Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: yes this is an amazing book I read it twice yes I said
Review: This book is incredible. A great beach read, if you were stuck on a desert island with nothing better to do. The basic plot is thus: on June 16, 1904, a young man, named Stephen, gets up and begins to wander around Dublin, while at the same time, a man named Leopold Bloom gets up, makes breakfast for his wife, Molly, and begins to wander around Dublin on many various errands, among which are to find the sign of two crossed keys, buy citronlemon soap, attend a funeral, and avoid his home at 7 Eccles street. On the Homeric level, (i.e. the Odyssey), this story is one about a man returning home after a ten years journey, represented here by a man who returns home after ten years of sexual paralysis to find his wife still faithful to him. On the heroic or mythic level, it is a story about Old Ireland, with Molly as the mother earth figure. On the Shakespearean level, Stephen is Hamlet, haunted by his mother's ghost.

All in all, this book is amazing. If you are intimidated by this novel, read only the fourth, fifth, and last chapters, for I see them as the most important and the easiest to follow.

In my personal opinion, Molly Bloom is the most well-developed woman in all of western literature: "they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont find many like me" she says in her monologue, and she's right.

Rating:
Summary: The book 'they' don't want you to read.
Review: I've always laughed at X-Files fans, but I'm beginning to suspect a conspiracy. For years now, all I've ever heard is 'Ulysses' is unreadable, obtuse, unwieldly. It is anything but, being outrageously funny, unstoppably readable, dementedly inventive. Why would 'they' want us not to read it? Although it has saturated modern culture, Joyce's frightening lessons have been ignored or emasculated - film, literature, art, music are as timid and cliched today as they ever were, as if 'Ulysses' had never existed. 'Ulysses' demands that we think for ourselves, it bursts with inchoate possibilities we must take up for ourselves. Of course we shouldn't read it. But you really must get this edition (Oxford World Classics, edited by Jeri Johnson). go to 'Ulysses' bald, as I have done so many times, and you will probably throw it down after three pages, frustrated, annoyed, anchorless in a river of unfamiliar words, ideas, style. Johnson's annotation here is scrupulous. For each chapter, she registers the Homeric paralells, she discusses the various schema (each chapter has its own colour, art (eg literature, medicine), body organ etc.), she offers a brief critical precis of what is going on. Her notes, explaining historical literary, popular etc. allusions, are indispensible. With the exception of the (mercifully few) Stephen Daedalus chapters, as dense and (generally) dull as their hero, the book is a joyous breeze (well, almost). This in itself is a betrayal of Joyce - we are supposed to be jolted, confused, lost, such is the nature of modern life Joyce wanted us to taste. But he provided all his friends with clues, and we're just as good as them, right? There's no point talking about the discrete ingenuity of each episode, the depth of character, the unheard-of realism in describing their emotional and intellectual lives, the satire, the comedy, the seething anger at authoritarianism, communal idiocy and intellectual myopia, the parodies and pastiches of all literature and other cultural products. Like all great post-modern works (and like Godard, Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce is a fertile POST-modernist, not a strangulated modernist), it will be impossible to read previous literature in the same way before, while it makes almost everything that came after it seem diluted and half-hearted. Leopold Bloom has been called a bourgeois everyman, but if only he was. His kindness, his (however unmethodical) voracious curiosity, his self-awareness, his humour, are as unusual in 1904 Dublin, as they are in our racist, money-mad, mean-minded, self-obsessed, greasy-tilled society today (I mean Ireland of course). My favourite episode is 'Sirens', the ultimate fusion of everything that is 'Ulysses' - character, language, humour, style, parody, satire, anger, emotion. Life. Now for the Wake!

Rating:
Summary: This is the greatest book ever written. Yes.
Review: "Ulysses" is the greatest book ever written. After several attempts, I have read it in its entirety only once, but I hope read it again and again. I'm not one who tries to appear pedantic, but I feel very strongly about my amature opinion. When you grasp the accomplishment that Joyce produced, you are in awe.

"Ulysses" is just the events of one day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. The three "main" characters are Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, (the only reason I mention his ethnicity is because it's important to the story); Stephen Dedalus, a school teacher, who can be seen as a continuation of the protagonist from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", and as Joyce's own persona in the story; and Molly Bloom, Leopold's adulterous wife, whose non-punctuated "monolog" in the final chapter is probably the most quoted section of the book. Nothing fantastic action-wise happens in the story, beginning in the morning with Stephen's roommate--they live in an old military post built during the Napoleonic Wars--Buck Mulligan shaving, and ending very late in the evening with Molly Bloom's recollections of the day and her feelings for her husband, among many others; but it's the methods of production and presentation that you admire. Joyce uses "stream-of-consciousness" or some would say more accurately, "internal monolog". Characters thoughts are presented in prose to give the effect of being inside the characters mind, kind of like having a front row seat. One of the many difficulties is that the role of narrator often switches, and sometimes switches to characters that aren't even identified. This often confuses first-time readers and scares off scores of others. "Ulysses" isn't an easy read. Reading it takes work. But it's not impossible. Some may feel that no book is worth the effort, but I assure you "Ulysses" is, and it won't take that much out of you to understand it. One book I highly recommend is "Introducing Joyce". It's an easy read and covers Joyce's life and his major works, especially "Ulysses".

Which editon of "Ulysses" should you purchase? Either the corrected 1961 version, the Gabler edition (which has even more corrections and actually lists the chapters, numbered and titled, and has them clearly identified), both of which are published by Vintage Books. There is also the Oxford World Classics edition, based on the original 1922 publication that also has corrections, footnotes, and a map of Dublin. I proudly have all three. =D

Rating:
Summary: A Master's Masterpiece
Review: This book is a mystery and a masterpiece. The first time I read it, it was almost a quest of sorts. I had to find something to pass the time during a particularly tedious job that required me to wait against my will every evening for at least one hour. Bit by bit, I proceeded through the text, and found myself entranced and lost in the language. I was a writer at the time, and the attention to detail fascinated me. It also showed me how much I had to learn about language and lyricism. I have reread the book again and again, some sections more than others, and still love it. Every bit. Profane? Hardly. But it has its moments, even by modern standards. Still, the idea of creating such a thing is a thing to be admired.

Rating:
Summary: Vengeance is Joyce¿s
Review: I think there is one sentence in Ulysses that sums up Joyce's intention perfectly: "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods."

This really is a great book, full of humor and insight and what I can only describe as those little sparks of recognition you get when you see your own life in great literature. And I think it even has something akin to a real spiritual revelation we desperately need in the West (see the quote above). But there's no denying that Joyce was a sadist, linguistically speaking. Like all Irish writers I've ever read about, Joyce had mixed feelings about English. It was not his true native language and, while he loved it, he was always knew that it was a kind of shackle on his country. The issue comes up in A Portrait (when young Stephen bristles that he knows the language better than the English priest who's teaching it) and it reappears very early in Ulysses.

At breakfast, Haines confounds the old milk woman with his speech in Irish (it's French, for all she knows). In his mind, Stephen associates the old woman with all of Ireland, and Haines' command of the Irish language is emblematic of his status as conqueror (he's conquered the land and assimilated the language, and now he's come to plunder the culture! Haines is in Ireland to collect folk tales). Joyce may not have embraced the Irish cause like many of his contemporaries, but he had his own more subtle form of revolt. He wanted to bind the English speaking world with one of it's own shackles. In Richard Ellman's biography, someone tells Joyce he demands too much of his readers. He flatly replies that his only demand was that his readers spend their whole lives reading him. He wanted to make us all slaves! Just read those two mind-bending sentences near the beginning of the Oxen of the Sun chapter and imagine what sadistic pleasure Joyce must have felt writing them. You can almost hear him shout, "take that!" And any time you come to a particularly difficult section of the book, just imagine Joyce there beside you saying, "Hey, don't look at me. It's YOUR language."

I'm sure what throws most people is the third chapter that begins "Ineluctable modality of the visible..." Up to then, things have been pretty clear, except for the occasional shifts from dialogue to thought, which Joyce does without giving us those helpful little 'he said's and 'he thought's. He doesn't even give us quotation marks (he didn't use them because he thought they were ugly, by the way). We've seen-and "seen" is the key word...we have not been told by a narrator...it's as if we are there watching it all-we've seen Stephen have breakfast in the tower, walk with Mulligan and Haines to the bathing area, teach his class, and talk with Deasy. But suddenly we find ourselves inside his head along with Kant, Schopenhaur, Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, the Catholic Mass, early Christian heresies, Irish mythology, on and on. It gets confusing to say the least.

Do you have to know as much about all this stuff as Stephen to understand the book? It probably wouldn't hurt, but I certainly don't. The main thing is to understand that STEPHEN understands it all, and yet he is still struggling. His mother has died and he's asking a simple question, "what does it all mean?" This is the question of the book. What does life mean? How should one live? The answer the book gives is: life begins when you understand that we are all one. Stephen and Bloom, two completely different people, are one. Religion, myth, and all the great symbols that spring up across the globe are so similar because human life is essentially the same everywhere. Joyce told a friend that he chose The Odyssey as a model for his own book because Homer created the most complete character in all of literature: Odysseus is a father, a husband, a lover, a warrior, a politician. In short, he is Bloom: a completely ordinary man. Joyce showed us that ordinary life, "intensely regarded", is the stuff of myth.

It's not always easy (although much of it is, if you read carefully...and compared to Finnegans Wake it's practically Dr. Seuss). But it's well worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: una de esas novelas que hay que leer
Review: este extenso libro que algunos odian y otros adoran esta lleno de cosas que fastidian que agotan, que atrasan la lectura y sin embargo hay una anhelo de llegar al final, de ver, de sentir. Que fuerza creadora inspiro a joyce a escribir esto? Que broma malvada le jugo al mundo? al escribir una odisea de dialogo interior, plagada de voces que se encuentran, que chocan , que se superponen en un eterno dia. este libro es muy bueno,pero debe leerse con mente abierta hasta el final, sin animo de criticas. puedes odiarlo o amarlo, pero es como uno de esos grandes monumentos de la historia arquitectonica resistira los siglos y siempre estara ahi.

LUIS MENDEZ

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Rating:
Summary: Stick to the original.
Review: A couple things: First off, everyone's heard of Ulysses, and everyone has their own notions of what they expect from a book, what they expect from Ulysses in particular, and how they feel about experimental literature in general (though by today's standards Ulysses appears vastly less experimental than, say, Finnegan's Wake). So basically, if you don't think you'll like Ulysses, you probably won't. And no, it's not a casual read. If you're willing to do some homework, though, which in my case included some Homer, Shakespeare, Freud, and Irish history (though I could go on), it just might be worth your time (lots of time) to slog through all 900+ pages of the thing. But that's just my two cents.

The real reason I'm writing this review is to steer people away from the 'reader's edition' of Ulysses--that's the reason for the two stars. This is not the novel as Joyce intended--it is an adaptation by Danis Rose, and reflects what he (Rose) thought was 'accurate.' Though the changes he makes are minor--and, in all fairness, may correct oversights made by Joyce--I am offended by the idea that an editor has the ability to take an important and influential work and make changes as he sees fit. The fact that this edition was ever put to print debases the role of the artist (any artist), and reflects the increasing trend toward commercialization and dumbing-down of art in favor of turning a profit.

So--is Ulysses the greatest artistic achievement in any medium, ever? I don't know, and whether I think so is irrelevant anyway. But if you want to find out for yourself, please, PLEASE, at least read Joyce's words, not Rose's.

Rating:
Summary: Not so much a review as a vow . . .
Review: I know I'm itching for a whole ton of "unhelpful" votes here, but here goes anyway . . .

I have given "Ulysses" five stars because, quite simply, its reputation as one of the most, if not THE most difficult works in literature, precedes itself. There has to be a reason the Modern Library or whatever organization it was voted this the Number One novel of the twentieth century.

I shall read this book someday, I swear to God and all the folks at amazon.com

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed . . ."

So the book begins, Joyce's version of an epic voyage, the epic voyage of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. And an epic voyage for the reader, who is left pondering the opening sentence: "This is gonna take a while." That or, "This is English? What the hell?"

I'm going to read "Ulysses," however, by God. I want to be a well-read individual. I want to be able to display this book on my shelf with other reading trophies ("War and Peace" and "Mason and Dixon" among them- some people hunt deer; I hunt literature). Most of all, I want to know what you blokes are talking about.

Good reading, all.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Money
Review: Due to the recent explosion of fame of this novel, many literature lovers have gone out to buy the book (or get it from a library,) to at least see what the hype is all about, if not to actually enjoy it. Unfortunately, many of these literature lovers enjoy not just reading, but the atmosphere of reading--curling up in bed or in a plush recliner after work and shutting off the outside world to live with the characters for a few hours. These readers generally throw Ulysses away before getting past the third chapter because they realize that no such reading atmosphere is possible with such a complex novel. To those interested in reading the novel, I offer two suggestions: first study a little Irish history, particularly about Charles Stewart Parnell, Daniel O'Connell, Arthur Griffin and Sinn Fein, the Fenian movement, etc. even if you just peruse encyclopedia articles. Second, read the Don Gifford notes for the novel along with Ulysses itself. This will constantly interrupt your reading of the novel, but it will help your understanding. If you are completely unwilling to put in this effort, buying this book will be a waste of money. But even if you don't think you would be willing to read a novel that requires so much initial research for basic comprehension, consider this: If Ulysses is really as good as its fans claim, you will want to go back and read it a second time, and then you will be able to enjoy it without constantly referring to notes, history texts or foreign language dictionaries.

Rating:
Summary: Ulysses
Review: What a read! Stephen Dedalus's pretentious aestheticism reminded me a lot of Thomas Mann's Death of Venice's character Gustav Aschenbach, without of course the cynical hatred of the rotten Europe, more the wide-eyed lover of the growing Dublin. Leopold Bloom on the other hand seems to be a man to my own naive (or ignorant) tastes. The poetic consumer of words versus the materialist producer of words, a unity of humanity seen through two (or maybe including Molly three) eyes. The allusions to Aristotle and Blake needed a regular flicking through literary notes and for the Proteus chapter even a German dictionary! This was no bad thing though for if anything Ulysses is an education. Like all good things it required work, but with some good notes of history and literature its a must read, as beautiful as the Lithy.