James Joyce

Ulysses

Rebecca Light

里森

We each have heads not just of what we have read but, like Stephen, of what we have heard. We think with these borrowed words.

“I want, said Joyce, as we were walking down the Universitätstrasse, 'to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

From Lawrence, K. R. (2022). “Telemachus.” Refers to Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities. 

https://literal.club/lisson/book/benedict-anderson-imagined-communities-q3g1u

Mulligan and Haines try to solicit Stephen for their imagined communities.

Alawander Bouston 

Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. 

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Grace Stanger

George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world-sorrow' 

Mit den Mitteln moderner Tiefenpsycholgie gestaltete Erlebnisse, Handlungen, Gespräche, Gedanken und Träume eines Durchschnittsmenschen während eines Tages in Dublin. SW: Psychologischer Roman.

Sarah Sammis

Ulysses by James Joyce is a book I've had on my to be read pile for ten years. My husband originally got it to read during a Caltech Bloomsday celebration but finals or something got in the way and he didn't go to read the book. Instead I started it and got a couple episodes into it before I had to box up all my books for our big move from South Pasadena to the Bay Area.
 Ulysses is a long book. It's just shy of 800 pages. It's also a complicated book. It was originally serialized and each episode is written in a very different tone and style. What they all have in common is a thematic tie to Homer's Odyssey as evidenced by the titles of each episode and of course by the title.
 For reasons unknown to me, published versions of Ulysses don't seem to include the episode titles. It would help to have a book that was at least annotated to know where you are in the novel. There are online annotations online. For the most part I read with the wikipedia site open just to get a very basic sense of what to expect from the episode and to know its title. There are more dedicated sites if you really want to know Ulysses inside and out, such as Ulysses Seen (which also twitters annotations). My point is, you don't have to take this book on alone. There are resources out there. Also, it's a much easier book to read slowly. I took eighteen weeks to read it.
 If you would like to read my more in depth thoughts about each episode, links to them are included below:
  

  Episode 1: Telemachus: Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy  
  Episode 2: Nestor: Kif 
  Episode 3: Proteus: Georgia Nicholson 
  Episode 4: Calypso: Parasites Lost 

  Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters: Down To The River To Pray  
  Episode 6: Hades: Agent Caitlin 'Kate' Todd  
  Episode 7: Aeolus: J. Jonah Jameson  
  Episode 8: The Laestrygonians: Earl's Court to Islington 

  Episode 9: Scylla and Charybdis: If I Had a Hammer... 
  Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 
  Episode 11: The Sirens: Our Man in Havana 
  Episode 12: The Cyclops: Pick-a-Little 
  Episode 13: Nausicaä: Petting in the Park 

  Episode 14: Oxen in the Sun: The Critic in the Cabernet 
  Episode 15: Circe: Alice in Wonderland 
  Episode 16: Eumaeus: Wayne's World 
  Episode 17: Ithaca: "For Real" 

  Episode 18: Penelope: Marge Simpson

Maurice FitzGerald

In the end there wasn't anything to it. You really like the place you grow up in. Really smart people can play around with words and it is sometimes fun to read but not that often really.

Andrew Louis

The book covers approximately 18 hours of a day; the audiobook is 35 hours long; getting through it felt like an eternity. Over and over again, I kept thinking of Joyce: "what a wanker" and almost every paragraph required looking up references. 

On the other hand, being in intellectual commune with the dozens and dozens of scholars who have devoted their lives to making some sense of this book was an interesting experience that gave a modest amount of pleasure.

Ulisses

Nelson Zagalo

Roman

Kaya

Nein, es wird nicht mein Lieblingsbuch. Aber Bloom und die Frauen sind definitiv lesenswert. Er ist mitfühlend. Obwohl er kein Heiliger ist. Aber diese Sicht auf die weibliche Seite des Lebens ist selten. Dafür gibt es einen Stern mehr. Warum soviele "männliche Männer" recht merkwürdige Ansichten haben ist mir noch nicht klar. Witwer Daedalus lässt seine Kinder im Stich und sein Sohn ist ebenfalls kein Familienmensch. 
Ulysses ist anstrengend zu lesen und ich bin froh, dass ich jemand an meiner Seite hatte um über die schwierigen Stellen zu kommen. Auch wenn ich durch bin, wird mich Ulysses noch eine Weile beschäftigen. Die Nachbearbeitung wird hoffentlich nicht zu lange dauern.

Robin Sturm

I complained about David Copperfield not being particularly challenging for how long it was, yet I am now complaining that this (actually a shorter book) was too challenging. Maybe I will find a happy medium. I'm thrilled to have finished it, but sad that I'm not sure if I can say it's the greatest book I've ever read. I can't quite bring myself to give it 5 stars when I feel like there's so much in the text that I wasn't able to (either on my own or with the companion lecture I had) understand. There were lines and sections that I absolutely loved, but also a ton that went way over my head, and a few things I really did not like. But taken as a whole it is quite a masterpiece.

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession". None of these descriptions, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in its own way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book.

Molly Phillips

I read it and I will read it again. Yes. And I will never finish it, but somehow I have read it and it was beautiful.

Boxuan Mao

Nothing is impossible for novels after Ulysses.

Kathryn Reyes

A day in the life of Leopold Bloom, whose odyssey through the streets of turn-of-the-century Dublin leads him through trials that parallel those of Ulysses on his epic journey home.

Simon Elliott Stegall

Ulysses feels like a cross between a hoax and a fashion show. It is a catalogue of all the ways that James Joyce can write better than you can (no matter who you are); can make puns better than you can, can reference Shakespeare in more subtle ways than you can, and can turn a phrase better than you can. He can quote historical figures better than you can, he can quote mythological figures better than you can, he can write a longer sentence than you can, and you can be DANG well sure he can write a longer paragraph than anyone you know. Basically, Joyce is a genius and he is going to make you suffer for it.

That’s why it’s a fashion show. And it’s a hoax because it doesn’t mean anything. My impression after poring over the appendixes to my annotated version of Ulysses was that Joyce intended to create a work of style- of comparative and invocative mastery. T.S. Eliot said as much when he said “Ulysses destroyed the whole of the nineteenth century…. It showed up the futility of all the English styles.” This it certainly did, but I haven’t read anyone making the argument that Ulysses is a good book for any other reason. Chesterton said, comparing the authors of the two Ulysses’s: “Homer manages to be very pure in very plain language, while Joyce manages to be very coarse in very esoteric language.” So do I give Ulysses 5 stars for obviously being a work of genius? Or do I give it two stars for being half-unintelligible and basically useless except to literary theorists? 

Three stars because his wordplay is amazing, but I wouldn’t recommend it for any other reason.

Trevor Berrett

Ulysses is simply the most brilliant book ever written. Strangely, it is one of the least read brilliant books ever written--it probably is the least read brilliant book. Perhaps even more strangely, it is understandably underread--and I can't say I recommend it to anyone in particular. It is different from any other book. It looks unapproachable because of the unfamiliar style and form. However, it is accessible and wonderfully fulfilling. 
Joyce's play with words and forms is at its peak here (I think he went downhill with Finnegan's Wake, an even less read [apparently] brilliant book which is truly inaccessible--have you read it? do you know anyone who has read it?). The great thing is that Joyce isn't playing just to show off. His style creates a new window to the characters and to ourselves. Once the reader gets around the strangeness of the book, the reader finds an illumination unlike any presented before or since. 
So I've just said it is the most brilliant book ever written. Is it my favorite? No. I've like many other books more than I liked Ulysses. But I don't think I've seen more brilliance at work in any other novel. And that was a pure pleasure to be a part of.

Jeni Enjaian

What is Ulysses about? I have absolutely no idea.

When I started the book I knew that it would be a difficult one to get through. Many of the classics happen to be that way. Another goodreads friend posted a glowing, positive review that told of the extreme effort (reading aloud, chapter guides, rereading passages) she took to get through the book.

In my opinion, such an extensive effort should not be part of initial comprehensibility. A person should be able to read a book and at least be able to name the main character and describe the plot, if even in the simplest terms. I am not able to do either of those things.

I have to admit that I skimmed the book. I did try to read each line for the first few pages. I could made no sense of the jumping, scattered, disconnected narrative. On top of that, the version that I read contained minuscule print, making it even more difficult to read.

Another factor working against the book is the overabundant use of sexual imagery. Some of the most comprehensible portions of the book are passages concerning sex. It's simply not necessary.

Some people may like this book. I, however, do not. Even more, I do not even think that this book of near gibberish should even be called a book.

Daryl Houston

One of the hardest, most confounding books I've read. Brilliant in places, maddening and silly and boring in others. Like good medicine that tastes bad; I see why it's great literature, but there are very large chunks of it that I can't say I like very much at all. I can't really say I liked it, but I recognize its worth.