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Title: Ulysses (Gabler Edition) by James Joyce, Hans Gabler ISBN: 0-394-74312-1 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 May, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (310 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Mind-Boggling
Comment: This is the second time I've read "Ulysses". It is a 'hard read' even for me, a good reader; my consistant criticism against Joyce is that he intentionally works to hide his arguments, his characters, and his thematic material behind a mind-boggling wall of style in "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake", though his earlier works are quite approachable.
Too bad. The book is actually quite deeply human, and funny as hell. Bloom is a decent, bungling 'hero', a human like all of us. He's got his strengths, his weaknesses. I see him wandering flat footed in his black slacks like Charlie Chaplin through the crazy, jangling streets of Dublin. The night-town scene is a burlesque with a keenly penetrating, humanistic mind firmly at the helm. The barroom brawl a riot, especially with the dual narrators; the uneducated clod of low intelligence, and the archaic, mythic intonations of the blabber mouthed rhetoritician.
He muses on the wonder of existance; how we, living, dead breaths breath. How man and woman come together, making love and making babies. How, ultimately, we are all connected, umbilically to the past through our connections with the Tribe of Man.
"God loves everybody," says the comic, absurd voice in the barroom scene. It is funny. We grin, chuckle at the absurd voice. But it is true. It is Joyce's central theme.
Unfortunately, what he's mostly done is kept a ton of scholars busy writing 'commentaries' for a book that is revelant, all too human, and funny as hell... Perhaps even more hillarious than "Catch-22"... but that's debatable.
I give it five stars because I happen, through the graces of a good education, to be able to understand it. It is towering and complex. If you're willing to work, go for it. It will take you some time; took me two solid weeks of work. Still, when you're through, there's a sense of mental satisfaction. You feel like you've solved a great logic puzzle. However, don't just read it for themes; try to recreate the scenes and dialog in your mind. This isn't easy, granted. Joyce's style makes it tough.. but do! The rewards are immeasurable. Once you see these characters as real, solid characters, not as abstractions, the lights begin to shine, and you understand how Joyce sees the mythic/ religious shining through our chaotic, jumble of the modern world.
Rating: 5
Summary: THE greatest novel of last century--sans peur, sans reproche
Comment: The lovely, talented Erica Jong confessed to having skipped large parts of this momentous work, yet told people it was her favorite book. Hemingway did it a similar injustice--Ulysses deserves to be read, reread, and studied as infinitum. Joyce devoted eight years of hard work to it, and nothing like its stream-of-consciousness narrative has been seen since. Scholars take note--Faulkner never read this book!
Space prevents me from gushing the way I would like to, but look for the passage in which Stephen Dedalus and Poldy Bloom are getting blasted in Dublin as a baby is being born above them, and Joyce's language begins with the Angleish of Beowulf and travels through time, touching downe with Chaucer and Sir Thomas Browne, among others. In truth, it's hard to believe that a single living human being actually sat down and created this out of nothing; to my poetic heart, it has always seemed as sacred and immutable as the sea or its stars...
Rating: 5
Summary: A Light and Airy World
Comment: I've read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and now Ulysses. One apparent source of the joy of reading these for me is that all of the characters are good, sympathetic people, even when they do petty things. It is a world full of light and air, humor and optimism. Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, Leopold and Molly Bloom and all the rest are more-or-less normal humans living normal lives even though somewhat oppressed by poverty, the Church, and the English, and of course themselves. Ulysses has none of the violence, darkness, ugliness, cynicism, villiany, and perversion that is found in so much of modern literature. The most dramatic and upsetting thing that happens is when Stephen gets his hand whacked in school (in Portrait). Even Stephen's alchoholic irresponsible father is painted somewhat empathetically.
The events in Ulysses are so prosaic and quotidian that Joyce had to dress up his work with high-fallutin prose and verbal pyrotechnics. Otherwise the work would just be too bland. The reader can skate over most of the obscure rambling parts or go back and endlessly ponder them. I ignore most of the references, and I'm not too taken with the Homeric and Biblical symbolism. The book can be read on many different levels. I admit I loved it--but I would recommend reading Dubliners and Portrait first. I would also recommend visiting Dublin if you can swing it, and especially Howth, which figures prominently in Ulysses. Howth is a charming village and vast, dramatic, wild, high headland with sweeping views of the Irish Sea, Bailey Lighthouse way below, and Dublin city center in the distance--all within the city limits of Dublin. Last stop on the DART.
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Title: Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford ISBN: 0520067452 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: October, 1989 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce, Seamus Deane ISBN: 0142437344 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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Title: The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses by Harry Blamires ISBN: 0415138582 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by James Joyce, John Bishop ISBN: 0141181265 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Dubliners by James Joyce ISBN: 0486268705 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 May, 1991 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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