Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: What a nightmare !
Review: A lot of things have been said and written about James Joyce's most famous novel. Most of these remarks are high praises for the quality of his work and particularly for his originality.

Before buying the book, I went on-line to check Amazon's review about it. At the time, the comment seemed helpful. It clearly explained the structure of the novel, the personality of the characters - Leopold Bloom ans Stephen Dedalus -, as well as the outline of the plot - a day in the life of these people.

The review is very positive. It mentions that it is a "modern masterpiece" and that it is the greatest expression of realism in literature. Furthermore, it is said that the novel tells a "funny, sorrowful and suspenseful" story where "everything happens".

Since I am not an expert in literature I wonder what a masterpiece is? I cannot convince myself this is the best literature can get.

Nevertheless, other characteristics mentioned are impossible to grasp. It is obvious that I wrongly assumed that Amazon and I shared the definition of basic concepts such as "funny".

Therefore, I discovered that the novel was not what I though it would be. I like thoughtful and dynamic story telling books. I should have never bought Ulysses because it is slow, distant and numbness of one's brain is required to understand what the author is describing.

To sum up, the book did not impress me. Actually, it was a nightmare. And the review did not help me at all.

Rating:
Summary: Okay. Is it really worth it?
Review: Ulysses is one of those big, mad bellwethers of a book that X will tell you is the biggest, best, most important blah blah blah and Y will tell you is a load of badly written tripe. Neither X nor Y tend to notice that the book consciously encourages both responses...but, well, I'll get back to the academic riffing in a minute.

I first tried to read Ulysses aged about 14 (I was an annoying little boy that way) and didn't get very far. The first three chapters are set in and around the mind of Stephen Dedalus, one of the most ridiculously clever and over-educated characters ever conceived, as he takes breakfast with some friends, teaches in a school some miles south of Dublin and walks along a beach. Along the way, his mind ruminates on subjects as diverse as 16th century underworld slang, his dead mother, and something he calls "the ineluctable modality of the visible" which I'm still struggling with. But he's a curiously ambiguous character, this Stephen; he fancies himself as a poet and rebel but when, on the beach, he picks his nose, he has a quick look around to see that nobody's watching before he smears the snot on a rock. (Joyce likes to poke fun at pretension this way - although he doesn't suggest that Stephen's ideas or rebel stance are completely hollow, either.)

The 14-year-old me didn't get that far. I gave up. It wasn't until I was 19 or so that I got as far as chapter four and encountered a Mr. Bloom, pottering around the kitchen making breakfast, that I started to get a grip. Bloom is one of the most likeable characters in fiction. He's a quiet, rather shy, oddly intelligent advertising salesman married to a voluptuous siren of a wife, Molly. Either you're prepared to go the distance with Bloom, or else cast the book aside with a hollow oath, because he's about to spend the entire day walking around Dublin. Nothing will happen except that a man will be buried, a baby will get born, and Bloom will help Stephen when the latter gets into a drunken fracas with some British soldiers. (Ireland was still part of the Union in 1904, and Dublin was a garrison town. Many non-Irish readers concentrate on Joyce's innovation or wit or technical whatever, but Joyce is extremely historically aware, and Ulysses, like all his other books, is riddled with the traces of English domination. These add to the book, rather than diminish it.)

Readers who like those clanky, tinpot contraptions known as "plots" may get a tad frustrated. Leaving aside Joyce's gifts for parody (a _tad_ too indulged, in my opinion), the, if you like, human interest in Ulysses is in the details of the to-ing and fro-ing between the characters. A quite banal conversation turns out to have all sorts of fascinating undercurrents; Bloom, who is Jewish and therefore even more of an outsider than Stephen, is extremely good at detecting the hints and shifts in the tones of the people he meets. He keeps running into two things that cause him particular discomfort: anti-Semitic remarks, and reminders that his wife is about to sleep with another man.

Ulysses is about language, but that makes it sound like it's some godawful lumbering doorstop written by an English professor. (John Barth, come on down!) It doesn't feel abstract at all; it's full of sights (the band of old sweat inside Bloom's hat), smells (restaurants, horse urine, flowers) and especially sounds (cats, printing presses, trams). I can't think of any other book which transports you so completely to a different place and time. (It might've helped that I grew up in Dublin and knew most of the places that Joyce is writing about.) Borges described Joyce's prose style, at least in the earlier half of the book, as "strong and delicate" and that's a good description.

As the day wears on, the book starts to rumble at the foundations and it lurches with increasing unpredictability from style to style. Joyce is making a point about language; that things are altered by the manner in which we describe them. This can get a bit wearisome after a while, but when it works well - as in the chapter where the doings of a young girl on a beach are narrated in the style of a girl's magazine story - it can be very funny and rather touching. The book closes with a mighty tour de force as Molly Bloom sits up and thinks about her life and her curious husband.

Okay, that's the beginner's guide. My personal opinion? It's the best Irish book, a constant wonder, irritation and delight to read, and a stunning effort of imagination and intelligence by the most significant and most lavishly talented Irish writer. 20th and 21st century Irish culture is unthinkable without it. I'm grateful that it's there. What else is to be said?

Rating:
Summary: MY 2 CENTS ARE WORTH A HELPFUL VOTE!
Review: Okay, this is clearly the most thought out book I have ever read. You go through it, and you pick out any part and say, why must he be so wordy about two people getting a guinness, but you realize that he is putting all the mythical overload into trivial events, and that while it is absurd, it is true. If you can read this book in a class, that would be best, but at least be sure to have a complete guide so that you can get some of the allusions. You don't need to catch EVERYthing. It is very show-offy, a bit like Joyce is trying to just pack every single piece of information he's ever picked up into this novel (or whatever you'd like to call it, I think it is a novel, though). This can be annoying, but it is amazing. And I think that was his point, to describe his world and everything in it, through the story of a common man, whose heroism so deeply embedded in him is overlooked.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but...
Review: What many consider to be Joyce's masterpiece is, to be frank, by no means his best work. "Ulysses" takes Joyce's use of realism and disjointed language to an extreme that causes most readers to lose interest in the story and the messages contained within. No work in which the style causes the vast majority of the readers (even of the highly educated readers) to become disallusioned and pretty much sick of can be considered a true masterpiece. If one wants to understand Joyce's feelings on Dublin and its people (and consequently his feelings on the Universe in which we exist) should read a work such as "The Dubliners."

Rating:
Summary: Mind-Boggling
Review: This is the second time I've read "Ulysses". It is a 'hard read' even for me, a good reader; my consistant criticism against Joyce is that he intentionally works to hide his arguments, his characters, and his thematic material behind a mind-boggling wall of style in "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake", though his earlier works are quite approachable.

Too bad. The book is actually quite deeply human, and funny as hell. Bloom is a decent, bungling 'hero', a human like all of us. He's got his strengths, his weaknesses. I see him wandering flat footed in his black slacks like Charlie Chaplin through the crazy, jangling streets of Dublin. The night-town scene is a burlesque with a keenly penetrating, humanistic mind firmly at the helm. The barroom brawl a riot, especially with the dual narrators; the uneducated clod of low intelligence, and the archaic, mythic intonations of the blabber mouthed rhetoritician.

He muses on the wonder of existance; how we, living, dead breaths breath. How man and woman come together, making love and making babies. How, ultimately, we are all connected, umbilically to the past through our connections with the Tribe of Man.

"God loves everybody," says the comic, absurd voice in the barroom scene. It is funny. We grin, chuckle at the absurd voice. But it is true. It is Joyce's central theme.

Unfortunately, what he's mostly done is kept a ton of scholars busy writing 'commentaries' for a book that is revelant, all too human, and funny as hell... Perhaps even more hillarious than "Catch-22"... but that's debatable.

I give it five stars because I happen, through the graces of a good education, to be able to understand it. It is towering and complex. If you're willing to work, go for it. It will take you some time; took me two solid weeks of work. Still, when you're through, there's a sense of mental satisfaction. You feel like you've solved a great logic puzzle. However, don't just read it for themes; try to recreate the scenes and dialog in your mind. This isn't easy, granted. Joyce's style makes it tough.. but do! The rewards are immeasurable. Once you see these characters as real, solid characters, not as abstractions, the lights begin to shine, and you understand how Joyce sees the mythic/ religious shining through our chaotic, jumble of the modern world.

Rating:
Summary: How can you judge?
Review: How can this book be compared to others when it is so different? It has very little exciting plot. From what I have read of Joyce he has little imagination for pulling the reader to the edge of his or her seat, and keeping the reader up for hours past his or her bed time waiting to see what happens next. He does, however, have great knowledge of english language among other things, and uses it well. I LOVED reading this book, but not because of how much better it is than all other books (because it isn't), but because I couldnt wait to see what all of the fuss was about! You should definately get it for the same reason. By the way, Random House, the company that rated it number one has sole publishing rights to Ulysses.

Rating:
Summary: Ulysses
Review: Those who hold Ulysses up as some kind of uber-novel do it as much disservice as those who toss it aside as "trash" without giving it a second thought. Is it the greatest novel of the twentieth century? Who cares? What it is, certainly, is a work rooted in the depths of writing, a work labored over by a very intelligent man for years on end, and a work which deserves more thought than some are willing to give it credit for. The simple fact that a novel must be digested and thought about does not make it "obscure," nor is it, "worthless." It can be enjoyed by all who are willing to think about it. Writers like Carver who can demonstrate beauty in the simplicity of their writing have their place in the corpus of the English language, but so do writers like Joyce, whose complexities weave around themselves and ask us to consider the possibilities of our language in a different sense. To cast this book aside as meaningless does a disservice to the writer and the reader.

Rating:
Summary: The Mere Art of Enjoying Life (and in one day only)
Review: Yes, OK, it's always easy to say you don't like something (therefore, you are better than that particular work of art) Having recently arrive from Dublin, the Ulyses experience is understood different: now I can see why Life can happen in just one day. I do not know if it's difficult or easy to read, but when you are more than just a reader but also jump inside the book, and write it together with the author, you are brushed away, swept into a new realm, and sigh: he's right, life is worth it. Do no try to critize the book with difficult words: just live it, and choose who you want to be: Bloom or Dedalus

Rating:
Summary: A Muddled Tome
Review: While Squire Taylor might have waxed excessively virulent, he does provide a valid point. I have long questioned Joyce's status as a great writer. Not that he failed to display a knack for the pen - indeed, his _Dubliners_ contains work of substantial depth and real stylistic artistry (particularly "The Dead"). My qualm is with his later works, especially the much-praised _Ulysses_. Here Joyce lapsed into experimentation for the sake of experimentation. The final result was a muddled mess, the underlying meaning of which can only be _constructed_ by general readers of exceptional creativity or professional critics with advanced degrees and an excess of spare time.

And even if we give Joyce the benefit of the doubt, even if we believe that he was (like Thomas Wolfe, who had, after all, a very patient editor) writing to capture each and every moment of our lives, we must admit the difficulty of the task. Literature must follow some logical construct; it must sort our daily chaos with art. If we follow Joyce's example by stuffing a day's garbled thoughts into a book, we have created only a mirror - something that apes our futility. True literature, on the other hand, attacks our existence piecemeal. And though such literature may never reveal the meaning of each breath or cry "fiat lux" before God or the Void or whatever lies at the root of the universe, it is a symbol of our unquenchable willingness to kick against the pricks, to grasp at unknowable truth. The artist, in carefully crafting - in reaching for that elusive order and higher truth - breathes new and continual life into those words of William Faulkner:

"[Man] is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice . . . [must] help him endure and prevail."

How can our "puny inexhaustible voice" ring defiantly when, like Joyce, we wallow in our daily morass?

Rating:
Summary: another one of those snobs...
Review: Why do people who don't like Ulysses always lambaste those who do? You have every right to like and dislike what you please, and so do I. Why the name calling? I wouldn't call myself an intellectual and I'm certainly no "literary luminary," but I love the book. For me, it's not about mythic parallels or stylistic experimentation or esoteric theories of art-it's about the richness, the absolute miracle, of human experience. Whatever else you can say about Joyce's intent, he wanted to show us life. And every time, for example, Bloom wonders whether black reflects or refracts light, I see life-the sort of life (banal, uncertain, driven by the demands of the flesh, often a joy, sometimes thankfully relieved by humor) that I live. Joyce (I think) succeeded in giving us a very simple but profound truth: every moment of life is sacred. Eternity, heaven and hell, God, the whole shebang, are right here around and within us all the time. And we spend 99% of our time distracting ourselves in one way or other.

Bring your sense of humor! (it's supposed to be a comedy), and a little patience. The more you read it, the more you get out of it.