Take a photo of a barcode or cover
christopherc 's review for:
Ulysses
by James Joyce
This is the everything book. It is that because, in describing the single day of 16 June 1904 in Dublin through stream of consciousness and other dense techniques, it depicts its characters and an entire society more vividly than any novel before, and moreover it transcends the time and place of its setting though a collection of all manner of universal human quirks. But it is also that because it is a exhaustive catalogue of English prose. Every way the language had been used since Chaucer is alluded to here, together with Joyce’s own dazzling innovations. As I just finished Ulysses for the third time, it is that linguistic richness and ingenuity that particularly delighted me this time around. I look forward to another go in a decade or so.
On the internet a great deal gets said about the difficulty of this novel. I first read Ulysses as a bookish high-school student. Even then I found the book-learning that Joyce’s work wears on its sleeve to never be too daunting; so much of it requires only a basic Western humanities education as was common in his own time and survived well enough to my own youth in the late twentieth century. Of course, with knowledge acquired over the years, re-reading has brought additional insights, but the basic plot was accessible from the start. The one challenge of any trip through Ulysses is not the intellectual references, but rather mundane details of Irish history and politics that would have been known to each and every one of Joyce’s compatriots at the time, but now are obscure especially to foreign readers.
On the internet a great deal gets said about the difficulty of this novel. I first read Ulysses as a bookish high-school student. Even then I found the book-learning that Joyce’s work wears on its sleeve to never be too daunting; so much of it requires only a basic Western humanities education as was common in his own time and survived well enough to my own youth in the late twentieth century. Of course, with knowledge acquired over the years, re-reading has brought additional insights, but the basic plot was accessible from the start. The one challenge of any trip through Ulysses is not the intellectual references, but rather mundane details of Irish history and politics that would have been known to each and every one of Joyce’s compatriots at the time, but now are obscure especially to foreign readers.