Ulysses

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Summary: wonderful!
Review: The single most influential novel of the twentieth century. Glorious, all encompassing, touching, extremely funny, unforgettable...simply sit back relax and let your eye and mind takeover...the "ineluctable modality of the visible"...and be amazed. Faulkner went to Paris to gawk at him, Hemmingway described it as the "most goddamned wonderful book" he knew. And it is.

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Summary: a shabby edition of a literary monument
Review: Ulysses is one of my very favorite books. Even though I've read the novel many times, I'm not qualified to compare this new edition to its predecessors: I'm a commercial artist, not a literary scholar. I AM qualified, however, to complain about how badly produced this book is. Professor Rose refers in his intro to the important influence that editors, designers and printers have on a text. Careful analysis of those influences are the basis of the method he used to create this new edition. Well, too bad he wasn't able to influence the publisher. This edition of Ulysses is printed on very cheap paper -- the kind of dim gray brittle stuff that the cheapest of romance fiction is printed on. Fine for a book that will be read once, but terrible for a "Reader's Edition" of a classic that will be reread and annotated. These pages will be badly discolored in a few years. The typography is mediocre, too: the title page looks like the Bad Example in any design textbook. The newspaper-style headlines in the "Aeolus" chapter are barely readable -- of course the ink spread on that awful paper doesn't help. If you read this, Professor Rose, I'm sorry your efforts were presented so poorly.

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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.

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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.

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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