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Summary: What you would give to let it go...
Review: This is a book that can't be ignored if you want to be considered by anyone to be a "serious" reader, but it shouldn't be ignored. The truth is it is endless entertaining and enlightening. Though you need to spend many hours with it, you'll leave with a lot more than a great name to add to the list of authors you've read. You'll never let it go.
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Summary: Dublin on Bloomsday, 16 June, 1904
Review: Ulysses DOESN'T throw out the welcome mat. Joyce spent 7 years in its composition (1914-1921), and it took me two years to finish a thoughtful first reading (consulting numerous references meanwhile). Ulysses refines the technique used in the Portrait of dramatic (i.e. without author's comments) presentation of plot by psychological inflection through linguistic artistry. The not inconsiderable word-play presages Finnegans Wake, - "con-trans-magnifican-jew-bang-tantiality", for starters. As do Portrait and Wake, Ulysses redefines [?] the concept of "reading" a book. A fresh, intimately realistic atmosphere is reinforced in each chapter by successive changes in style. Juxtaposed humour and pathos, numerous levels of interconnectedness between people and events eluding definition -Plato's "intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere"... Mark Twain remarked that "a great book is a book everyone wants TO HAVE read and no one wants TO read". Ulysses' impeccable crafting makes it "a book to be enjoyed over and over again", as Joseph Campbell remarked. Certainly there is something NOT realistic about the incredibly profound and intellectually pregnant reveries of the young lion Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount Shore, nor in some of the musings of Leopold Bloom. Yet it is often unclear whether these mental images are distinctly voiced or simply lapping on the shores of the characters' awareness. [If seriously interested, get Campbell's "Wings of Art".]
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Summary: Note on the edition
Review: I don't blame reviewer Jim Lyke for not liking the copy of Ulysses he picked up at the St. Louis Airport. It is, however, far superior to the clams there.
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Summary: what am I missing
Review: I knew there was going to be trouble when I picked up the book in a St Louis airport book store and someone said something about me being a glutton for punishment. On the declaration of its being the greatest book of the 20th century, I had to see what the fuss was all about. And I still wonder, 167 pages or so later. Usually after about a hundred pages I can sort of get the "gist" of a document, and I will admit to not having a degree in literature or Irish studies. From all the praise, I am wondering if I have a defect in my brain. But I will admit, I don't get it. If this is supposed to be some mental time capsule, a masterful expose of stream-of-consciousness, then fine. Must be an acquired taste. Back to the Archie comic books I guess.
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Summary: The only edition worth getting
Review: Since I would hope most people are convinced of the merits of the book, let me talk about the edition. Academic infighting notwithstanding, I think the Gabler edition is as close to a "correct" Ulysses as we're going to get. The work he has put into studying each word is really astounding, and he's cleaned up a lot of sentences that never made sense earlier (I'm sure plenty of graduate students wrote long papers on how brilliant those nonsensical fragments were), and restored several sections that make it a much richer read - the telegram to Stephen, especially, opened up a lot of things for me. The book itself can get infuriating if one doesn't read it with a guide. Reading it beside the Bloomsday book allowed me to enjoy it the first time I went through it; if I hadn't done that, I doubt I would have enjoyed it much at all. It occasionally seems like he is just throwing in a different gimmick each chapter just to make it opaque - Oxen of the Sun, especially, just annoyed the hell out of me. But there are moments in this book that are unequalled by any other writer in English, and everyone should at least read it once - no matter how many people have ripped Joyce off, no one can get his style just right. Honestly, it is difficult to love this book as much as one might love Portrait, or even Dubliners, but there are moments of great compassion and insight here - you just have to cut through some of his tricks first. And the tricks usually aren't without purpose - most of them do need to be there. I find myself flipping through the book and reading some of the chapters again and again - the first two, Hades, Nausicaa, Circe, and Penelope, especially - and they're rewarding no matter how many times I read them. Beat through the whole book. And get this edition. It's worth the effort.
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Summary: pure drivel
Review: Okay, before we start, I know you've never read Ulysses--sure you've dabbled or read the first 100 pages, but no one's ever actually read it. I knew I wouldn't be able to read this beast--I've tried & failed three or four times--but I figured I'd read some criticism about it. Well, the critics have such overblown & grandiose interpretations of the book's meaning & Joyce's importance that they were alternately making me laugh or become violent. But last night I had an epiphany. It occurred to me that Ulysses is the greatest hoax of the century, ranking with Conan Doyle's Piltdown Man. Surely, Joyce must have realized that Ulysses was the inevitable & fitting conclusion to the Romantic Age. Art, cut loose from the mooring of God, had steadily drifted away from the universal & towards the personal. Ulysses is the culmination of this trend--a novel that could only be read, understood or enjoyed by its author. Spare yourself. GRADE: Hard to give a low enough grade to the single most destructive piece of Literature ever written, try (F x Googolplex)
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Summary: A Lasting Work of Art
Review: Ulysses is, without a doubt, the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Although many great books have been written before and after its publication, nothing has equaled it, or even come close. It is, without a doubt, a true and lasting work of art. Ulysses is an immensely detailed, perfectly-crafted, often sordid account of the wanderings of certain Dubliners around their city on 16 June 1904, principally, Leopold Bloom, outwardly a Hungarian Jewish proprietor of a small business, but inwardly, a sensuous rags and tatters Hamlet, a man who has lost both his religion and his name; his adulterous wife, Molly; and Stephen Dadelus, a clever but pretentious young teacher, Joyce's alter ego. Joyce labored for years on Ulysses, amassing and checking facts and then, with a genius that has never been matched, drawing them all into various symbolic patterns that mirror the wanderings and ordeals of Homer's Odysseus, Joyce's own hero. In one episode, narrated by an anonymous Dubliner, Bloom enters a pub and politely declines a drink offered to him by a Nationalist, accepting a cigar instead. Despite numerous attempts to change the subject, the Nationalist rages on and on, grumbling about foreigners and strangers. Bloom eventually gets fed up; he defends himself and his race, jabbing his cigar for emphasis as he speaks. Eventually, though, Bloom is accused of true treachery against the Irish race--not standing everyone a drink when he is thought to have successfully backed an outsider in the Gold Cup horse race. The Nationalist explodes and throws a biscuit tin at Bloom as he quickly retreats. In Ulysses, this scene is funny, but it is also so much more. The Nationalist is the one-eyed giant Cyclops from whom Ulysses escaped by jabbing his eye with a burning stake. The tunnel vision and terrorism that are but a small part of the Irish race are fought by Ulysses/Bloom as he jabs his cigar at his tormentor. "But it's no use," Bloom says. "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life...Love." There are ironic devices used in Ulysses other than the Homeric one, including the one used so strikingly by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (in which we were introduced to the character of Stephen Dadelus), matching the style of the narrative to the person occupying the foreground. As a Modernist, Joyce wanted this stylistic device to be "visible" rather than "invisible;" he wanted readers to develop an awareness of his technique, to identify, not only with the story but with the way in which he was telling it. Joyce had a message to deliver in Ulysses: he sought to tell the world of the people he had encountered; to describe their conduct and speech, to analyze their motive, to relate the effects the sordid, turbulent, disorderly "world," replete with Irish whiskey and Irish ecclesiasticism, had upon him, an emotional and egocentric genius whose chief pleasure was self-analysis and whose chief preoccupation was in keeping a notebook filled with every incident he'd ever encountered and every speech heard, all recorded with a Boswellian fidelity. Although Ulysses is not impossible to understand, the book does test anyone's endurance as it is filled with fragments of songs, bits of other languages, lists, obscure references and Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style. Idiosyncrasies abound; from the early Dubliners, Joyce abjured "perverted commas" in favor of French-style punctuation. Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one way to prepare for Ulysses. In that book we are introduced to Stephen Dadelus and we also have a chance to get used to Joyce's capacity to externalize his consciousness, to put down in words those things many of us would be ashamed to admit to thinking, even to ourselves. Unlike Odysseus, Joyce never returned home. He wandered around Europe, his eyesight failing, with his fiercely-loyal wife, Nora, at his side. It is Nora Joyce celebrates in the tremendous punctuationless passage that ends Ulysses. Although Stephen Dadelus, in his Parisian tranquility, would have pretended indifference to the praise heaped upon Ulysses, Joyce knew that he had created something special and lasting. "O rocks," Molly says to Bloom, "tell us in plain words." That is something Joyce never failed to do.
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Summary: Best book I've ever read
Review: Well, I won't try to write eloquently. I am a music student. I took a summer and I read this book for fun. I also did other things that summer, by the way. I had read A Portrait and Dubliners and I refreshed myself on Hamlet, The Odyssey, and Aristotle. I also got a couple books to help if I got stuck. I thought the book was beautiful and moving, but also very funny. It is one of the only books that makes me laugh out lound constantly. I came to realize that the difficult passages are difficult on purpose. Why should everything be easy and pleasant? Once I realized that parody was behind many parts, it stopped being difficult and became funny. I'm used to and thouroughly enjoy atonal music and complicated, difficult music. The time you spend with these things, like Ulysses, the more you get out. I no longer find Ulysses difficult at all. It is simply an emotional response when people hate it for its difficulties. Proffesors are wrong for saying these people are stupid. They are just looking at it the wrong way.
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Summary: this is THE desert island book
Review: As an avid reader, I've often thought, "Which book would I want to take with me to a desert island if I could only pick one book." Others like the Bible, or Dante's Inferno, or the Odyssey have crossed my mind, but in terms of revealing almost infinite possibilities, Ulysses is my pick, hands down. Recently I've reread some of it, but I read the book in a full in graduate school. For first time readers, my advice is, don't be intimidated! Unlike Finnegan's Wake which is not really "readable" by a normal person (okay, if you happen to be able to understand word puns in 27 different languages -- I don't mean to insult anyone...), I find that with some background preparation, Ulysses is very readable. As background, you should reread the Odyssey since each book is based on a corresponding book of the Odyssey. Then, you should get one or two guides to reading Ulysses (Gilbert has an easy to follow one) and try reading one chapter of Ulysses while keeping open the pages in the commentary (may remind some readers of biblical study). In fact, reading this book is the closest I think a non-rabbinical student will come to an exercise like reading Talmud (which comments on the Bible). The experience is infinitely rewarding and will teach you more about reading than any course you could take. The basic plot of the book is not at all hard to follow and there is an abundance of ribald humor. Lest you think Ulysses is "upscale" think again! Let me be clear: this is THE masterwork of the 20th century. It holds up well as one of the greatest of all time. No serious writer has escaped its influence. When you tackle it, you will understand what a great literary achievement is. After reading it for the first time, I become a Joyce fanatic. I'd also recommend both the Ellman biography of Joyce and the even better (in my opinion) biography of his wife Nora. You'll learn lots about Ulysses by reading both of these books as well. Don't be intimidated -- jump in head first. You will not be disappointed.
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Summary: A Man From Ireland...
Review: James Joyce's Ulysses has been hailed as a masterpiece since its publication in 1922. This tale of the adventures of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904, in Dublin is a remarkable conflation of mythology, symbolism, philosophy, social realism, and humanity. Bloom's relationships with wife Molly and surrogate son Stephan Dedalus reflect the simple decency of the common man. There is no doubt that reading Ulysses places great demands on the intellect of the reader. Joyce's intentions in writing Ulysses, to present a totally realistic view of one day in the life of ordinary Dublin citizens, yet at the same time to weave into this a grand parallel with Homer's Odyssey and on a smaller scale to deal with issues as complicated as those of Irish politics and religion, mean that before they come upon the novel, it is necessary for the reader to have a wide base of knowledge. The act of interpretation becomes not a burden but an essential part of the act of reading Ulysses for without it the reader might not gain the sense that they are one of the people that the novel is addressed to, rather than just an observer of a finite experience...
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