Ulysses

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.

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

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.

Jesus, must have gone pretty badly so :-(