Ulysses

buyer95

So I was in a book shop yesterday. I had never visited this particular establishment before. I just happened upon the shop as I was searching for a book, and I failed to find it in either of the big stores(Easons and O'Mahony's). Needless to say this shop did not have the book I was looking for. However, unlike Easons and O'Mahonys, I did not feel a strong compulsion to immediately leave the premises after being told they did not have the book I was looking for. The place is a bookshop in the real old sense of the word. The door to enter the shop is weather beaten and creaks. Signs advertising sales are nowhere to be seen. It is all about the books in this establishment, turning a profit seems almost an afterthought. The word that stuck in my mind was "character", the place has character. I resolved to browse around the shop for awhile. Finding a section seemingly dedicated to Irish classics, I thumbed through a few different titles. Then, I spotted out of the corner of my eye a book hidden at the back of the bookshelf. I felt I knew what book it was going to be before seeing it. "Ulysses, James Joyce." It is a book which I have heard much about but always considered to be one book I was destined never to read. The reason for this being I generally buy most of my books on amazon and download them to my Kindle, so as such I would have been avoiding this book, considering it beyond what I would be capable of reading. But here it was, in my hands in front of me, enticing yet aloof. I began to think that perhaps this was a sign of some sort, that maybe I was supposed to happen across this book, in this brilliantly obscure bookshop.
I then thought back on the words my leaving cert English teacher had spoken one day 2 years ago when we were discussing Shakespeare's "Macbeth." "Some of you believe that this is as complex as the language gets. Ulysses, that's all I'll say. If your mad enough, try to read it someday."
No price was displayed on the book, so I asked the shopkeeper what the price of the book was.(Being a college student this would be important.) "2.50 or something close." I was delighted with this, thinking it would be closer to a tenner. I told him I'd take it, he gave me a furtive smile, wrapped book with care bordering on the devotional and simple said " Best of luck." I had never heard those words from a shopkeeper but he didn't say it in a condescending way, he seemed to really be hoping that I would manage to finish it.
So a day later here I am, feeling daunted looking at Ulysses in the corner of the room. I suppose I'm looking for encouragement, your experience with reading the book, or any thoughts really. I'm not a voracious reader, I don't really have the time with college and and work at the weekend. But I do enjoy reading, and generally consume books very quickly.

Ficheall

I see it's influencing your writing style already.

Ruu

Did the shopkeeper look like this? Certainly sounds like it.

Archeron

I never understood why there was a room full of what looked like dead people all floating up near the ceiling and then towards the end, some big old roman god would appear in space and seem to be really pissed off for no particular reason. I really liked the little red robot but the little blue alien girl creeped me out.

P_1

Tis a big boat alright

Mariasofia

I finished the book in less time than it took to read your post. :O :-D

Liamalone

I enjoyed the cartoon version

catallus

Just read the book OP, and then tell us what you think.

Stavros Murphy

P_1 wrote: »

Tis a big boat alright

Ferry big indeed. Yer man Joyce did some job on the inside - who'd believe the amount of cars and trucks that can fit in? Unreal. Unusual name too.

Rothko

I really enjoyed Ulysses and didn't think it was difficult to read at all. I don't understand why it has that reputation. Naked Lunch on the other hand...

buyer95

Ficheall wrote: »

I see it's influencing your writing style already.

I'll choose to take that as a compliment.;)

Hunter of Invisible Game

I am forever buying books and either half reading them, or not reading them at all.

Think I have an unread copy of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 & 3/4 knocking about somewhere.

Capt'n Midnight

Download
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300

Read online
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm

Sir Osis of Liver.

Whats not to love about Joyce?

J_E

What was the name of the book shop?

Teyla Emmagan

Just break the spine in a few places OP, stick it on the bookshelf, and pretend you read it. Like the rest of us.

I have actually read it, when I was 11, believe it or not. It meant nothing to me then and not a whole lot more when I did in in college 10 years later.

We had the good Senator David Norris, teaching us Joyce. I vividly remember being in one lecture when he was talking about hansom cabs driving people around Stephen's Green, for 'trysts', and the passage about all the crusty semen on the leather seats after.

Have you tried 'Anne of Green Gables'?. Its a lovely book. Not quite as unsettling.

buyer95

It would appear that most here have an opinion on the book, yet the majority who have weighed in have not read the book!

catallus

It would appear that the Op's eyes were opened to the beauty of bookshops. It was just his own bad luck that he found Ulysses there

bmwguy

I tried it, never finished. Might try to get to page 10 soon

buyer95

catallus wrote: »

It would appear that the Op's eyes were opened to the beauty of bookshops. It was just his own bad luck that he found Ulysses there

Haha, I'm not trying to pick a fight. For the record, there is nothing beautiful about the slabs of concrete that is Eason's. I have visited my fair share if bookshops, and this one stood out for it's beauty, thats why I mentioned it in my post.

Sir Osis of Liver.

Sh1te n onions.

marienbad

Just start reading it, it is really not that hard . Without question one of the greatest reads of my life .

I was inordinately proud of myself when I read it the first time but that was just because it was hyped as so difficult. Subsequently I read it because I loved it and still do.

catallus

buyer95 wrote: »

Haha, I'm not trying to pick a fight. For the record, there is nothing beautiful about the slabs of concrete that is Eason's. I have visited my fair share if bookshops, and this one stood out for it's beauty, thats why I mentioned it in my post.

I didn't think you were looking to pick a fight but FYI all buildings are slabs of concrete. Was it because it was romantically dilapidated that you found it so nice?

In your OP you say that your teacher said that the language of MacBeth was less complicated than that of Ulysses. That's because Joyce knew MacBeth back to front (along with a lot more newer writing, and older too) and his main trick was to synthesize it. Much like a nobody sound engineer these days takes songs and remixes them.

Anyway, Ulysses is worth reading. But so is an awful lot of stuff.

Menas

Ulysses , that is the dirty book where our hero has a hand shandy behind a rock whilst watching some young wans sunbathing in their victorian swim costumes?

Engine No.9

Archeron wrote: »

I never understood why there was a room full of what looked like dead people all floating up near the ceiling and then towards the end, some big old roman god would appear in space and seem to be really pissed off for no particular reason. I really liked the little red robot but the little blue alien girl creeped me out.

I had a wicked crush on her as a youngfla

SEPT 23 1989

Read Dubliners first ease yourself into it

pwurple

OP, I'd recommend another book... Ulysses unbound, by terence killeen. I read ulysses a couple of times, but it wasn't until i read a companion book like this one that i got the most enjoyment out of it. I had been missing so many references. It really unlocked the humour in it for me.

buyer95

pwurple wrote: »

OP, I'd recommend another book... Ulysses unbound, by terence killeen. I read ulysses a couple of times, but it wasn't until i read a companion book like this one that i got the most enjoyment out of it. I had been missing so many references. It really unlocked the humour in it for me.

I'll look into this, thanks.

tiredcity

Treat it a bit like a very long song and don't get too hung up on what everything little thing means. First time I read it I just enjoyed it for the language itself and then a few months later it popped into my head and suddenly lots of stuff came together and made sense. Think it's one of those books where you can bring as much or as little to it as you want. The companion guides are great but for me that'd have made the reading more of an academic exercise so I'd give it a lash first & if its wrecking your head then read the companion. It's one of those books that always stays with you, particularly (obviously!) if you're a Dubliner. Enjoy the read

50 Shades of Grey palesto insignificance in comparison to Molly Bloom's soliloquy.

I found it hard work and ultimately unrewarding because of it. I'm going to read it again but I think I'll get some good notes to help me on my way.

Good luck OP, if you get through it and enjoy it you'll be doing much better than I did.

Spring Onion

It is overrated in my opinion but you'll be in the "club" if you finish it.

Waitsian

Cydoniac wrote: »

What was the name of the book shop?

I'll second that question, sounds like the kind of place I'd like to visit.

KCC

I read half of it (decided that life was too short!). I didn't enjoy it at all and thought it was incredibly over-rated. From what I remember it's written in a "stream of consciousness"/interior monologue style, which is tough to plough through.

JuliusCaesar

Why not skip the complex and go straight to the goodies: Jimmy Joyce's letters to his beloved?

buyer95

Just finished the introduction. It has to go down as one of the longest introductions to any book ever. Here goes nothing.

Menas

buyer95 wrote: »

Just finished the introduction. It has to go down as one of the longest introductions to any book ever. Here goes nothing.

See you after the world cup.

The 2018 world cup.

the groutch

Archeron wrote: »

I never understood why there was a room full of what looked like dead people all floating up near the ceiling and then towards the end, some big old roman god would appear in space and seem to be really pissed off for no particular reason. I really liked the little red robot but the little blue alien girl creeped me out.

So glad I'm not the only one who got that reference.

orestes

I read a lot, and that and War & Peace are the only two books I've ever started and thought "fukk this, life is too short" and put down without finishing. Not because they're hard t read (although keeping track of who is who in War & Peace is a serious pain in the arse) but just because they were so damned hard to enjoy.

GotTheTshirt

I started Darwins Origin of Species about two years ago, I keep promising myself I'll finish it but it's bloody hard work.

tiredcity

Some books are definitely a tough slog. Sometimes working through them pays off, sometimes it doesn't. I finished War and Peace but would never be bothered reading it again. I've never even considered attempting Finnegan's Wake. I like Ulysses but I'd be lying if I said I was flicking the pages furiously. More than once I stuck it down thinking "can't be arsed with this anymore". Eventually got through and as I said in my first post it made very little impact until a few months later when I warmed to it. I've read it twice since, it's still quite tough work but there's a joy in that kind of writing too if you just let it wash over you and stop trying to read it like every other book. Still, loads of people hate it for very legitimate reasons and if it's not bringing you any pleasure, there's no shame in using it as a doorstop or something. Pretty sure Joyce wouldn't mind!

Realt Dearg Sec

buyer95 wrote: »

Just finished the introduction. It has to go down as one of the longest introductions to any book ever. Here goes nothing.

I wish I'd seen this thread before now, but you'd be better off to not read the intro first (for any book, actually, it always seems strange to me that they put intros to books instead of having an essay at the end, since they assume the reader has already read the book anyway, or otherwise dictate the direction your reading will take).

More to the point, if you are reading the Gabler corrected text, the intro is very technical and off-putting because it's about the editorial process. If it's the Kiberd version then you'll be doing very well because he's a fantastic guide to have for any book, especially this one. Nobody at all, though, is still better. (An earlier poster recommended Terence Killeen's book which I would also second).

Full disclosure, I'm one of those people who people complain about when it comes to Joyce: a Joyce scholar. Which is why I think I'm pretty well qualified to say you shouldn't read ANY of us until you've read the book yourself.

From my own experience as (initially) a casual reader, I would only quote Joyce himself. Once,challenged about the supposedly dirty nature of the book, he responded "if my book is not fit to read, then life is not fit to live". Any sense of plot development is significantly less important than the idea that, by the end of it, you will know some of these characters better than you will ever know nearly any real person in your entire life. And that involves seeing them at their most open and vulnerable. And also, uh, seeing them ****ting and pissing and masturbating...but whatev...

Joyce also once said that you can learn more about a man from the way he butters his toast, than the way he marches to war. Again, I think the point here was that it is in our daily routines that we reveal who we are, not in the exciting, exceptional moments. Ulysses is about the former, not the latter, so get used to it! There is a moment when we first see Bloom, making breakfast for his wife (itself a major revelation about his character), and the process by which he puts the breakfast on the plate reveals more about him than you will see in virtually any book you'll ever read, I guarantee.

Another poster also said that it is written in interior monologue. That's correct, but only in places. The opening two episodes are actually in straight up realist prose and I've never understood why people are confused by it. In the third episode, 'Proteus', the opening line, 'The ineluctible modality of the visible' is usually the moment the book gets slammed shut forever. But don't, please, do that. There's a lot going on in this book and one of them is that Stephen Dedalus (the one who thinks that line) is quite a pretentious kid. It is poking fun at him too. Stick it out, you'll get to Bloom in the following episode and he's much more relatable.

WHat's more important, though, is that many episodes are written in vastly different styles. That can be jarring, but it can also be very rewarding, especially when you find an episode that you really GET, yourself, and start to gain an insight into why he is writing a given episode in a given style. My favourite, in that regard, is 'Wandering Rocks', in which a series of short cameos by various characters are put one after the other with no apparent connection in narrative terms. But you gradually get a sense that while there are some random connections between these characters, what the episode really does is give an impression of the city as a complicated, inter-related whole. The moments at which you gain these realisations are, to my mind, worth the work. Same with 'Aeolus', in which the story is punctuated with headlines from a newspaper, which reflects its setting in an Abbey Street newspaper office.

But the other side of that is the episodes you wont understand, maybe until you actually turn to Killeen for help. I would say, either persist in your lack of understanding (again, the book is more like life than a story, we don't always understand everything we see in life, we just get on with it and try to make sense of what we can...the point being we don't NEED to understand everything) or just skip to the next episode. In plot terms, you're unlikely to lose very much. You will find an episode you do get, and that's much better than a bookmark on page twenty for the next decade. Good luck with it, remember it is actually meant to be fun (and it is very funny). It's difficult in places but I think it's worth it.

Realt Dearg Sec

How are you getting on with it OP?

Realt Dearg Sec

Jesus, must have gone pretty badly so :-(

losthorizon

I read Dubliners by Joyce - now thats a good book. One of the short stories in it the Dead Starring Donal McCann is a fantastic film.

For me a great achievement was finishing Don Quixote by Cervantes. Found that tough going.

kowloon

orestes wrote: »

I read a lot, and that and War & Peace are the only two books I've ever started and thought "fukk this, life is too short" and put down without finishing. Not because they're hard t read (although keeping track of who is who in War & Peace is a serious pain in the arse) but just because they were so damned hard to enjoy.

I find that difficult in most things, be they books or film. It's nigh on impossible in anything where the characters are Poles, Finns or any other hard to remember/unpronounceable form.

the culture of deference

Read the Odyssey first, there is a double book (iliad) translated into English by chapman