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    James Joyce - Ulysses
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    James Joyce - Ulysses
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    James Joyce - Ulysses
    Audiobook (abridged)55 minutes

    James Joyce - Ulysses

    Written by James Joyce

    Narrated by Siobhan McKenna and E. G. Marshall

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Ulysses is a seminal novel by the Irish writer James Joyce that has had a great impact on the modernist movement. Indeed, for many critics, the novel has established most of the conventions of modern fiction and has become one of its fundamental references. After being serialized in magazines, Ulysses was first collected and published in 1922. The narrative, which is set in the Irish capital Dublin, follows the two principal characters of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Different issues are discussed and reflected upon ranging from Irish history and nationalism to anti-Semitism, art, literature, sexual desire, marital infidelity, death, religion and theology. In each episode, Joyce draws parallels between his own story and Homer’s classic epic poem The Odyssey, often borrowing the names of its heroes and places and invoking its main themes. Joyce’s novel is marked by experimentation, the extensive use of symbolism, figures of speech, allusive language, metaphorical language and parody. It is also in Ulysses that Joyce develops his now famous narratorial technique known as “the stream of consciousness” where the character’s thoughts are naturally presented without any attempt at interrupting them or rearranging them.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Copyright Group
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781783941155
    Unavailable
    James Joyce - Ulysses
    Author

    James Joyce

    James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. One of the most influential writers of the 20th Century, Joyce's life was punctuated by poverty, critical controversy and self-imposed exile. Joyce was one of the pioneering figures of modernism and counted W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound amongst his earliest supporters. Before his death in 1941, Joyce had published Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners; works that today are recognized as amongst the greatest achievements in literature.

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    Reviews for James Joyce - Ulysses

    4/5

    3,236 ratings126 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A brilliant book to read and reread, but not a book to love with the heart, more with the brains. Great variety in styles, themes, some experiments are a succes, others not. This is not about Dublin on 1 day, by 1 person, no, on the contrary, the multiple points of view are essential! It's kind of cubustic view on reality. A few of the topics Joyce touches: what is truth, what is reality? How can you know reality? And how, as a human, can you cope with this reality?
    • 3/5
      Didn’t seem to finish. Some chapters missing?
      Talking in whispers. Sometimes hard to hear the words.
    • 3/5
      Look, you wouldn’t try and climb Everest or run a marathon without making some preparations, would you? So, don’t attempt Ulysses casually, thinking it’s only a matter of reading nine hundred odd pages. Find out as much as you can about it before you start. You’ll appreciate what you read more and you’ll have more chance of reaching the end. This text is rich, dense, complex and confusing. You’ll need a guide and Declan Kiberd’s “Ulysses and Us” is excellent. Ulysses took me three and half weeks to read and I can’t say that much of it was pleasurable in the normal manner of reading a book. Nevertheless, it is an astonishing and important piece of literature and I’m glad I’ve tackled it. I’m sure that there are a lot of allusions and ideas that I have totally missed, that I just hadn’t got the learning to appreciate. But, even so, this is a far from barren read for the ordinary reader. More than anything, it is the very depth and complexity of the work that is the most awe inspiring aspect. It's much like viewing a challenging piece of artwork, you are going to come away impressed and possibly haunted rather than in love.
    • 1/5
      I loathe Ulysses the way that most sensible folks loathe the very existence of Bernie Madoff. It's an all encompassing and consuming loathing leaving no room for mercy. In fact, if I were The Blob or a Killer Tomato on the attack, I'd consume every volume of Ulysses extant (and Bernie Madoff) with my acidic, dissolving loathing. I wish the book were still banned and my access to it summarily and arbitrarily denied by Big Brother, so that I wouldn't have wasted my precious, irreplaceable time and energy reading it, is how deep my Ulysses loathing goes. Yes, it's true, reading Ulysses (even just half of this poo poo) feels like being disemboweled (or at least like having bad, painful gas; and that's bad, painful gas when you're stuck inside somewhere with other people and it would be too impolite - even as painful as it is holding it in - to let it rip. Oh yeah?! You think that's tacky and tasteless? Well if the "genius," Joyce, can make fart jokes in Ulysses left and right, why can't anybody else do the same in describing his flatulent, nauseating tome?Worse, reading Ulysses leaves one feeling like they've been had, scammed, rused, abused, conned, pawned, cheated, excreted, duped, nuked, swindled, swizzled, diddled, belittled, hustled, hoaxed, stiffed, tricked, taken to the cleaners or taken for a ride, ripped off royally of everything you've worked hard for your whole life and hold dear. How you like that list, Joyce, you MOTHERF%$#!R?Less painful indeed, having your wisdom teeth extracted with pliers by an orang-utang...and without novocaine, than trying to read Ulysses first page to last.I hated it.
    • 4/5
      I have been listening to Ulysses off and on for 6 months and I must say that I did enjoy it very much. I may not have understood most of what I was reading but I did enjoy the poetry, the music, the monologues and the characters. It was funny, sad, lyrical, crude, sensitive and blunt. It is a novel that should be read many times and hopefully when I read it again, it will make a little more sense to me. If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you give it a try.
    • 3/5
      To those who advocate listening to this book rather than reading it, let me add that seeing the movie, with Sioban McKenna as Molly Bloom, is also better than reading the book.
    • 5/5
      Humbling. Exhausting. Sometimes exhilarating. Often beautiful. This is a novel that puts you in your place. It tries your patience and requires you accept that you'll go large stretches without understanding what's happening. Eyes will glaze over. Attention will wander. But it will reward the reader. There will be points at which the reader will marvel at how deftly Joyce twists and turns the English language. The humanity that busts out of this thing is impressive. The second to last 'chapter' alone is an incredibly powerful piece of writing. Perhaps a bit too erudite for its own good, Ulysses still manages to captivate as often as it obfuscates.
    • 1/5
      This is only a fragment and not the full book, which is not explained. Not worth the credit.
    • 5/5
      "Ulysses" by James Joyce (1934) is a novel about the interaction of social responsibility and personal desires. It focuses primarily on three characters: Stephen Dedalus a self-absorbed scholar attempting to find his artistic voice, Leopold Bloom who tries to meet his social responsibilities in a culture that is not completely accepting of him, and Molly Bloom (Poldy's wife) who struggles with her feminine destiny. The novel parallels the structure of Homer's "Odyssey" that chronicles the 10 year struggle of Odysseus to return from war in Troy to his home in Ithaca. Ulysses, the Latin translation of the Greek name Odysseus, is Leopold (Poldy) Bloom who travels the streets of Dublin one Thursday on June 16, 1904. His goal is to accomplish his daily task of meeting his family's economic needs, forming social alliances with Dubliners (including Stephen), and satisfying his own drives for understanding and fulfillment. Odysseus sought to reunite with his wife and assess her fidelity in his absence, and Bloom looks forward to the end of the day when he returns to his home at 7 Eccles Street, concerned about his wife's unfaithfulness. "Ulysses" is remarkable in its descriptive detail of the physical and psychological environments of Dublin and its characters. The feelings related to immersion in the living Irish city are so strong that there may be some irrational fear of being unable to return to current life. The entrance into the reality of the lives of Stephen, Molly, and Poldy is uncanny as readers become physically and psychically connected to characters. It is a matter of proximity. You lose your own personality as you accompany these people when they converse, walk the streets, visit stores, drink and philosophize, reveal themselves in stream of consciousness monologues, argue, pursue bacchanalian extremes, and have private battles with loss and melancholy. The reader `sees' everything that day, the external locations and the inner worlds of the characters, with the "ineluctable modality of the visible." This is the direct and complete experience of Joyce's art without the restriction of our own frame of reference, history, obligations, and wants. It is intimidating to realize that your own life is changing, that part of your personal history now contains a new day of your own existence - you have extended your life for a day. Many people throughout the world celebrate a second birthday on June 16 (Bloomsday). After publication of "Ulysses," I believe that James Joyce (like a few other artists) spent the rest of his life amazed at his creation. As he lay dying in hospital waiting for his wife to return to his bedside, he had to wonder where his inspiration originated, where he summoned the ability to give the gift of another day of life to us all. The reader can benefit most from "Ulysses" by preparing to read it. Read (re-read) Homers "Odyssey." Pay close attention to the structure, the symbolic content, and the psychology of Odysseus. Odysseus was a flawed hero, externally brave but also self-serving and blind to parts of his own personality (like Bloom). Use "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford to help guide you through the detail of theology, philosophy, psychology, history, rhetoric, and the physical layout of Dublin. This reference work is very good because it allows readers to have their own experiences by providing only supplementary content (facts) that help to understand the myriad allusions presented in the text. I suggest that you enjoy the many beautiful styles of prose presented in the 18 episodes pausing to quickly glance at the definitions in your opened copy of "Ulysses Annotated." Then before reading the next episode, go back and read the complete explanatory entries in this reference book. Give yourself a couple of months to enjoy the novel and add this new day to your life.
    • 4/5
      The last chapter took me a while.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Well that was quite the experience. I always thought that, as lover of literature (and of Irish lineage), I HAD to read Ulysses before I passed. Like many others I'm sure, I was intimidated and doubted my ability to finish the work much less understand and appreciate it. I don't claim to understand it all yet but I can say I certainly appreciate it. It is, without a doubt, a monumental and pivotal work of fiction. I suppose it's hyperbole, but one can see the seeds of modern fiction taking root. Another incredible facet of the work is Joyce's mastery of a variety of writing styles. The last of my initial observations is the surprising amount of humor in the work. My next step is to read Harry Blamires' "The New Bloomsday Book", which as you no doubt know is an authoritative guide to Ulysses. I wanted to read the book prior to the guide so as to not allow the guide to become the book. No doubt I'll have further thoughts after finishing Blamires' guide.Having now finished Ulysses, I can now relax as my literary bucket list is completed.
    • 5/5
      FINALLY! That's the fist thing I can think of saying for this review. Always wanted to read this since college and reading Mrs. Dalloway. Took me so long because I never had the guts to read the book. I really enjoyed this though, didn't understand everything, but thought it was amazing.

      With that said, don't read this book unless you know what you're getting yourself into and have a reason to read Ulysses. Yes this is an ultimate classic, but this book is not easy. Like I said before, I'm not sure what I read half the time. I get the point of the book, but not the full plot. Plus, be prepared to read just about every kind of narrative style all within one book. One minute you're reading a novel and the next thing you know you're reading a play, then a Q&A, and then a 45 page run-on sentence, and so much more. BE WARNED!

      But yes I did enjoy this book a lot. I just love books like this were the plot becomes less important and the characters and writing style take over. I mainly liked this for the 45 page sentence though. For literature it's historic because like Mrs. Dalloway, it's one of the early usages of the stream-of-contentedness. Never fully understood that term until awhile ago and this book gives the perfect example. It's like if someone was to write down every little thing you were thinking about before you fall asleep.

      Another reason I loved this book was for the fact it was experimental writing at its finest. Where the writer gave the bird to the editors and wrote about everything and anyway they desire. Like most of the books I've been reading this year this goes places some wouldn't enjoy. I think this is when I realized this book was never about a plot, but more thoughts James Joyce had about society.

      One thing this book will have an affect on you is that it might make you want to go to Ireland. Never had that thought before. I've wanted to go to England at some point, but now I might have to add Ireland too. From what the book points out, sounds like a great place to visit. I'm not really Irish at all and I feel it a little now.

      Anyways, I could go on and on about this book because it talks about so much and there are s many interesting points. I think I covered what I liked the best. I say don't read this unless you know what you're getting yourself into, but if you do happen to read it try to spend time with it and try to get some points mentioned in this book. It is a great book and I can see way they tell people to read Ulysses.
    • 2/5
      Holy Crap! What a not good book. This was the latest "on the can" book. I read this a page at a time. I am planning on googling its meaning and purpose. But what I did see in this book was the makings of a classic novel. If Joyce wouldn't have been so lazy and used these characters he developed in a plot of some kind. Still, there were flashes of brilliance.
    • 4/5
      No niin, tulipahan sekin luettua. Ihan tosissani olin suunnitellut jättää tämän hirviön selättämisen jonnekin eläkepäiville, mutta lopulta en voinut vastustaa kiusausta. Mitähän tästä nyt sanoisi... sata vuotta kirjan ilmestymisestä, en tunne irlantia nyt enkä tuntenut sata vuotta sitten, Saarikosken käännös tekee kuulemma paljon omia tulkintoja, joten luultavasti 95 % kirjan (piilo)viesteistä meni minulta ohi. Monissa lukuohjeissa toistui viesti: älä lue mitään ohjeita, sen kun vaan luet ja suhtaudut kirjaan huumorilla. Tein näin, ja lopulta tämä oli minulle aika kivuton prosessi. Lueskelin kirjaa sängyssä ennen nukahtamista, ja olisiko 6 viikkoa kestänyt tämä leppoisa lueskelu. Osa luvuista oli minulle täyttä hölynpölyä, mutta onneksi loppua kohti parani. Nautin erityisesti toiseksi viimeisestä luvusta, jossa hypertarkka kerronta tavoitti aivan uskomattomia sfäärejä. Nauroin välillä ääneen, mikä on minulle harvinaista. Annan urakkaan ryhtyville ohjeeksi: älä mieti liikaa, älä yritä ymmärtää (läheskään) kaikkea, jatka lukemista. Juonella tai hahmoilla ei ole väliä, yritä eläytyä kulloiseenkin hetkeen. Minä lunttasin kulloisenkin luvun teemat, tekniikat ja antiikin vastineen netistä, ja koin sen helpottavan jollain tavalla.
    • 3/5
      I have been meaning to read this book for years, and I made a resolution to myself that I would tackle it at the end of this year. Well, in my entire life, I don't think that I ever said this, but this book defeated me. It is supposed to be a marvel of early 20th century literature, and is touted to arguably be the best English literature book ever written. I really tried, but I was totally lost from the first page. I persevered. I pushed and pushed far harder than I have ever done, but at about 30% of the way through, I just shut it, and put it away. I do admit the writing is incredible, and his symbolism and realism is off the charts, but I just couldn't seem to put it into any semblance of order in my mind. Perhaps I should have read this with a much younger brain than I have right now. Perhaps I should have done more research and read a Coles notes version or a summary to help me before I started. I'm not sure what would have helped me. It may just be a book that is written with subject matter that doesn't appeal to me. Who know, maybe reading it high on some kind of drug might have helped, but since I don't take drugs that option for trial is not open for me. Anyway, I came, I saw, but I sadly did not conquer this book. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and The Dubliners were great books, and I loved both of them. I'll leave my James Joyce experience to those two books, and sadly file this one away.
    • 5/5
      This book has a well deserved reputation as being a "difficult" read. And, yes that is true. It was not easy reading and it's a big book. Was it worth the perseverance? Well I think so....it has made an impact on me and the more that I read about Ulysses, the more I realise, the impact that Joyce, and this book in particular, had on subsequent English literature. I'd put off reading it for years though I do recall "speed reading" it whilst at University. (I was into speed-reading at the time but think I retained little more than it was about an Irishman walking around a city in Ireland). This time, I have read it much more slowly and I also have a lifetime of reading and experience behind me ....plus some fluency in Spanish and experience in living in Spain so some of the references (eg to ex pat living in Gibraltar) have a bit more meaning for me. One has to approach the book with a grain of salt because the introduction has a quote from Joyce: "I've put 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". And many times I felt that Joyce was just experimenting with us (the readers) to see just how far he could push things. One also gets the impression that he wrote it in bursts with a whole section drafted like a play...and another section (really very clever) being the long soliloquy by Molly Bloom. And yet another section being the inside of a brothel. I got the same sort of feeling from bursts of text in "Good as Gold" by Joseph Heller and from"Moby Dick" where the author wanders off on long side-narratives about whales, or Nantucket etc. .....that they were on a bit of a roll and it didn't matter if this was smoothly integrated into the whole text.True to his word, Joyce has put lots of sly references and innuendoes into his text. I didn't realise until I read the book that Harold Bloom is Jewish. His Jewishness seems disguised early in the book but becomes more pronounced as the book goes on. And, in fact, it is these clever innuendos that captivates one. It's a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle...section by section...finding that you "get" the allusion or know the reference. You can't escape admiration for Joyce's command of English and his facility with words and his descriptive power. And even the plot roughly hangs together even if it keeps being interlaced with other fragments earlier in the book. I hadn't realised that it was banned in the USA as a depraved and immoral work and, in fact, I'd read most of it before finding this out...and was surprised. I guess that we have become more open to sexually explicit material and these scenes made little impact on me ...though I can see that they would have offended an more prudish segment of society in earlier times. I was asked, would I recommend it? And I said yes. Though you have to be prepared for a "commitment to read". Not an easy read. Am I a better person for reading it? Almost certainly NO.......though I feel my mind has been opened up to many literary devices.I once wrote a one act Play that was produced and entered into a competition in regional Australia...where it received complimentary reviews. But I included some stream of consciousness material into the play. When I was writing it I just wrote in the things I could hear going on around me at that moment.....the sound of footsteps outside my window, the distant sound of voices; the rattle of a doorknob and so-forth. Two things amazed me about this.....the first was that very strong opinions emerged from the actors/producer about the "meaning" of the words and their profundity. When I pointed out that they were not especially meaningful I was told that I didn't understand how profound the phrases were.......like I was the instrument of god writing the text but oblivious to its "real" meaning. I found this extraordinary and it made me realise how gullible people were in general. The second thing that amazed me was what happened when they came to produce the play. I had written two concurrent streams of consciousness speech...both overlapping so that the audience could only pick up snatches from both.....thus leaving them partly mystified. However, my enthusiastic players insisted on each person speaking in turn so the "import" of the words was not lost on the audience. I can see why Joyce was confident that his words would keep the professors arguing for centuries. Will I now go on to try Finnegan's Wake? Probably not. That just seems a bridge too far. Has it had an impact on me. Well yes. It certainly has.I give it five stars. An impressive and important work.
    • 2/5
      The most surprising thing about the book was how modern it seemed - all other books I've read from that period gave a false impression of how different people were but this reveals the lie and shows how familiar and easily relatable people living a century ago were.
      The story itself is not particularly interesting, being an extremely muddled (more about this in a moment) retelling of a day in a life of a 19th century advertising agent, a likeable but sad, serially cuckolded by his wife, timid man and a few other incidental characters. The conspicuously eventful day gives a unique general snapshot of life in Dublin which makes for a valuable record regardless of how fantastical the prose is.
      What I didn't appreciate was the style it's written in which I understand was a bit of an experiment and I don't think it proved successful given how the style hasn't not taken off all that much since. The signal-to-noise ratio is so low that you can read *anything* you want in the book and be right. It's a bit like the bible code - given enough material to work with you can prove it contains any message you want. And there is plenty of material here as almost every sentence is bordering on gibberish and ambiguity abounds and I don't think this technique really adds anything to the story. In the end it's almost not worth the effort. I'm sure the author enjoyed himself immensely writing this but from a reader's perspective I'd rather optimise for information retrieval. You could've captured all the information using more structured prose which can be beautiful too, given enough effort.
    • 5/5
      Reviewing Ulysses is like reviewing the bible, not just because--as you surely know--it encourages irrational hatred and irrational love, and should probably have more three star reviews than it has. More importantly and, if I do say so myself, insightfully, it's like reviewing the bible because the bible is not a book, it's a collection of books, many of which refer to earlier books in the sequence of books.

      So, I am suspicious of those who declare their undying love/hatred of everything in here, because that would mean loving/hating an awful lot of stuff. I read the book as a snotty teenager, and 'loved' everything, almost certainly because it made me feel so full of snot. I re-read it in my twenties and got kind of bored with some things. I just finished reading it properly for the first time (i.e., I had some idea of what was going on) and realized that my feelings could be parsed:

      i) I hate Joyce's stream of consciousness. I hate its fake difficulty, the fact that in this book it approaches pure form, devoid of any content that's even remotely interesting. I do not care, Leopold Bloom, about your thoughts on astronomy. I do not care, Leopold Bloom, to listen to you ponder gastronomy.

      ii) I love Joyce's parodies in the second half of the book.

      So, I imagine Joyce's writing process running like this: "I'm going to write the fuck out of Dublin and revolutionize literature by writing Dublin the way we *really* experience it, yeah... boy, I'm going to stick it to those people who said I'd never amount to anything... wow, this is getting pretty dull... nope, I'm bored. Let's throw some newspaper headlines in there and make it much funnier... nope, still bored. What about a good philosophical argument... nope, I'm no good at that. Whatever, it can stay. But it sure was nice to have more than one person involved. I wonder if I can do lots of people. Yes. Yes I can. That was cool. Let's try again. Nice. Maybe I can try out a new story-teller, story-tellers are unintentionally funny. Yes, that was funny. Also funny: bad books. Also funny: all books. Hell with it, I'll write a play that anticipates most of the twentieth century in literature... wow, I really am pretty good, that's a relief. To prove it I'll write the worst seventy pages in the history of world literature, only I'll be doing it intentionally... damn, that is *horrible*. How to wrap this up? How about a catechism and some really long sentences that will call into doubt all the excellence that I've stuffed in between the argument and the end? Perfect."

      I look forward to re-reading it in my forties, when I will violently disagree with my 30-something self, rail against my immaturity and bemoan my inability to really feel the pain of Leopold Bloom.

      **********************************

      Now, a word about editions. I read the annotated edition, from Declan Kiberd. It is perhaps the most egregiously bad edition possible, except for the text, which is easy to read, and the margins, which are wide and allow for your own notes. Kiberd's commentary is horrific on almost every level. He makes 'difficult' mistakes (e.g., directing the reader to Plato when he should be directing the reader to Aristotle). He makes simple mistakes (e.g., telling the reader the wrong time for Boylan and Molly's humping). He distorts the book in an attempt to make Joyce a great mind.

      This is a genuine problem for Joyce scholars, who like to pretend that Joyce was super-educated and really erudite and just fantastically smart. He was not. Joyce was moderately well read, and pretty sharp. Do not confuse him with Robert Musil or Ezra Pound. Those guys were *smart*. But Joyce, like Shakespeare, doesn't need the smarts because he is a beautiful-word-producing guy. His sentences, when they're not Stream of consciousness or pretending to be other people's sentences, are gloriously perfect. Of course, that sort of thing can't be analyzed in a classroom. Hence the Joyce industry turns Joyce into some kind of Derrida/Swift/Kristeva/bell hooks, hundreds of years ahead of his time, capable of intuiting precisely the politics of the late twentieth century.

      Except he's not. He's kind of a shit head.

      Kiberd's editorial work gets one star. One of the worst Penguins ever. The design, of course, is still amazing.

      Far better are the annotations in the Oxford World's Classics edition, which are a) accurate and b) not quite as patronizing. On the downside, the text is the unreadable though historically cool 1922 text.
    • 2/5
      Well, what else do you do in lockdown but try to read something Difficult and Improving?I'm sorry. I know it makes me a heathen. And it's not that I don't understand seeing deeply into human thoughts and dwelling on the richness of a single day. But really. Paragraphs were invented for a good reason. Punctuation was invented for a good reason. I am prepared to admit that it may be me not being clever enough for the book rather than any failings in the book, but I didn't really enjoy spending 900 pages not actually sure what was going on or what the point was. I guess I could spend another year of my life studying it until I understood it better. But I think I might read a book with an actual story instead.
    • 1/5
      Never again
    • 5/5
      6stars? 100? My favorite book? Kinda. The book I've read the most? Definitely. This is a book you can read 10, 20 times and get something new out of it each time. There are dozens of books written about this book, and they add something too, but the thing itself is (really) thoroughly enjoyable. Still shocking in form after all these years, this is as good as a novel can be.
    • 5/5
      Oh, that, "apathy of the stars." I am wistful and amazed.

      P.S. I have since read texts by Julian Rios and Enrique Vila-Matas who devoted novelistic approaches to Ulysses that ultimately steer the reader back to Bloom and Dedalus. I know of no other groundswell that continues to percolate and excite.
    • 4/5
      Inside the cover of this Second Hand copy a previous owner has written "June 2013, Got to page 12 Only". In some way it is the ultimate literary critique.I first read Joyce's book as a callow youth in my first year at Uni: Couldn't get into it - a way too intellectual, too self-indulgently, unleashing that 'stream of consciousness' prose style for my patience & understanding in that era of my life.Bought & read a copy in my thirties (decades ago) - it made much more sense, but there were still whole passages of Joyce's lyrical gallivanting with the English language that still had me perplexed & irritated.So, here am I (retired, time to take an in-depth, considered view on the alleged masterpiece) and read its 680 pages: Verdict - it's a damn clever piece of writing that really stretches the boundaries of word-play and its visionary erudition challenges almost every concept of what constitutes a literary novel - Joyce is extremely talented & this tome about one day bristles with extraneous vivid idiosyncratic bouts of words in scenes that need the most intense concentration to make sense of them: Is all that effort worthwhile? Is it genius at work?I'm not clever enough to make a judgement: I do know it figures in the top25 of most 'great' literature lists - BUT, for me it doesn't make my personal top50 'great reads' & there I suppose is something of the difference between the literary critics and the much wider, less intellectual readership of novels - if a reader struggles to make head or tail with many of the passages then that is NOT a 'great' read and nor is it necessarily an important literary read.James Joyce's Ulysses can be judged, I suspect, as TOO CLEVER BY HALF for many of us!
    • 4/5
      This is an experimental novel for it’s time that follows a Dublin school teacher, Stephen Daedalus through the events of June 16th, 1904. It is a pretty ordinary day. The cast of characters is large, with Molly Bloom and her husband Leopold dwelt on quite thoroughly. To sum up this is a major classic of English literature, and quite fun to read. First Published February 2, 1922.inished January 18th, 1971.
    • 4/5
      I signed up for a lecture on how to enjoy reading Ulysses, and eagerly bought the book. I decided to start reading a few pages before the lecture....got to page 60 (of 933) and was notified that the seminar was cancelled! Nonetheless, I decided to proceed without professional help.The novel takes place over a single day as we follow Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dadelus on their meanderings in Dublin. There isn't much plot; the book is a character study of Bloom, modeled after Odysseus, and also an exploration of writing techniques to show how different ways of telling a story change the perspective of the reader and the characters themselves. It was more enjoyable than I'd expected and, several days having passed since I finished it, I am still coming to appreciate aspects of Leopold Bloom's character that I may have missed. Hard to rate....it's a masterpiece of style for sure, but sometimes confusing and so long!
    • 2/5
      "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are portals of discovery."This novel has a remarkably simple story. It traces the paths of two characters on a single day in 1904 Dublin. Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged, Jewish man and Stephen Daedalus, a young intellectual.Bloom spends the day in the knowledge that his wife, Molly, is probably spending her day at home entertaining her lover. He spends the morning attending the funeral of a friend who had died suddenly whilst Stephen in contrast, spends his morning teaching before moving on to a newspaper office, a public library and finally a maternity ward where the two men's paths cross. Stephen invites Bloom to join him and some friends on a drunken spree, visiting a notorious brothel along the way and ends with Bloom inviting him back to his house, where they spend a number of hours talking and drinking coffee.In the final chapter, Bloom slips back into bed with his wife, Molly, and we get a final monologue from her point of view. This book is a notoriously difficult read and in fact resides in number 1 position on Goodreads '100 most difficult books to finish list'. It is not it's length, nearly 700 pages in my case, but Joyce's writing style that makes it so much hard work. In fact I was tempted on more than one occasion to abandon it. Firstly it is largely written in a stream-of-consciousness manner which whilst allowing the author to portray a unique perspective on the events, it also requires a fair bit of concentration and perseverance. But Joyce isn't content with finishing there. He also employs several other narrative and linguistic techniques. For example, he employs phonic representation in one chapter whilst another is laid out like a play. Joyce is trying to show is that there are more than one way to tell a story. The final chapter returns to the stream-of-consciousness process and is virtually devoid of any punctuation marks.Ulysses's experimental literary structure makes it a powerful but also incredibly taxing piece of work and whilst I am glad that I finally got around to reading I cannot in truth say that I particularly enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      I started off thinking Ulysses was a pile of incoherent drivel, even though I'd never got past the first page. At 20 I would sit in the uni bar getting pissed and slagging off literary types and lecturers who mentioned it (some of them were pretentious posers; some of them weren't). At 30 I decided to put up or shut up by actually reading it so that I could explain why it was incoherent drivel. The result was that I was drawn into it and have read it five times cover-to-cover. Like a lot of challenging literature, it requires a bit of life experience to get into.The funniest bit in 'Ulysses' is when he's browsing a second hand book store for a book for his wife. As nice as she is, Bloom obviously knows she's not really on his intellectual/reading level. He decides to look for the kind of romance, Mills&Boon, type books for her. In the whole novel of course, the narrative style has it that the description of action, his thoughts, what he's reading, and his speech are all rolled together in the same syntax. So it's funny when he comes across a book, flicks to a random page and it says something like 'and she wore her finest gowns for him, she would do anything, for Raoul', and he just pisses himself, deciding there and then:“This is it. This is the book. This one.”Then a few pages later, the quote crops up again in his mind (much like things come back to us after a while when doing something completely unrelated) and he laughs about it again. A very interesting outline of the psychological process.Random thoughts:- Interestingly enough, Joyce was very influenced in on the porno-lit side, by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz. Joyce was a diagnosed schizo, which disease, at the beginning, made for one of the world's great Kustwerke, Ulysses, but in its way-out stages made for his garbled nonsense, "Finnegans Wake", as well. There is, really, too much of a good thing. Too much mouse running up your clock, jumbles up your hickorydickory beyond comprehension;- To me "Ulysses" is still the #1 laugh-out-loud novel of all time, worth every minute of effort---and the best critical intro is still Ellmann's relatively small but high-impact "Ulysses on the Liffey." Read that first and you'll instantly enjoy 90% of the tough parts. Still laughing about the Irishman dragged away for setting a cathedral on fire. "I'm bloody sorry I did it," says he, "but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was in there."- How could you not love Leopold Bloom? He talks to his cat. He eats with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, which "give to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine". He wonders if it would be possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub. He surreptitiously observes the marble goddesses in the lobby of the National Museum to see if they have anuses. He buys pornographic novels for his wife, masturbates on a public beach without getting caught, and picks the winner at Ascot without even trying. The most endearing character in all literature.
    • 1/5
      The life of the everyman in a single day in Dublin is the basic premise of James Joyce’s Ulysses, yet this is an oversimplification of the much deeper work that if you are not careful can quickly spiral down into a black hole of fruitless guesswork and analysis of what you are reading.Joyce’s groundbreaking work is a parallel to Homer’s The Odyssey though in a modernist style that was defined by Joyce in this novel. Though the primary character is Leonard Bloom, several other important secondary characters each take their turn in the spotlight but it is Bloom that the day revolves around. However any echoes of Homer are many times hidden behind Joyce verbosity and stream-of-conscious writing that at times makes sense and at times completely baffles you. Even with a little preparation the scale of what Joyce forces the reader to think about is overwhelming and frankly if you’re not careful, quickly derails your reading of the book until its better just to start skimming until the experience mercifully ends.While my experience and opinion of this work might be lambasted by more literary intelligent reviewers, I would like to caution those casual readers like myself who think they might be ready to tackle this book. Read other modernist authors like Conrad, Kafka, Woolf, Lawrence, and Faulkner whose works before and after the publication of Ulysses share the same literary movement but are not it’s definitive work.
    • 3/5
      I went into this book thinking it was going to be a complete slog and I would hate it. But honestly, I wanted to know why was considered a classic. I love Ireland and this is one of the most famous pieces of literature from the country. I think I built it up as being so difficult and horrible in my mind that the reality isn’t quite as scary. Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely a tough ride. There were sections I loved and others I really struggled with. Joyce is undeniably talented; the chapter where he walks the reader through the entire history of the English language proves that. But his style isn’t my favorite and I frequently felt lost in his ramblings.I can’t say enough about the importance of pairing the audio version with the print. I read it that way and it helped so much! Instead of fighting through every single line, I hear a lyrical Irish voice reading the conversations to me. It brings them alive. When one person rambles on about some idea, it feels like I’m listening to a long-winded friend. Then I go back to the print version and find passages that I loved. I look at the layout of each chapter because the styles are unique. I wasn’t a fan of every single chapter and of course it is a strange book with a lot of meandering and stream of consciousness thought, but I was expecting that. I wasn’t expecting the beautiful language or profound reflections of life and death. I particularly love the references and discussions of Shakespeare’s work in chapter 9.There’s a lot of crass humor and sexual descriptions, so I'm not shocked that it was so frequently banned in the past. But each of those sections gives the reader a deeper view into the characters, both how they see themselves and how others see them. I'm also both impressed and often overwhelmed by how many different styles Joyce uses in his writing. Sometimes his parodying something, sometimes it fits a new narrator's point of view, etc. But it always keeps the reader on their toes. The supplemental material in my book explains some of the background on the censorship of the book and includes a letter from Joyce to his Random House publisher. It also includes the monumental 1933 decision to stop people from banning the book in America. The ruling changed the way censorship was approached in our country.I absolutely loved some of the comments from Judge M. Woolsey, the man who made the decision. To me, his summary of the book captures so many of my feelings perfectly. “Ulysses is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable to read a number of other books which have now become it’s satellites. The study of Ulysses is, therefore, a heavy task. The reputation of Ulysses in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written.It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake.Joyce has attempted — it seems to me, with astonishing success — to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.”------------------------------------The very final episode of the book is a crazy onslaught of thoughts from Bloom’s wife Molly’s point of view. She flits from thing to the next with no real pattern. She is just thinking, so her thoughts are unfiltered. It’s oddly refreshing even if it’s hard to follow. How many of us have had the same thing happen as we randomly think about our day? I could immediately relate. Joyce’s honesty his characters really struck me in the final few chapters. He writes about Bloom’s flaws and fetishes in detail, something that just wasn’t done before. Yet by the close of the book you feel a bit hopeful about his marriage. There was something powerful about that. No matter how gross or strange Bloom was, he might have found his equal in his wife Molly. BOTTOM LINE: Reading Ulysses was an experience. I struggled with it. I was blown away by the lovely language at times and at others I was completely weirded out. I can’t really compare it to anything else and that alone makes it a unique book. I am so glad I read it and I also don’t think I will ever read it again! “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and one livid final flame. What’s left of us then?” “Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute.”"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves". “Still you learn something. See ourselves as others see us.”“Life, love, voyage round your own little world.”