Ulysses

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Summary: Nobody could have done it except Joyce
Review: My advice to you is - read the entire thing first. Then read the book about it by Stuart Gilbert, and reread it.

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Summary: An amazing book that captures the entire human spirit.
Review: I started reading Ulysses with the help of the annotations, but soon left those behind. The horror stories that I had heard of the difficulty of the book were unfounded, and I enjoyed every moment of the text. Having read the Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was used to Joyce's style, or so I thought. But in Ulysses I discovered that stream of consciousness could be taken to a new and deeper level. Joyce did not mean for us to grasp every allusion, therefore annotations are not really necessary. By reading Ulysses, I also managed to gain a new insight into the Odyssey, and found new undertones withing Homer's work. People had told me that at the age of 16 and 17 it would be impossible to read Ulysses. I disagree. Length does not make a book more difficult to read -- Walden Pond is, at times, harder to understand than Ulysses. When I finished Ulysses, I felt an emptiness, for I had been living in the mind of Leopold Bloom. It was as if part of me had been taken away. In the future, I will definitely reread Ulysses, and I recommend it to anyone who loves literature. It is a masterpiece.

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Summary: Ulysses and the psychological wanderings of everyman
Review: Ulysses is certainly one of the least approachable books of our century. (It took me 2 years to finish reading it in a thoughtful manner.) Joyce spent 7 years in its composition, (1914-1921). Ulysses expands the technique used in Joyce's earlier work, The Portrait, of dramatic presentation of action via psychological inflection and superlative linguistic mastery. The not inconsiderable word-play of course presages the last and most formidable work: Finnegans Wake. As do the Portrait and the Wake, Ulysses challenges the reader to reassess not only himself but also what he expects from a book, and what he understands by "reading" a book. An atmosphere is created which is very intimate and precise-to-detail. There is a great deal of juxtaposed humour and pathos, and one senses deep and numerous levels of interconnection between people and events that one just cannot seem to put one's finger on: an expanding horizon of meaning that vanishes in the distance of one's ability to comprehend it, or perhaps "an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere". While Mark Twain's observation that a great book is a book everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read may certainly seem at first glance to apply to Ulysses, the impeccable crafting of the story, and the layers upon layers of symbolism which support it, make Ulysses a book to be enjoyed "over and over again", as Joseph Campbell rightly observes. One final note: if, like me, you have found other authors, say, Tolstoy, to be incredibly true-to-life in their literary characterizations, (e.g. Anna Karenina, or Pierre in War and Peace), prepare for a shock..just wait until you breathe in the realistic "holodeck" atmosphere of Dublin on Bloomsday, 16 June, 1904! Certainly however, 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, and also in the extensive inner musings of himself and Leopold Bloom elsewhere in the book. Yet it is often unclear, (at least to me!), to what degree these thoughts and thought pictures are actually distinctly voiced within the characters, or simply lapping on the shores of self-awareness within their consciousness... Not for the faint of heart, nor for those who are unwilling to follow the thread Joyce gives us to find our way to the centre of the labyrinth of our own psychology and culture, Ulysses is a grand book.

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Summary: Yes
Review: It has been said that the title should arrest the casual onlooker as if it was read: The Bible. Ulysses is James Joyce's Bible. What does one gain from reading this novel? Joyce has such a command of our language that it becomes putty in the hands of an artist. Each chapter has its own technique. Joyce wears a different mask for each section so that the reader sees the history of the English language unfold before him. Joyce remains the super-artist however, peering down from his overworld of the ulimate artist. Reading Ulysses will make all modern fiction seem to be the ineluctable flotsam in the path of the Joycean mothership. So who is Ulysses the character? What is Ulysses? Odysseus? Odysseus is the beloved Greek figure who appears in the form of Leopold Bloom. Ulysses was the despised, bloodthirsty, Roman rabblerowser who ended up in one of Dante's jivin' circles. Bloom is not Ulysses. Ulysses is something else. Everything else. A three in one of Bloom, Stephen, Molly; Father, son, mother(holy ghost); Scientist, artist, lover; the meeting place of lust and compassion: Word known to man: Love. Reader beware, Ulysses is not Ulysses, it is something else. It is the Bible of Modernism. or something like that.

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Summary: More than worth the effort. Relax and listen to the music.
Review: This book is five or six times the length of most novels, has an army of minor characters to keep up with, and contains a vocabulary that makes prudent keeping handy a good, unabridged English dictionary. (Never mind the German, Italian, French, Gaelic, Yiddish, etc., or the allusions to classical or Irish mythology.) A damned difficult book, it's true. But it captivated me. ULYSSES is by turns crude and sensitive, lyrical and blunt, funny and sad. During Bloomsday, the people of Joyce's universe eat, ogle women, defecate, bet on horses, worry, work, make love, lift their petticoats and wiggle their behinds, attend funerals, beg, give alms, pray, blaspheme and discuss every subject worth breath from the disposition of Shakespeare's second-best bed to God being a shout in the street to sex in all its manifestations. Yes! O yes! I have never seen anything so rich with the texture and feel and vivid details of life. Add to that Joyce's use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue to draw the reader into the tale with the characters (something no novelist before Joyce, not even Henry James, could pull off) as well as blindingly beautiful stretches of sheer poetry and you are looking at magic. Read this. Truly beautiful things can be as difficult as they are rare.

Rating:
Summary: Monumental piece of modern art.
Review: Many have said that Ulysses is the greatest novel written in English in the 20th century. Technically speaking, it's certainly unimagineable that any author could have put more into a book in this or any other century. But it's not for all tastes. You should read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist before attempting Ulysses, as the former are more accessible and will let you know whether you like Joyce. Read the World's Classics edition of Ulysses, the notes are very helpful. Be prepared to work at this book. It takes some getting used to. Having read it, I think the effort was worth it. Joyce is a genius (evident from his earlier works). His writing is almost lyrical at times and every word is chosen deliberately to achieve the overall impression he seeks to make. He was one of the Protean Modernists, though, and in Ulysses he takes Modernism, the novel and literature itself to their outer limits. At times, thoughts and actions, reality and imagination all get mixed up in this book and sometimes the narrative line just seems to disappear - but isn't this the way of the human psyche? Don't expect Dickens or a plot in its normal sense. Do expect, after all the hard work is done, to marvel at the author's abilities and to have a warm feeling for Leopold Bloom, to wonder at his humanity and to do this despite the character's weaker traits.

Rating:
Summary: The greatest of them all.
Review: An independent discovery of self and matter rarely comes in such obtuse and atmospheric prose as Ulysses does. The most spinalcrushingly dense text this side of the Marquis De Sade and Rabelais, Joyce evolves the subconscious greatness of Bloom by using thousands of references from 20th Century Industrial Europe and weaving them into million mile high levels of plot and thought. Joyce carries subtlety and grace with each poetic sentence and each step of character development; you don't just read, you experience, you live within this world. Immerse yourself in the essence that is Ulysses, whether your teacher assigns it to you or not

Rating:
Summary: It is no less than perfect
Review: Although I enjoy using Anthony Burgess', "Joyce Prick," as a walking guide through Ulysses, it's not a difficult read. However, the best part about Ulysses is that no matter your view, no one will ever agree with it! Ulysses is best understood, in my opinion, by the male aged 35 to 50. It is the story of Bloom's passage into middle age. His last bit of memory, physical or mental, of his youth. He is passing on to new memories, but allows for one final mental seduction. In the meantime, his wife, Molly, is also passing. She has allowed herself, in her own final touch with youth gone, to be physically seduced. In the end, Molly and Bloom rejoin. Life goes on; youth is dead. I guess that I will always love this book, however, I will always be amazed at how simple it is and how much has been written analyzing it. But then, it is no less than perfect

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Summary: A day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Dublin.
Review: Ulysses begins where A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man left off. Stephen Dedalus has left Ireland only to return to his dying mother. Just because you've read and understood Portrait, don't expect Ulysses to come quite as easily. It's rough going in spots but well worth the effort of getting through. In the process you will be taken through 783 pages that encompass less than a twenty-four hour period in the life of Stephen, the Blooms and Dublin. And what a day it is. Everything you might imagine happens, and much more than you ever could imagine also occurs. From the uneasy start of Stehpen's day to his boring job as a teacher he plods through his mind as he tries to plod through his life. In the course of the day a man dies, a woman gives birth, Stephen finds himself at the library discussing his theories of Shakespeare, Hamlet, and that paternity may very well be legal fiction. Also during this same day Leopold Bloom is going about his routine business in Dublin and finally fatherless Stephen meets sonless Bloom. They venture off into the night world where the present and past hallucinate in a theatre of the mind living nightmare that culminates with Bloom taking Stephen under his wing. And while all this was going on, Mrs. Bloom, Molly has had her own sort of day. The Blooms have an odd relationship yet manage to maintain a bond through their thoughts that neither of them does well in putting into words to one another. Whatever they do, they do with full thought and awareness of the other. What makes this book so terrific is the wide ranges in style that Joyce uses. Each episode is like a novel in itself. There is no boredom or tediousness to get through, the main thing that makes it difficult are the constant allusions and references that Joyce makes that may have you wondering at times just what is going on. There are a number of good books to refer to while reading Ulysses and they can make it easier, but even without them, it's worth plunging forward and reading it all. The novel covers every part of human existance from the banal to the sublime. You will not be in doubt as to what these people are feeling or thinking, their stream of inner consciousness takes up most of the book. And what's great about that is in finding out what these people are about you can learn something about yourself that you were not previously aware of.

Rating:
Summary: yes yes yes Leopold yes
Review: Incredibly to us, from our "modern" vantage point, "Ulysses" was at one point suppressed in most of the civilized world for its supposedly raunchy sex scenes. Today, we can see that his fiction worked on much higher levels: his portrayal of sex (and other things) is more inventive than Miller's, more subversive than Mappelthorpe's. Joyce's intention is no less than to create an entire mental universe; his novel is a potent artistic answer to the philosophical question, "Do we really exist?"

Leopold Bloom, the hero of the story, is a completely ordinary man; but Joyce's combination of words and the proliferation of cross-connections between the current word and the next illustrate that there is often little connection between *what* we think and the *words* we think. So Joyce is in effect trying to write a novel without words; he wants to get into the stream of Bloom's thought directly, without preface or interference.

Though most would agree that this is a "difficult" novel -- perhaps the first book to attempt to break the limits of language -- it is a must-read. Bring the book on a picnic, along with your dictionary and a lot of time. The famous final chapter is worth all the work.