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3.64 AVERAGE
3.64 AVERAGE
I am glad I finally read this. I have described Ulysses as my white whale for a while now and aside from feeling energized from the reading experience itself, I am glad to finally get the monkey off my back. And now it dawns on me that I haven't read Finnegan's Wake. New epic reading goal? Maybe in a few years.
The idea of God's being "a shout in the street" as Stephen Dedalus says in Episode 2, is very appealing to me. The elevation of the ordinary, base activities of Leopold Bloom in one ordinary day to the subject of a novel is entirely in line with the shout in the street thing. The divinity of the ordinary is something I'm down with. And also I love wordplay, comedy (most of the book is funny), and the sympathy that Joyce has for his characters even while debasing and laughing at them. I think the criticism I have as a feminist for the book may be largely a criticism of the world in which Joyce wrote it.
I am sure some people could read this without a guide, but I didn't have that kind of faith in myself, so I chose to use Harry Blamires' guide, which was invaluable for some of the more stylistically challenging episodes (The Oxen of the Sun, Proteus, Circe for sure). I also used Gifford's Ulysses Annotated.
I am on my cell phone now so I don't really think I can review this properly nor do I know if I ever will. Suffice it to say that I liked the book enough that I foresee re-reading it multiple times in the future. The Sirens episode, in which Joyce uses onomatopoeia extensively and attempts to write prose in mimicry of musical counterpoint, is an episode I'm pretty sure I'd like to make a close reading of some day.
The idea of God's being "a shout in the street" as Stephen Dedalus says in Episode 2, is very appealing to me. The elevation of the ordinary, base activities of Leopold Bloom in one ordinary day to the subject of a novel is entirely in line with the shout in the street thing. The divinity of the ordinary is something I'm down with. And also I love wordplay, comedy (most of the book is funny), and the sympathy that Joyce has for his characters even while debasing and laughing at them. I think the criticism I have as a feminist for the book may be largely a criticism of the world in which Joyce wrote it.
I am sure some people could read this without a guide, but I didn't have that kind of faith in myself, so I chose to use Harry Blamires' guide, which was invaluable for some of the more stylistically challenging episodes (The Oxen of the Sun, Proteus, Circe for sure). I also used Gifford's Ulysses Annotated.
I am on my cell phone now so I don't really think I can review this properly nor do I know if I ever will. Suffice it to say that I liked the book enough that I foresee re-reading it multiple times in the future. The Sirens episode, in which Joyce uses onomatopoeia extensively and attempts to write prose in mimicry of musical counterpoint, is an episode I'm pretty sure I'd like to make a close reading of some day.
I'm done. I'm tired. I can't do it any more. Nothing about this is appealing; nothing about this suggests any reason for this novel to have become the landmark that it is. I want with everything in my English-major, Irish-lit-loving heart to finish this, to be capable of finishing it, to at least say that I understand why it's a classic, but I would be lying out of my teeth. I can't. I'm not. I don't. And I'm out. Maybe next year I'll finish it - take it a chapter a week - but no. Not this year. I'm bailing. I read 286 pages of 769. I'll pick up where I left off in January. It won't be a problem because I won't misunderstand it any more than I'm not getting it now.
22nd book of 2022.
2nd reading. Reading Ulysses again, which I didn’t imagine doing until the end of this year, but couldn’t resist starting it on its birthday, opened up many more doors within it. As well as having read Ellmann’s brilliant biography on him, too. Ithaca still makes me laugh the most, and it was Joyce’s own favourite too: I see why. I also adore Hades. Bloom’s humanity is restorative to read in the time we are living in right now. There’s something about getting to the end of the novel, 900+ pages, and realising that it’s just one day, it makes you realise the hugeness and, at the same time, smallness of life. The book is a masterpiece and it’s sad that so many people never even try it because of its reputation, which honestly taints it. There are hard bits, no doubt, but the general feeling of the novel, its illuminating ordinariness, completely outweighs that. And above it’s funny, funnier than Pynchon and Wallace and the postmodernists on the whole. It’s honest, funny, surprising (still!), filled with piss and semen and menstrual blood and shit, it’s filled with dirty streets and spots, drunken men, adulterers, prostitutes, but actually, it’s probably one of the best books about life ever written. Joyce once said to Djuna Barnes, ‘A writer should never write about the extraordinary. That is for the journalist.’ And yet, his writing of the ordinary is so extraordinary. Just like last time, when I put it down for the day and went out walking, I felt like I was inside Ulysses, or somehow Ulysses was outside of me, all around me. One of those books that does get close to being somewhat, somehow, life changing.
ULYSSES FAST FACTS FROM RICHARD ELLMANN’S JAMES JOYCE
—‘Leopold was the first name of Signorina Popper’s father in Trieste; Bloom was the name of two or three families who lived in Dublin when Joyce was young.’
—Leopold Bloom was partly based off the man who would later be known as Italo Svevo.
—‘Ezra Pound, for example, insists that the purpose of using the Odyssey is merely structural, to give solidity to a relatively plotless work. But for Joyce the counterpoint was important because it revealed something about Bloom, about Homer, and about existence.’
—Asked why he entitled his book Ulysses, Joyce replied, ‘It is my system of working.’’
—‘The theme of Ulysses is simple, and Joyce achieves it through the characters of Bloom, Molly, and Stephen. Casual kindness overcomes unconscionable power.’
—‘In later life Carr, who loathed the sight of Joyce, told his wife unconcernedly that Joyce had presented him as a bullying villain in Ulysses.’
—‘He worked 1,000 hours by his own calculation on the episode [Oxen and the Sun].’
—After finishing Circe he commented, ‘‘I think it is the strongest thing I have written.’’
—But ‘then he hurried on to Ithaca, which he described to Miss Weaver as my ‘last (and stormiest) cape,’ ‘the ugly duckling of the book and therefore, I suppose, my favourite.’’
—‘Perhaps I have tried to do too much in this book,’ he worried.’
—Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who was translating Ulysses, actually came up with the final word. It ended with ‘I will’ and Benoist-Méchin said it should be ‘Yes’. They argued for hours until Joyce said, ‘‘Yes, you’re right. The book must end with yes. It must end with the most positive word in the human language.’’
—‘‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read,’ Joyce replied, ‘life isn’t fit to live.’’
—‘Joyce announced proudly that the unused notes [of Ulysses] weighed twelve kilos.
—'When a young man came up to him and Zurich and said, 'May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?' Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, 'No, it did lots of other things too.’’
____________________
1st reading, 2019. Now, I have a lot to say. Firstly, my reading of this book has been a secret. I say secret like anyone cared anyway. I didn’t take it out with me, I didn’t put it on Goodreads and I told none of my reader friends. I read it in bed late into the night and early in the morning.
I actually started Ulysses to get over heartbreak. I read in a book once about a man who had his heart broken so he translated the whole of Don Quixote to take his mind off things. As a four year relationship of mine ended and I suddenly felt like I was floating in a limbo with all this free time and sudden loneliness. So, on the 31st August, I picked up the hardest and most intimidating thing on my bookcase simply to occupy me, like translating Don Quixote. I had no intention or idea that I would ever finish it – especially not a month later, today, on the 1st October. It’s a shame September doesn’t have 31 days so it could have been the 31st to the 31st of the following month but 31st to the 1st still has a nice ring, I guess.
Before I talk about the book itself, I want to say one more thing. During my time at University, I, partly jokingly and partly not, hated on James Joyce. I read Dubliners and didn’t get along with it. My housemate started Ulysses so it became a joke between us to hate on it, and Joyce. It was the usual. God, he’s so arrogant! Who would even read it! It’s not even a novel! You can imagine us, in our early twenties, bumming around our student home, talking badly about Joyce. It’s where Martin Amis went wrong, being too young and talking badly about some literary greats. Some people hold their beliefs about Joyce though, there are some horribly negative (funnily so) reviews on Goodreads for this book. I’ve read them many times, before even reading the first page. We all know the most famous one: Life’s just too damn short to read Ulysses.
You can imagine my surprise then, as the pages were disappearing behind me and I wasn’t despising the book, not at all, I was enjoying it. There was a time near the beginning when I considered dropping it. There’s so many other things I want to read, what’s the point in sticking to this? I only picked it up in an emotional low, I didn’t really mean it. But then I thought, no, I’ve picked it up. Let’s see where this goes. Halfway through I was thinking, I want to try and get it done before Christmas. And then the pages kept flashing by. I began enjoying it more and more. Until, I read over one hundred pages yesterday and finished it in bed this morning.
My first thought on finishing? I want to go back and read the whole thing again. On reflection, all the most wildest images and scenes are returning to me? It’s like coming out of a stupor; it’s strange reading about one day in Dublin over a whole month of your life. So much happened to me and the characters were reflecting on things I read two weeks ago, but it was only their morning. I bring back the image of Buck Mulligan shaving in the beginning, or picking noses on the beach, or masturbating on the beach, or fireworks, lame legs, men becoming women and giving birth to eight children, dead mothers bursting in manifestation, Stephen getting knocked out in the street, the wandering rocks, the citizen, the phonetic sounds in the beginning of the Sirens… In other words, utter madness. But in all that madness (and me researching alongside the madness to check I’ve understood the madness) the strangest clarity. The strangest sense of understanding without possibly, truly understanding.
I recently had a poetry lecture by a lecturer well loved who comes out with the best lines and explanations, you can’t help but write them down. He said (on poetry):
“No one asks what classical music means, they just let it happen. People seem to think that they need to beat a confession out of a poem and if it doesn’t confess, it’s a bad poem. I would say to that, you’re just a bad torturer, and a bad reader.”
Partly, I think this is applicable to Ulysses. Of course, I’m not saying that if you don’t understand it or don’t read it or dislike it you’re a bad reader. But for me, the madness of Ulysses can sometimes be felt or perceived rather than wholly understood. I didn’t understand every single word, far from it, but it didn’t stop me enjoying the book, following the plot and the feelings of the characters. I’ve spent a long time saying many things about Joyce and I take a lot of them back, not all of them, but a lot of them. There’s no denying this novel is one of the greatest things ever written. As an aspiring writer it’s opened a million doorways in one novel about what’s possible. How did this come out of Joyce’s brain? How is this even possible? It seems extraordinary to look at the book now and know what it contains between it’s pages. It’s uncanny. A script within a novel? A question and answer during a novel? Bursting into the dreams and the subconscious of characters, a chapter with no punctuation, and all those made-up words. It is, really, a masterpiece. And if you know me, it’s surprising that I would say that. My favourite two episodes by far were Circe and Ithaca. The book gets considerably both harder and more enjoyable towards the end. Some chapters I didn’t care for as much, but that’s the same with all books, right?
So, I haven’t given it five stars because it’s Ulysses. I’ve given it five stars because it is a feat, whether you like it or not. It’s one of the most ambitious things I’ve ever read and Joyce created this, came up this, made this world, this single day, out of only words. It also shows me the power of words, that literally anything is possible. Maybe, only if you’re as smart as Joyce though.
To those who want to read it, I would say just try. Let your mind open its pores and let Ulysses in. It’s worth it. It's mad and funny and powerful and original and it has changed my writing too. I now understand how Ulysses has changed the world of novels forever. I just want the whole thing to start over from the beginning. And two months ago I could never imagine reading more than ten pages of it. Ulysses is a masterpiece. Joyce, I’m sorry about what I’ve said in the past. I was wrong. And that’s something I never admit to being: wrong.
2nd reading. Reading Ulysses again, which I didn’t imagine doing until the end of this year, but couldn’t resist starting it on its birthday, opened up many more doors within it. As well as having read Ellmann’s brilliant biography on him, too. Ithaca still makes me laugh the most, and it was Joyce’s own favourite too: I see why. I also adore Hades. Bloom’s humanity is restorative to read in the time we are living in right now. There’s something about getting to the end of the novel, 900+ pages, and realising that it’s just one day, it makes you realise the hugeness and, at the same time, smallness of life. The book is a masterpiece and it’s sad that so many people never even try it because of its reputation, which honestly taints it. There are hard bits, no doubt, but the general feeling of the novel, its illuminating ordinariness, completely outweighs that. And above it’s funny, funnier than Pynchon and Wallace and the postmodernists on the whole. It’s honest, funny, surprising (still!), filled with piss and semen and menstrual blood and shit, it’s filled with dirty streets and spots, drunken men, adulterers, prostitutes, but actually, it’s probably one of the best books about life ever written. Joyce once said to Djuna Barnes, ‘A writer should never write about the extraordinary. That is for the journalist.’ And yet, his writing of the ordinary is so extraordinary. Just like last time, when I put it down for the day and went out walking, I felt like I was inside Ulysses, or somehow Ulysses was outside of me, all around me. One of those books that does get close to being somewhat, somehow, life changing.
ULYSSES FAST FACTS FROM RICHARD ELLMANN’S JAMES JOYCE
—‘Leopold was the first name of Signorina Popper’s father in Trieste; Bloom was the name of two or three families who lived in Dublin when Joyce was young.’
—Leopold Bloom was partly based off the man who would later be known as Italo Svevo.
—‘Ezra Pound, for example, insists that the purpose of using the Odyssey is merely structural, to give solidity to a relatively plotless work. But for Joyce the counterpoint was important because it revealed something about Bloom, about Homer, and about existence.’
—Asked why he entitled his book Ulysses, Joyce replied, ‘It is my system of working.’’
—‘The theme of Ulysses is simple, and Joyce achieves it through the characters of Bloom, Molly, and Stephen. Casual kindness overcomes unconscionable power.’
—‘In later life Carr, who loathed the sight of Joyce, told his wife unconcernedly that Joyce had presented him as a bullying villain in Ulysses.’
—‘He worked 1,000 hours by his own calculation on the episode [Oxen and the Sun].’
—After finishing Circe he commented, ‘‘I think it is the strongest thing I have written.’’
—But ‘then he hurried on to Ithaca, which he described to Miss Weaver as my ‘last (and stormiest) cape,’ ‘the ugly duckling of the book and therefore, I suppose, my favourite.’’
—‘Perhaps I have tried to do too much in this book,’ he worried.’
—Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who was translating Ulysses, actually came up with the final word. It ended with ‘I will’ and Benoist-Méchin said it should be ‘Yes’. They argued for hours until Joyce said, ‘‘Yes, you’re right. The book must end with yes. It must end with the most positive word in the human language.’’
—‘‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read,’ Joyce replied, ‘life isn’t fit to live.’’
—‘Joyce announced proudly that the unused notes [of Ulysses] weighed twelve kilos.
—'When a young man came up to him and Zurich and said, 'May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?' Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, 'No, it did lots of other things too.’’
____________________
1st reading, 2019. Now, I have a lot to say. Firstly, my reading of this book has been a secret. I say secret like anyone cared anyway. I didn’t take it out with me, I didn’t put it on Goodreads and I told none of my reader friends. I read it in bed late into the night and early in the morning.
I actually started Ulysses to get over heartbreak. I read in a book once about a man who had his heart broken so he translated the whole of Don Quixote to take his mind off things. As a four year relationship of mine ended and I suddenly felt like I was floating in a limbo with all this free time and sudden loneliness. So, on the 31st August, I picked up the hardest and most intimidating thing on my bookcase simply to occupy me, like translating Don Quixote. I had no intention or idea that I would ever finish it – especially not a month later, today, on the 1st October. It’s a shame September doesn’t have 31 days so it could have been the 31st to the 31st of the following month but 31st to the 1st still has a nice ring, I guess.
Before I talk about the book itself, I want to say one more thing. During my time at University, I, partly jokingly and partly not, hated on James Joyce. I read Dubliners and didn’t get along with it. My housemate started Ulysses so it became a joke between us to hate on it, and Joyce. It was the usual. God, he’s so arrogant! Who would even read it! It’s not even a novel! You can imagine us, in our early twenties, bumming around our student home, talking badly about Joyce. It’s where Martin Amis went wrong, being too young and talking badly about some literary greats. Some people hold their beliefs about Joyce though, there are some horribly negative (funnily so) reviews on Goodreads for this book. I’ve read them many times, before even reading the first page. We all know the most famous one: Life’s just too damn short to read Ulysses.
You can imagine my surprise then, as the pages were disappearing behind me and I wasn’t despising the book, not at all, I was enjoying it. There was a time near the beginning when I considered dropping it. There’s so many other things I want to read, what’s the point in sticking to this? I only picked it up in an emotional low, I didn’t really mean it. But then I thought, no, I’ve picked it up. Let’s see where this goes. Halfway through I was thinking, I want to try and get it done before Christmas. And then the pages kept flashing by. I began enjoying it more and more. Until, I read over one hundred pages yesterday and finished it in bed this morning.
My first thought on finishing? I want to go back and read the whole thing again. On reflection, all the most wildest images and scenes are returning to me? It’s like coming out of a stupor; it’s strange reading about one day in Dublin over a whole month of your life. So much happened to me and the characters were reflecting on things I read two weeks ago, but it was only their morning. I bring back the image of Buck Mulligan shaving in the beginning, or picking noses on the beach, or masturbating on the beach, or fireworks, lame legs, men becoming women and giving birth to eight children, dead mothers bursting in manifestation, Stephen getting knocked out in the street, the wandering rocks, the citizen, the phonetic sounds in the beginning of the Sirens… In other words, utter madness. But in all that madness (and me researching alongside the madness to check I’ve understood the madness) the strangest clarity. The strangest sense of understanding without possibly, truly understanding.
I recently had a poetry lecture by a lecturer well loved who comes out with the best lines and explanations, you can’t help but write them down. He said (on poetry):
“No one asks what classical music means, they just let it happen. People seem to think that they need to beat a confession out of a poem and if it doesn’t confess, it’s a bad poem. I would say to that, you’re just a bad torturer, and a bad reader.”
Partly, I think this is applicable to Ulysses. Of course, I’m not saying that if you don’t understand it or don’t read it or dislike it you’re a bad reader. But for me, the madness of Ulysses can sometimes be felt or perceived rather than wholly understood. I didn’t understand every single word, far from it, but it didn’t stop me enjoying the book, following the plot and the feelings of the characters. I’ve spent a long time saying many things about Joyce and I take a lot of them back, not all of them, but a lot of them. There’s no denying this novel is one of the greatest things ever written. As an aspiring writer it’s opened a million doorways in one novel about what’s possible. How did this come out of Joyce’s brain? How is this even possible? It seems extraordinary to look at the book now and know what it contains between it’s pages. It’s uncanny. A script within a novel? A question and answer during a novel? Bursting into the dreams and the subconscious of characters, a chapter with no punctuation, and all those made-up words. It is, really, a masterpiece. And if you know me, it’s surprising that I would say that. My favourite two episodes by far were Circe and Ithaca. The book gets considerably both harder and more enjoyable towards the end. Some chapters I didn’t care for as much, but that’s the same with all books, right?
So, I haven’t given it five stars because it’s Ulysses. I’ve given it five stars because it is a feat, whether you like it or not. It’s one of the most ambitious things I’ve ever read and Joyce created this, came up this, made this world, this single day, out of only words. It also shows me the power of words, that literally anything is possible. Maybe, only if you’re as smart as Joyce though.
To those who want to read it, I would say just try. Let your mind open its pores and let Ulysses in. It’s worth it. It's mad and funny and powerful and original and it has changed my writing too. I now understand how Ulysses has changed the world of novels forever. I just want the whole thing to start over from the beginning. And two months ago I could never imagine reading more than ten pages of it. Ulysses is a masterpiece. Joyce, I’m sorry about what I’ve said in the past. I was wrong. And that’s something I never admit to being: wrong.
Yup, did it. One huge check mark on the must-read literature bucket list. I was confused and frustrated through all of it. But there were some good times. Stephen was just wonderful. Bloom's a weird guy. Dubliners that I liked in the Dubliner short stories are probably all jerks. People are complicated and in this book I got to see one of those people's semi-sociopathic day. Good for me.
Third reading of Ulysses. I enjoyed parts of it this time. I felt like I gave it a closer careful reading the second time around. I enjoyed the first and second readings much more. I am a bit more scatterbrained on the third reading probably the hormone replacement therapy but there are still gems to be found. Of course, I enjoy the wordplay and the stream of consciousness that are hallmarks of modernist fiction. I will tackle this again once I have sea legs with estrogen.
This has been reviewed to death, so I'll keep this brief. A day (June 16, 1904) in the life of Leopold Bloom, a self-described Everyman and Noman in Dublin paralleling Homer's Odyssey. In addition to the 933 pages of text, there is also an 80-page Introduction by Declan Kiberd, in this edition, including a useful table categorizing the unnumbered chapters to the episodes in Homer, human organs emphasized, art mentioned, colour, symbolism, and literary technique used.
It's a literary tour de force begging extensive study, yet can be a relatively quick read for its length. The "Circe" chapter reads like a surrealistic dream-script that I visualized as being portrayed in animation or CGI. Molly Bloom's stream-of-consciousness in bed next to her sleeping husband in the last chapter adds insight to her "Poldy's" own failings. Note: knowledge of Latin can come in useful.
It's a literary tour de force begging extensive study, yet can be a relatively quick read for its length. The "Circe" chapter reads like a surrealistic dream-script that I visualized as being portrayed in animation or CGI. Molly Bloom's stream-of-consciousness in bed next to her sleeping husband in the last chapter adds insight to her "Poldy's" own failings. Note: knowledge of Latin can come in useful.
One of the greatest novels ever written, and I do not say that lightly. It's arguably the best novel of the 20th century, though people are making their case for Proust these days.
Joyce's masterpiece borrows the structure of Homer's The Odyssey, so it's nice if you've read the latter first. Here is the story of Leopold Bloom's journey through one day of his life in Dublin--it's the Modernist trope of the antihero on display. All of the events of the day are writ large, and one has the sense that life is simultaneously significant and absurd.
And the prose! The prose is magnificent and extraordinarily complex. This is not a book for the casual reader. Joyce demands you engage him in every chapter, and each section is written in a different style. Some passages are laborious, but many are glorious. Loved the final chapter the best.
Joyce's masterpiece borrows the structure of Homer's The Odyssey, so it's nice if you've read the latter first. Here is the story of Leopold Bloom's journey through one day of his life in Dublin--it's the Modernist trope of the antihero on display. All of the events of the day are writ large, and one has the sense that life is simultaneously significant and absurd.
And the prose! The prose is magnificent and extraordinarily complex. This is not a book for the casual reader. Joyce demands you engage him in every chapter, and each section is written in a different style. Some passages are laborious, but many are glorious. Loved the final chapter the best.
a lexicon of consciousness. i don't have words for the impact this book has had on my life, my thinking, my music and so many other things.
I just finished Ulysses but I feel like “survived” is more apt. I don’t deny the genius but it felt like being stuck at a dinner party for hours on end next to a drunk professor who rambles and throws out reference after reference to prove how cultured he is. Took me 5 months because I had to take breaks and read other novels in between that had plots and characters I could relate to. More power to people smart enough to “get” James Joyce.