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colleenolsen 's review for:
Ulysses
by James Joyce
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.