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scott_wilson_kc 's review for:
Ulysses
by James Joyce
I am not going to do the stars thing here, though I think it would be funny to rate it two and say, "It was OK."
I am going to wonder aloud here, though, what it must have been like to read this at the time of its publication. Surely it was a singular experience. Because today, despite its torrent of language and its bottomless ocean of references, it feels to me no less a relic than the Bible itself.
I listened to an unabridged, full-cast recording from 1982. The performances were excellent. In fact, the actor reading Bloom was so effective that I grew to dread his sections. This is the original nincompoop, the father of every fictional fuckup all the way through Nick Hornby's canon. Smart, bookish, immersed in words and thought. Also, a horny idiot.
So, yeah, I envy anyone who read this almost 100 years ago and was rocked to see the male psyche laid so bare, to accept as a new-century Everyman an absent-minded, snack-fingered cuckold. But after everything literature and pop culture have offered up since, including countless arch-Blooms and distillations and thefts of Joyce and his themes, I could read/hear only an oafish dolt.
The last quarter, though, especially its Q&A and the Molly Bloom monologue, still contain a great deal. Or, anyway, they include, in summary or in miniature, every verbal aspect I liked about the book. And I may try again someday. When the audio finished, I jumped back to the first Leopold Bloom chapter and found symmetries with Molly's section that I'd lost track of.
It's a thing to respect, this book, respect and admire. But, despite as much following along with my volume of annotations as time and patience allowed, I failed to understand long stretches of the novel, other than the schematic itself and, thanks to the cast, who was who among the characters. I don't mean I couldn't follow a plot, since there isn't one, or that the discrete sentences were impenetrable. The words washed over me fine, some of them beautifully and prismatically. I mean instead the deep specificity of time, place and creed(s), all of which are, by design, anti-universal and therefore beyond my grasp.
That's part of what makes Ulysses rich. I must settle, though, for recognizing its richness without having been much enriched by finally having read it.
I am going to wonder aloud here, though, what it must have been like to read this at the time of its publication. Surely it was a singular experience. Because today, despite its torrent of language and its bottomless ocean of references, it feels to me no less a relic than the Bible itself.
I listened to an unabridged, full-cast recording from 1982. The performances were excellent. In fact, the actor reading Bloom was so effective that I grew to dread his sections. This is the original nincompoop, the father of every fictional fuckup all the way through Nick Hornby's canon. Smart, bookish, immersed in words and thought. Also, a horny idiot.
So, yeah, I envy anyone who read this almost 100 years ago and was rocked to see the male psyche laid so bare, to accept as a new-century Everyman an absent-minded, snack-fingered cuckold. But after everything literature and pop culture have offered up since, including countless arch-Blooms and distillations and thefts of Joyce and his themes, I could read/hear only an oafish dolt.
The last quarter, though, especially its Q&A and the Molly Bloom monologue, still contain a great deal. Or, anyway, they include, in summary or in miniature, every verbal aspect I liked about the book. And I may try again someday. When the audio finished, I jumped back to the first Leopold Bloom chapter and found symmetries with Molly's section that I'd lost track of.
It's a thing to respect, this book, respect and admire. But, despite as much following along with my volume of annotations as time and patience allowed, I failed to understand long stretches of the novel, other than the schematic itself and, thanks to the cast, who was who among the characters. I don't mean I couldn't follow a plot, since there isn't one, or that the discrete sentences were impenetrable. The words washed over me fine, some of them beautifully and prismatically. I mean instead the deep specificity of time, place and creed(s), all of which are, by design, anti-universal and therefore beyond my grasp.
That's part of what makes Ulysses rich. I must settle, though, for recognizing its richness without having been much enriched by finally having read it.