Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: Very intresting and engross despite the diffculty
Review: I will admit that I dont understand every little word of ulysses but the lyricsm of the novel of enough to warrant five stars. The way the novel goes back and forth between joyce reality and the stream of thoughts are simply increable. Increable in both how he conviced it and who effect it is. There are also just prse of pure emtion that anyone can instanitly understand . As for the charaters, all are intresting and distinct. Each word has to be read very carefully to understand what is happening but the end resut is both and intresting and intensen novel.Any one who truly enjoys ulysses should also check out Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin, which is also a large urban story useing the stream of concessness

Rating:
Summary: A Question of Fidelity
Review: The granddaddy of shock-jock and dadaist literature, "Ulysses" can feel a little dated at times, its brilliant turns of phrases often sounding only rather archly cute and its various "voices" forced. Well, a great pioneering work such as this would probably have to take chances or it wouldn't be the work that it is. But suffice to say, when it all comes together properly it can blow you away. My favorite sections, "Scylla and Charybdis" and "Penelope," seem to me to be unequalled in their raw intellectual and psychic power. Like the epic upon which it is based, "Ulysses" spends an inordinate amount of time and emotional energy on the nature of the marital relationship. The great tension of "The Odyssey," the question of whether Odysseus can get home in time to keep his wife faithful, is turned on its head in "Ulysses," where the wanderer makes a conscious decision to stay away from his unfaithful wife but is doomed to continue to wonder resignedly how he can resolve their sad situation. Don't be afraid to consult Cliff's Notes your first time through, but don't try to catch every nuance either, or you'll go crazy. But this is one book that will truly haunt you no matter how you approach it.

Rating:
Summary: The book that most resembles, to my mind, an atlas. Really.
Review: This is a book designed to make some people hate it, and make some people love it. That's what we all want to write - the seeds of a good debate.

Does one need to understand something to appreciate it? I first approached this book like any other - steam through the pages, and try to remember what the story was all about. I found a book which didn't make sense, a book that was near incomprehensible, and I felt frustrated that I could not see what the fuss was all about.

I could not hate a book I could not understand, however, except for the fact that it seriously dented my ego. A book I couldn't understand? Never! How dare it??

But certain fragments stayed in my mind, and I returned to it again, six months after my first read through.

Picked through the text, fell through the lyricism, and replaced the book back on the shelf, where it resided more as a symbol, a badge of courage than a book.

And I returned. Again and again. Snippets, fragments, open the book at random, extract. Replace. Repeat.

Bit by bit it began to fall into place, the characters and the ambition of the book began to emerge. Bit by bit I began to like it more. I had to stop judging it on its reputation, difficulty or intellectualism. There are sections I love, sections I find a chore to read, and sections I discover all the time. Bizarrely, previously tedious chapters began to come to life, and I began to appreciate them. Equally so, I began to dislike some I previously liked, and the whole balance is always changing. So, I can say that although I've read all the words at least thrice, I have not finished reading the book. And at my rate of a few pages a month, I never will. I hope I never will.

Most will either focus on the ambition or the difficulty of the book. There is no need to justify, I think, just read it. There is no need to judge it against any criteria other than yourself; you are the only yardstick any book needs (unless you're an academic, in which case something else is needed). There is no need to redefine "good" over and over again, and justify it.

Multifaceted, multilayered, and most of all, strangely human, this is a book I'm not done with yet, and I don't intend ever to be so.

That's why I'm giving it 5 stars. It never has ceased to uncover something new each time. The only other book that I can look at time and time again and discover something new all the time is a very good atlas! Well, that's why I think I'll give it 5 stars today. Tomorrow, maybe 4. It changes all the time.

Joyce won, didn't he? Everyone wants to write something which is near immortal, and by writing a book which would prompt endless debate, he achieved that goal.

Rating:
Summary: Actually...
Review: ...there are two kinds, not species of people. The kind who can like or dislike a book and articulate why; and those who can't articulate anything and resort to name-calling and insults.

I enjoyed Ulysses. Wasn't an easy read, and I don't like the idea that you have to buy a guide to appreciate all the nuances; but all in all it's worthy of the veneration we heap on it as a truly modern novel.

Rating:
Summary: People
Review: Apparently there are 2 species of people who have read "Ulysses": those who understand it's a great piece of work, and those who are idiots.

Rating:
Summary: An exercise...
Review: Richard Ellman in his biography of the famous Dublin-born sponge, points out that Joyce was once asked why he was taking 12 years to write what would become Ulysses. Joyce was living in Europe, hitting up friends, relatives, and would be patrons for money as he masturbated away his talent right in front of the poor, half-wit woman he married. "Because," he answered, "I can't think of anything else to do." That about sums up why this book in truth is an eruption of verbal flatulence, a screech in the literary void by a man who was not capable of doing what lesser writers could: compose a plot. There are scenes, passages and conversations from Ulysses that are truly brilliant--but that's all one can say about it. The tragedy is that a man of such talent, who would have secured a place in literary history if he had never written another word after "The Dead", felt obliged to labor his way through this doorstop of a novel, when he could have produced something so much better.

Rating:
Summary: Ulysses for me, is the consummation of all literature.
Review: Many people see Ulysses as perhaps a pretentious volume of over-rated nonsense which can only be appreciated by intellectuals and academics. This is not the case. By 'the consummation of all literature' I mean that it employs every style of language, every grand philosophical and theological theme. It unites styles of literature like playscript, monologue, soliloquoy, poetry, melodrama, fantasy, heroic, symbolism and makes use of all literary devices: bathos, puns, litotes, dramatic irony, hyperbole - fusing them not only into a story but into an Odyssey. It is the heroic storyteller's heroic story. It's context - modernism - is transcended and becomes what one would hesitatingly refer to now as Postmodern. By that rather glib statement I mean it uses all these disparate themes and unites them via the central character, Leopold Bloom. Leopold is the Modernist man - the manifold fragmented man who asserts a new identity by unification of his 'hundred thousand flaws'. Virginia Woolf tried to demostrate this in Mrs Dalloway by allowing no chapter breaks in her exploration of the semi-autobiographical heroine and thus totalising the sum of experiences. Where Joyce succeeds over Woolf is that he explores not only the totalisation but the totalisation of all relevant parallel events. Like a theorist of chaos, he explores the detail that affects the major life-forces and struggles. The parallel to Homer's Odyssey is emphasised by making the hero's journey so incredibly anodine on the one hand and so completely heroic on the other. Using the Homeric myth of Cyclops, Joyce explores the prevalence of anti-semitism, the Irish religious conflict, the pettiness of argument and theological truths in but one scene. Joyce's work is a classic, not in the way that Finnegan's Wake is - which explores the actuality of language, the song of words and music , but by taking a life in a day and writing about lives themselves and the world they inhabit. It sounds extremely pretentious to say it is the consummation of all literature, but no other book thus far, in my experience, comes even close nor attempts to tackle so much of what Joyce achieves. It is not only that Joyce sees a world in a grain of sand he sees, more importantly, the grains of sand in the world.

Rating:
Summary: It's Pretty Good
Review: If I hadn't read the book, I think I would simply on the basis of the controversy within this review listing. I think the people who gave it one star should forgive the book it's difficulty and direct their hostility away from it's five-star constituency. Personally, I find the difficulty of the work to be one of its many rewards. But its difficulty really starts to fade after a couple hundred pages as you get used to Joyce's protean style, and settle into Leopold Bloom's head. For those who deride the book's fans as pseudo-intellectual sycophants, I just want to say that most of the pleasures I derived from the book were not intellectual at all. I found it a very moving and uplifting story of the heroism inherent in the simple affirmation of going through an ordinary day. That Joyce implements the whole cultural arsenal of Western Civilization to conduct such a simple story is the evidence of his genius, and if that is too intellectual, I still feel richer for wading in the depths of his book. For it really contains all, or at least it seems to--the epic scope of the book dwarfs the reader coming into it. I certainly wouldn't read this book in order to feel intellectually superior to anyone. I imagine those who enjoy it rather feel humbled from the process. At any rate, I loved it. It is a treasure, the most amazing and titanic example of literature moving forward ever written.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the pseudo-intellectual's literary bible
Review: I am on the last 100 pages of - what is in all liklihood - the hardest book I have ever read. How I feel about the book is still in question. Some parts I have found very poetic, lyrical, truthful, and yes! even slightly titillating; but, I must say, the vast majority of the book I think is not so much as boring as it is protracted and useless. However, with all due credit to Joyce, it's always honest. Very honest! I found Joyce's other work "Portrait of the Artist..." far more readable and inspiring. So, I don't thinks it's being unfair to Joyce when one says that Ulysses is extremely over-rated. Furthermore the novel seems to have a sort of literary snob appeal for those pseudo intellectuals (and/or Joyce-devotees) who feign some sort of intellectual epiphany from the experience of reading it. For them, yet perhaps another way to separate themselves from the "unappreciative, uninitiated, unenlightened reading masses."

Rating:
Summary: An unique work and a remarkable novel!
Review: A very complex narrative! I think it must be the most difficult reading I ever made. Joyce built an entire new language of literature to write this remarkable novel, an original work in all aspects from tale to structure and language. People talk in many codes, from old rude Irish to Latin, Italian and common english. The description of inarticulate sounds like the cat's "Mrkgnao" was quite new to literature. The tale grasps to describe the everyday action of early century Dublin, a single day of the common life of some Irish villagers - every action, every thought and discussion, every joke, memory and dream! The story is about a man that represents the classic hero inside of the common man. Heroic deeds aren't done only in the bloody fields of senseless wars; the common man does great deeds every day without bloodshed. Remember that Ulysses was a a hero that hated war. Joyce believed that modern literature was empty within its meaningless structures and tales; only the profound significance of the classics could inject human soul back to literature. Joyce believed that people were always unconsciously reliving the classics models in their lifes, like a circle that never ends. Finally, the structure is made of many styles in order to create an entire new genre of modern literature. Think of something and you find it in "Ulysses": popular songs, discussions, theatre, oniric events, medieval tales, monologues, mind narrative... "Ulysses" has what it takes to stand among the greatest works of mankind's literature. Scholars say that Joyce wrote "Ulysses" as the book that would end with all books, the final stone of modern literature in its way to regain the soul of the classics. They may be right! "Ulysses" is a small world written into book. It's an unique piece of work!

Carlos Madeira Portugal, 16th of August of 1999