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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
I just didn’t care. It was so long winded and really nothing happened. Mainly wanted to read this for context before I try Ulysses (hopefully sometime next year) but I just couldn’t stand to read anymore.
now, i’d say the first half of this book is a strong 5 stars out of five. lovely stuff about his childhood and that. however, when reading the latter half of the book it makes me want to take a star off of that rating. stephen dedulas getting all scared because he shagged a prostitute and feels that’s a sin because he was a christian just doesn’t do it for me. the whole ramble about catholicism just feels a bit over dramatic. maybe i’m too simple to appreciate it or maybe it just is dull. who knows.
(Immediate impressions based on first reading -- certainly not a review)
I can recall: being 7-8 years old, wandering through a house separated by girdled walls on each side but the right (where white, newly minted stairs stood attached to a crumbling wall), chasing after my younger brother, probing two very dark, very empty rooms, and emerging out through the dining room. The house was built such that there were very few vessels for sunlight to travel through -- the only few windows we had hidden behind drawn curtains painted a colour too dark for sunlight to pierce and in rooms too sadly at a distance to actually walk to and sit and read and make pillow forts and traipse into a glass table in. During the day, the room was too terribly inviting -- the sun shone on through so bright it lit up the whole house to its fullest precision. Which made it all too awful that this room took on an oddly gothic, nightmare-driven shape at night: so massive, so fuelled by a malignance that I thought to dwell somewhere in the odd position behind a sofa or underneath a table. Running through those rooms late at night, chasing after my brother, I remember him coming out of the dining room right as I was about to enter, his face having morphosed into a much older man's. No one could see it but me. I remember crying. I remember my thoughts contorting around to make it so that every latent anxiety that I'd preternaturally been born with would manifest itself in an instant. And then I remember waking up.
That was the first crisis of faith and existential terror I'd felt in my life -- the simple thought of mortality and what future I could project for myself in terms of my ambition and live my life being who I really was and follow any aspiration that I imagined to be useful and not growing old, inundated with any sense of regret r/e who I wanted to be. A who and not a what. A lot of this book was an exercise in remembering that feeling and, through the character of Daedelus, imagining myself located in a specific period in history with a past, present, and possible future with the understanding that that is not who I am. For Stephen, it is the ultimate understanding that he doesn't have to attach any lapel to his being and have it be who he is: he is not, first and foremost, an Irishman, neither a Catholic, nor a brother nor son, but, of course, Stephen Daedelus - the one who can live alone and not abide, born to a world that seems less accepting of who he wants to be, but one who knows that he absolutely has to live alone. What is ironic, however, is how the very things which seem to impede his heroic journey (his parent, his school, his colleagues, Irish politics, etc. ) are also the things that compel him toward his designated teleology, which I don't feel like he ever truly realizes (maybe in Ulysses? whenever I get around to that)
I can recall: being 7-8 years old, wandering through a house separated by girdled walls on each side but the right (where white, newly minted stairs stood attached to a crumbling wall), chasing after my younger brother, probing two very dark, very empty rooms, and emerging out through the dining room. The house was built such that there were very few vessels for sunlight to travel through -- the only few windows we had hidden behind drawn curtains painted a colour too dark for sunlight to pierce and in rooms too sadly at a distance to actually walk to and sit and read and make pillow forts and traipse into a glass table in. During the day, the room was too terribly inviting -- the sun shone on through so bright it lit up the whole house to its fullest precision. Which made it all too awful that this room took on an oddly gothic, nightmare-driven shape at night: so massive, so fuelled by a malignance that I thought to dwell somewhere in the odd position behind a sofa or underneath a table. Running through those rooms late at night, chasing after my brother, I remember him coming out of the dining room right as I was about to enter, his face having morphosed into a much older man's. No one could see it but me. I remember crying. I remember my thoughts contorting around to make it so that every latent anxiety that I'd preternaturally been born with would manifest itself in an instant. And then I remember waking up.
That was the first crisis of faith and existential terror I'd felt in my life -- the simple thought of mortality and what future I could project for myself in terms of my ambition and live my life being who I really was and follow any aspiration that I imagined to be useful and not growing old, inundated with any sense of regret r/e who I wanted to be. A who and not a what. A lot of this book was an exercise in remembering that feeling and, through the character of Daedelus, imagining myself located in a specific period in history with a past, present, and possible future with the understanding that that is not who I am. For Stephen, it is the ultimate understanding that he doesn't have to attach any lapel to his being and have it be who he is: he is not, first and foremost, an Irishman, neither a Catholic, nor a brother nor son, but, of course, Stephen Daedelus - the one who can live alone and not abide, born to a world that seems less accepting of who he wants to be, but one who knows that he absolutely has to live alone. What is ironic, however, is how the very things which seem to impede his heroic journey (his parent, his school, his colleagues, Irish politics, etc. ) are also the things that compel him toward his designated teleology, which I don't feel like he ever truly realizes (maybe in Ulysses? whenever I get around to that)
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Den Versuch, philosophische Abhandlungen in Romanform zu verpacken, fand ich schon als Teenager bei Sofies Welt scheiße. Das hier ist nichts weiter als intellektuelles Abgewichse.
Dass sich hier so viele der Rezensent:innen an einem Kinderreim mit einer Muhkuh erfreuen können, lässt mich insgeheim fragen, ob sie überhaupt über die erste Seite hinausgekommen sind.
Dass sich hier so viele der Rezensent:innen an einem Kinderreim mit einer Muhkuh erfreuen können, lässt mich insgeheim fragen, ob sie überhaupt über die erste Seite hinausgekommen sind.