can't help it, the man was an amateur for all his life, a typical tinkerer and home improvement guy who probably never really found the kind of subject matter that could have distracted him from his self-consciousness. His short stories wouldn't be barely remembered these days if there wasnÕt his name under the title. They are imitation pieces, ventriloquistic exercises, and pretty flat and lifeless if held against Chekhov and Kipling, or Flaubert and Kathleen Mansfield. Apparently "Dubliners" and "Portrait" and especially ÒUlyssesÓ were written by an author who went on a quest for his own style. If Finnegan's Wake eventually was the place where the eagle landed, then, I am sorry to say, the game wasn't worth the candles. Joyce had tons of talent to burn, but something went seriously wrong here. I am all for modern art, and consider "post modern" a phony contradiction in terms. But lesser talents accomplished more - DosPassos, O'Neil, Kafka, Proust, Marianne Moore, Auden, Hemingway, Nabokov, they all have their moments, even clowns like Bukowski and Douglas Adams (who is a linguistic genius in his own right.) Borges could put in 3 lines what took a Joyce 30 strenuous pages without ever achieving a comparable impact. In the end, all I ask for, is the readerÕs honesty. Don't just think something is great because a certain establishment says so. Real great artists (like Dickens or Shakespeare) can do without this sort of approval. Don't make it a mission to reach for an icon for no other reason than seeing it hanging high. A failure is a failure even if it is a great man's failure. And Joyce wasn't made of the stuff of greatness. But this is a different story. Approaching Joyce is an experience not unsimilar to ÒThe Approach to Al-MuÕtasim.Ó

Rating:
Summary: Alright
Review: I'm 14 years old and I am halfway through the book. I took people's advice and am taking it one chapter at a time, and then discussing it with a friend of mine. I'm not really into books, but I love to push myself. After every chapter I need to research a little, and look words up in the dictionary. I would recommend this book to a dedicated reader who is prepared to work hard and use their head constantly.