Ulysses  I'm currently reading Ulysses by James Joyce. I've had an old Modern Library hardcopy version lying around for a while. The other day I was trying to find room on my bookshelves by selecting books to be sold or given away when I came across it again. At around the same time I read an article about Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, who controls the James Joyce estate and who seems to relish giving Joyce academics a hard time. He thinks people can read Joyce's works without the annotated texts or extensive analysis. Joyce's work has spawned a small industry in academia and Stephen is doing what he can to try to control it.

So I picked up the book and started reading. And guess what, I couldn't figure out what was going on and remembered why it was I had stopped reading after the first few pages few years ago. I slogged on, not understand much of what I read, skipping a few longer paragraphs along the way. I read a bit about the book in wikipedia and The Literature Network and started to understand a bit more about the events taking place in the novel. Probably the most helpful was from the later:

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

After the first 100 pages or so I'm starting to get into it. Wish me luck.
posted by Bruce Wright at 10:04 PM #