Ulysses

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Just a point of information: among your reader reviews you have a review purporting to come from one "David Norris" from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. "Mr Norris" states that he has never read a worse book, and that it was obviously written for the purpose of complicating the lives of readers, students and academics the world over. In view of the fact that the real Mr. Norris is an eminent Joycean scholar respected in Joycean circles throughout the world, this review can only be a hoax.

Rating:
Summary: Best Novel Ever?
Review: This is a question that has come up many times. First of all, let me make it clear that I haven't finished Ulysses. I'm in the middle of it, but I feel that I can give a fair review with the amount of it I have read, and I want to review it with it fresh on my mind. Ulysses is not the best novel ever made. Since there is nothing else like it, you can't compare it to anything. It isn't revolutionary, and it doesn't teach the reader any valuable lessons in life, like the Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye, or to Kill a Mockingbird. However, it is insanely enjoyable. The monologues of thought and conversations, as well as descriptions, are beautiful. I can't recommend Ulysses to anyone, however, because I'm sure alot of people hate it. It's difficult to understand (at parts), and contains many cultural references (to Ireland), which confuses the reader even more. Something similar to Cliff's Notes might help. If you have read books challenging on the philosophical level before, I can't imagine a better choice for your next novel than Ulysses. (unless, of course, you haven't read the Lord of the Rings or the Catcher in the Rye :oP)

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.