Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: Still fresh after 75 years.
Review: Yes because you never read it since college with the pointyheaded old man but you can read it again it is better every time yes one day in Dublin is infinitely interesting with Joyce yes it has everybody yes tired young Stephen tired old Bloom and plain tired Molly yes it does everything from the newspaper to the bathroom yes it is complicated but better every time you read you must buy it say to yourself yes I will buy it yes I will Yes

Rating:
Summary: Kidneys, infidelity, and parenthood
Review: Reading Ulysses is a different experience for everyone. One thing is for certain - it is a difficult,long read. It is also, strangely, very hard to put down and it leaves you searching for meaning and just in a state of complete wonder. Amazingly, Joyce is able to convey each character's thoughts and dialect in a way that has never been achieved by anyone else. It feels almost as if each character was composed by a different author - they are so unique and detailed. Though I cannot express much of anything that has not already been said - let me make one recommendation to the reader of Ulysses - read something to help you through it (even cliff notes) and also read the Odyssey again - you will find this very helpful in navigating through this remarkable text.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant work of literature or load of crap?
Review: First of all I tried to like and understand this book.

I have read 200 pages of something that is really boring because some people kept on claiming that it is brilliant. At the moment I don't find it nessesary to read it any furder.

But here are the conclussions I have made.

Why this book is interresting:

-The stream of consience idea is great, really. I love it.
-I also love the idea that he descided to write about some of the things no sensibele writter would have ever written about. Like how Bloom went to the toilet or mastrubated.

Why this book is a load of crap:

-Way to long (I have nothing against long books and I have read quite a lot of books and I love Homer, Dante, Shakespear, Milton, Orwell, Huxley, Poe, Bulgakov, Plato, Swift, Nietzsche, Dickens, Asimov and many more so I do know a bit about litterature) this book should have ended whit the third chapter.
-It lacks a plot. I am not saying that there has to be a overlingly complicated story behind it but it should have some directionlines.
-The languege. Joyce seems to want to point out the whole time how good he knows English and that is very irretating.
-It has no real meaning. I know that people have looked for one but all they have come up whit where some things like it is an epic of the body (well describing how someone goes to the toilet could hardly be discrived as epic. The also spoke about the complex intriging monologs and the praise of the mind (well the just say a lot of things and never seem to be able to think in a straigt line for longer than 3 min. And finally the the so cold new light that Joyce shines on myths. The mostly bring up Odysseus whit this one. Well people seek for Odysseus in this book because Joyce told them to do so.
-Almost anybody could have written this book.

I would also like to point out that when it was released all the people who love this book now (writters and proffesors) hatted this book. If it had never ben forbidden it would have just been forgotten like it perhaps should.

I would like also to say that I didn't stopt reading tis book because it was to difficult but because it was borring. For after all I have read Paradise lost in the orriginal and I do find it difficulter to read that this one.

Perhaps it is just so difficult to read because it is borring has anyone thought about that?

(Excuse me for my English.)

Rating:
Summary: To read the words is to read the man
Review: I was intimidated at the bulk of ULYSSES, I must admit. But i found myself shocked by it's radiating brilliance. The book is a labor to read, one often has to re-read a paragraph or (god forbid) a chapter to allow the work to truly flow and make sense. Joyce uses beautiful detailed writing of the human mind, all of our peculiar little idiosyncracies and actions that define us as human beings.
The greatest feat I've had in my young life is reading the last page and closing the book. You sit back and for hours are confounded as to the brilliance and success of Joyce to write the actions of two characters in a day. Each thought, each subconscious connection and little bits of thinking and reacting are somehow branded into the pages of ULYSSES. I dont think i will ever read such a significant work again. It is bold, it is at times monotonous, at times incoherent, but there are some golden pages were you are sucked into the writing, for the words on the page are your thoughts, your fantasies, your raw human nature.
It took me a month to read the book, i read it in the midst of depression and suicidal thoughts. I was able to lose myself in ULYSSES, i was able to walk the streets with Dedalus and Bloom. I was able to sit on the beach and watch the dog sniff around for something he had lost in a past life time. It is a masterpiece while being imperfect, which is an awful lot like being a human being.

Rating:
Summary: You may have fooled the others...
Review: but you don't fool me.

It seems that there are three types of Ulysses reviewers out there:

Type 1: "This book is a work of genius that requires great effort, rigor, and intellect in order to digest."

Type 2: "This book is way too smart for me, but I THINK it's good. Everyone says its good, so I'm probably just too dumb to understand. When I read the Cliff's Notes it helped."

Type 3: "Why the f@$k should I "read" something by someone who didn't take the time to "write" something? This is stream-of-consciousness at its most unreachable and unrewarding. This is a slap in the face to Aldous Huxley, Philip Dick, KV, etc. Books by those authors are actually ENLIGHTENING and furthermore, ENJOYABLE(!!!!) to read."


Guess which type of reviewer I am and win a prize.

Rating:
Summary: On faith
Review: I am still digesting "Ulysses." I read it while walking around Dublin a few years ago. It was marvelous to trace the steps of Leopold and Molly, and to see what they "saw," but the novel remains a distant pleasure to the reader. I must admit it is not the most accessible book ever written, but it gets four stars for its intent ... and that it is better than "Finnegan's Wake." Be warned: This book is not for the casual reader.

Rating:
Summary: a true classic
Review: I tried to read Ulysses when I was about 20. I couldn't get into it. The stream of consciousness put me off completely Now I'm over 60 and I greatly enjoyed the book. I could hardly put it down. The writing is beautiful. I just had to go out and get a gorgonzolia sandwitch with a glass of burgundy.

Rating:
Summary: Over Rated Sensationalism
Review: It was later said when Joyce was dead and buried that he had confessed to a close friend that "Uylsses" was a complete fabricated joke that he used to get revenge at the world with. He was drunk most of the time he had put pen to paper and he threw so much of the text out that its suprising that most people hold this pretentious amateurish work as the greatest novel of the last one hundred years. The prose is vague, uninspiring and chatoic, there is no plot line what-so-ever, it's just a meandering stream of undelicate and unsophisticated garble from a minor artist.


Rating:
Summary: Impressive
Review: I feel myself quite inadequate to write even a small review on such a masterpiece. This is a book of astonishing beauty and remarkable insight. I do believe it well worth the time and effort. The last few lines are truly the most extraordinay I have ever read.

Rating:
Summary: It is a great book after all
Review: This is in the eyes of most literary critics the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and a major addition to the Western literary Tradition. So much has been said about it in so many ways that I will free to chip in my less than two cents without doing the reviewer's ordinary task of describing the work, and telling the reader what it is all about. Bloomsday is a day on the literary calendar of the world. And Daedalaus, and Leopold Bloom and Molly are with K. and Falstaff, and Sancho and Pickwick in the cast of world - literary creations whose image is part of the collective human consciousness generation to generation as most real human beings are not.
Ulysses is not easy to read even if one takes a Gilbert Stuart or some other modern guide , and figures out what each section with its own separate style, technique, theme parallel in the Odyssey is all about. And there are parts and not simply small parts which bore in their incomprehensibility as only Finnegans Wake will exceed. But there are also, and this is all through the work great lyrical passages of course culminating in Molly Blooms yes I said I will yes. There is too I suppose the particular pleasure of trying to figure out all these literary mysteries and these hidden hints in the multi- layered language of the text. Already Joyce here is moving toward the creation of his own language and the portmanteau and pun principles are richly at work. In Oxen of the Sun he writes the history of the English language parodying its styles. And the whole theme of parodying rewriting alluding to the great work, and somehow superseding it are in the frame of the work ( Before Bloom and before Daedalus there was a real Ulysses) Joyce's effort to write in one day the whole of human experience and to make too of the form of catalogue encyclopedia a higher way to art is part also of the transformation of popular forms into the highest art forms. Shakespeare did it on many levels and so must Joyce, as Hamlet Daedalaus reminds it. Ulysses at publication time was revolutionary to many in its putting on the page the lusts and obscenities , the sexual thoughts and even ' experiences' of its characters. It too broke the frame of convention in a whole host of other ways including through the shifting centers of its narrative consciouosness- the way it tells and does not tell its story. The sheer lyric musical beauty of Joyce's prose is poetry at its best .And the epiphanies on oval leaves are revelations of the beauty in language itself its sheer joyful joycean playing. And how can I having read through with dismay so much of the hidden and not so hidden anti- Jewish character of so many in the Tradition not be hearted by the warm feeling which flows toward the good souled Leopold Bloom. If I were to complain about graduate school time reading through the longest longeurs in Joyce I would nonetheless always keep in mind that one wee bit of an Irishladdie allalone went out there and by himself only made a masterpiece all mankind can make its own by reading and rereading before running on to riverun from bend of bay to swerve of shore past Howth Castle and environs