Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: Ulysses is Useless
Review: There is one great line in this book:

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Unfortunately, the rest of it is unintelligible, tedious bunk. Save your time and energy for something like '1984' by George Orwell, a REAL twentieth century classic.

Rating:
Summary: Ulysses
Review: I'm sorry to say I didn't know what was going on about 85 percent of the time while reading this book. I even read "Portrait of the artist" before this one. The only thing it helped me with was recognizing Stephen Dedalus' name. I can't recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: ULYSSES: BOUNDARY AND GATE INTO A WORLD.
Review: I encountered Ulysses when I was in high school in the late 60's.
It was the time when the great gulf between the classical-rooted modern (of which Ulysses is a summary representative), and the techno-corporate post-modern was becoming painfully clear. The encounter with Ulysses was an unsettling experience because I was so immediately and deeply drawn to the book that I couldn't leave it alone (I kept it with me all the time to grab any chance to read more), but I also knew that I was by no means equipped to read this book satisfactorily. I actually had a teacher who mocked my attempt to read it on my own because, I'm sure, he felt so intimidated by it himself and he was, after all, a 'teacher'. My lack of the necessary tools in this case was painful to me and I was determined to gain them with or without help. This determination, which involved a great deal of hard work in the glow of midnight oil, led me to a much deeper understanding of how different Joyce's 'cultural' world was from mine. American high school education was not, is not, designed to prepare one for an encounter with Ulysses, it has a very different purpose. So I worked at Ulysses nearly a year and began to get a grasp of the cultural depth behind it, and absorbed by it, that had no immediate connection with my own culture. Please recall that the world of Ulysses is the world that Joyce himself grew up in, it was common for young men to be familiar with not only classical English, but French, Italian, Latin and even Greek. It was normal to read books many times over a life-time. Long literary texts were carefully written out by hand, the techno-revolution that created fast, disposable ART did not yet exist. When Joyce said it had taken him a life-time to write Finnegans Wake and therefore the reader could spend a life-time reading it, he was making a rather confident but basically reasonable statement. After grasping this I went back and read Dubliners, the Collected Poems, Exiles, Stephen Hero, A Portait Of The Artist, and then read Ulysses again (I was not willing to meet Finnegan yet, because when I did I wanted to be able to converse with man.) So I succeeded in getting a feel for the overall shape of Ulysses which was very important because it allowed me to focus on the details within a more solid context. Then at that point it became a matter of how far I wanted to go with it. I saw at this point that Ulysses was in part a modern summary expression of a European culture that was at that time dying and becoming the 'past', the stuff of 'history'. It was in fact a part of the same cultural world as The Divine Comedy, much more than it was a part of my post-modern cultural world. This fact has nothing to do with whether or not Ulysses is worth reading (to me it was obviously worth reading intimately, it is a work of genius), but it has everything to do with how it is understood by readers today. I could give an episode by episode analysis of Ulysses from my perspective, but I think that would not be of as much value as addressing other questions. I will choose two.
1. Why do Joyce's last two enormous books, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, have such a conclusive, end-of-the-line, nothing-more-to-be-said, feeling about them? They describe a cultural borderline that is rather apocalyptic in its scope and suggestion. They are like the amazing last testament of a cultural world whose fire is fading out into the past. I think Joyce knew that he was the last of a line and so he put everything into it. His favorite books were Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy and he aspired to be in their company even though he was a modern artist, the last one. And it is highly relevant that his compatriot, friend, and fellow-artist, Samuel Beckett, who was born in the same world as Joyce knew that Joyce was special case and that nothing more could be done in the direction that Joyce represented.(Beckett is probably the only great artist who successfully strandled the modern/post-modern borderline because he understood what Joyce had achieved and what it meant for his own art.)
2.My second question concerns the many negative reviews that Ulysses has here. Do you reviewers who trash Ulysses with such smug confidence really believe that you are qualified to make a meaningful statement about this book? And if so, then why didn't you? You are certainly not obliged to like Ulysses, but could you at least be responsible enough to have some idea of what it is before you bless us with your holy judgement upon it?

Rating:
Summary: Do not read this hate crime.
Review: This "Reader's Edition" of Ulysses cannot be defended on any grounds, not even those of the editor. Mr. Rose claims to have brought the beauty of Joyce's most famous work closer to being appreciated en masse. He strips the work of many techniques that Joyce is admired for, that set him apart as an artist and that he surely intended. Gone are many (there are thousands of revisions) of Joyce's omissions of puctuation, capitalization and other conventions of grammar. There are documented mistakes that Joyce attempted to correct during his lifetime, and three existing editions are far truer to Ulysses as it was intended. There is no reason to subjugate the techniques of James Joyce so people with short attention spans and speciously pedantic (why correct Joyce's purposeful misuse of grammar) leanings can appreciate. If you simply want to know the story buy the Cliff's notes or ask someone who read the book. If you want to find out all the reason's for Joyce's renown read the true "reader's editions" from the 20's and thirties or ,of course, the 1961 text. I am obviously very angry. Even if I sat and thought for weeks I couldn't put any of my points in a technical manner. If you have read previous editions and enjoy seething, buy this one. Then you too can ask the question: Why would anyone do what Mr. Rose has done?

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Summary: This book could change your life
Review: Well, the reviews on here so far have been very mixed, and I'd have to say I more or less agree with all of them. That's right. All of them.

First of all, the ones that accuse Ulysses of being a load of gibberish and a sluggish read. They're right. However, Ulysses is not meant to be a pure pleasure read. It's meant to be studied. I read a lot, and before Ulysses, the longest a book had ever taken me was two weeks. Ulysses took me two months. I did it as a part of my AP English project, and tackled it AFTER I had read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and sections of Richard Ellmann's biography. Even then, I kept Ulysses and Annotated and the Cliffs Notes close by my side.

There are many parts of Ulysses that don't make sense. But the parts that do are brilliant. Joyce was a true genius, and if you take the time to studdy his work, you will be blown alway by his mastery of the English language, and his understanding of human nature. I hope to become a writer someday, and reading Ulysses has totally changed my outlook in writing and life.

I would be lying if I said I enjoyed Ulysses all the way through. But after you have read it, you will find that your mind is open to a million different poissiblities concerning life, other people, and the use of language.

Who knows? Maybe someday I'll write my own Ulysses...something a bit more reader-friendly...

Rating:
Summary: please note which text you read
Review: Another reviewer complained about "Ulysses, the Corrected Text" as a rewrite by Danis Rose; it is NOT. The Bodley Head (London, 1984) edition of this name was edited by Hans Walter Gabler and has a preface and recommendation by Richard Ellmann, the foremost biographer of James Joyce. This edition is a significant contribution to Joycian publishing and a "must" addition to any complete library of Joyce's works, alongside any of the "original" text works. Joyce's manuscript as sent to the printers was difficult to read (it had many handwritten corrections of corrections and border notes which the original publisher could not decide whether he was supposed to use), and Gabler merely did a highly-regarded job of reconsidering original manuscript materials and other sources. The first- or second-time reader of Ulysses likely would not notice the differences in the text, but Joyce scholars and Ulysses fans regard this as an important reconsideration and an essential work. Most editions of Ulysses use an identical numbering system for sections and paragraphs so that comparisons between editions are easy to make.

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Summary: Completely worth the eight-month read
Review: I didn't have much time to devote to Ulysses, since I read it while juggling a job search, attempts to make rent, a full load of college courses which required me to read twenty other books over two semesters, a series of personal projects, and about ten other books I was already working on. But after eight months I finally got through it, and the experience was liberating.

No longer shall I be forced to wonder what all the praise and controversy has been about. Far too many people view Ulysses as a monolithic literary monster that they can never hope to tackle- hey, maybe they're right. I don't know. But my encounter with Leopold Bloom has changed me for the better, and the knowledge that every day and every action is an Odyessey is more than enough to get a person out of bed in the morning.

So... dare I take the next step, and join the fun over at Finnegan's Wake?

Rating:
Summary: Last great book
Review: I see that the Euros love to trash modernism. Because they lack the brains to come up with anything better. This here book is the end of you, and it came from a blind Irishman. God, that's embarassing.

Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: ... The critics rave about Ulysses. Many readers who've slogged all the way through proclaim it to be the greatest book of the 20th Century. Put me in the camp of those who thinks it's a pile of gibberish.

It's the only book I've ever read that still had me scratching my head after three chapters. Is it a novel? A series of unrelated short stories? A poem? Apparently, only intellectuals can tell.

I was taught that writing is the process of communicating with readers. This book fails miserably at that. I honestly can't summarize the plot. I didn't understand it. Maybe I'm stupid, but I think the fact that Joyce repeatedly breaks into long stretches of French and Latin and his own made-up words--none of which I understand--has something to do with it.

I give the book two stars because of Joyce's obvious mastery of vocabulary, and because maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too ignorant to comprehend the genius. But I doubt it. To me, reading enjoyment shouldn't be this hard. --Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of Wake Up Dead.

Rating:
Summary: Very Challenging
Review: Mr. Joyce should be commended for writing a book which obviously needs careful interpretation to be understood. Simple things are not always best.

The most important questions which the novel raises, for this reader, is: To what extent is literary criticism a rigorous discipline? I'm sure one can place interpretaions on the way Joyce uses language, and what he alludes to: but how many other, competing, interpretations can one put upon it and can one credibly say that one interpretation is (in any sense) better than another?

And if the answer to the first question is "a great many" and the answer to the second is "no", then is not literary criticism as much a fiction as that which it surveys?