Reading 1001 discussion

I did it! It took me a whole year, but I finished it.
Now what do I say about it?
It's the work of a mad genius, clearly. A mad genius who has read every single book in the Western canon up until the time of writing and has decided to incorporate quotes and obscure references to at least half of them. Not just that, but he also goes through every writing style and literary technique in the history of the English language (on one memorable occasion all in one chapter/episode). And then there are the neologisms and the Latin and the Hiberno-English, the endless lists, the political history, the detailed information of tidal waters, and the astrological state of the night sky.

I generally have two approaches when I review literature: Did I enjoy it? Did I learn something from it?

Well, did I?

No. Yes. Sort of. Maybe.

There is plenty to learn. Too much. I have at least a passing familiarity with the Western canon, and with other parts of Joyce's authorship, and I was hopelessly lost in the details. You could probably spend a lifetime tracking down and checking both the factual information and the literary references. Considering the over 300 pages of footnotes my edition contains, it is clear that several people already have. I feel no inclination to follow suit.

So did I enjoy it? Or at least appreciate it? I enjoyed parts. But Joyce does go on. Even episodes I started out genuinely entertained by, went on for twice as long as my attention span and interest could last. At the end of each episode I was dazed and fed up and put the book away for a week or five. I appreciate the genius, the vision, the knowledge, and the sheer chutzpah of writing something as bonkers as this. But I can't really say that I liked it. It feels better to have read it than to read it.

But what about the story itself? Because there is a story to this. At least one. And frankly it is a fairly sad one. Leopold Bloom is going to a funeral, and then he spends the rest of the day and most of the night roaming the streets, shops, and pubs (and even a hospital) of Dublin. Not because he's depressed by the funeral, but because it reminds him of the funeral held for his infant son a decade ago, and because he's fairly certain that his wife is about to cheat on him and he doesn't want to go home and catch them in the act.

Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego, is also attending the funeral and roaming the streets. He is agonising over a previous funeral that he didn't attend, that of his mother. He also just got paid, and he has nowhere to be but plenty to say (as always). Their paths criss-cross and meet up and part, all over Dublin. Joyce apparently claimed you could reconstruct Dublin from the routes and info given in Ulysses. A tall claim, but I'm sure he wasn't far off. We run into several characters previously seen in Dubliners. We are exposed to a dreary amount of posturing, antisemitism, and misogyny. Although much of the misogyny is of a more allegorical type where they are actually complaining bitterly about Ireland. Still, they are, with minor exceptions, all men. And so I wondered, while Bloom trudged along, feeling sorry for himself, ogling women, reading a letter from a woman he's flirting with, touching himself at the sight of a young woman's knickers, and engaging in a spot of humiliation play in the red light district (although this last part might have been mostly in his imagination, I don't know, that whole episode was a theatre of the absurd - Kafka meets Monty Python). Anyway, I wondered, while he was skirting a fine line of (in)fidelity himself but not quite crossing over. What is Molly Bloom's side to the story? Is she really up to what old Poldy thinks she's up to? (It came as quite a surprise to me when I discovered that Bloom is only 38. I had him pegged at a good 10-15 years older. Different times indeed.)

At the end of the book, we do get Molly's side to the story. On fact, she gets the final word. We find out what she's been up to, and what she thinks her husband has been up to. It takes a bit of deciphering, because we get her thoughts as 30 pages of stream-of-consciousness, completely without punctuation. But we do find out. And I found it heart breaking. Molly and Leopold are both so terribly lonely in their marriage. The death of their son was the death of their marriage. He clearly still loves her, but has no idea how to show it or connect with her. She is desperate to be loved, but terrified of getting pregnant again. She is also mourning her lost youth (and she's only 34!) and struggling with the notion that her daughter is practically grown up. She's also so full of zest and longing for life, mixed in with bitterness and contempt. If ever there was a couple who should have called it quits years ago and given themselves, and each other, a chance to move on, it's the Blooms.

Yay!

You
DID
it!!!


Big congrats!! 🎉🥳👏🏻

You’re review is excellent, makes me kind of, sort of, think I might get through it one day. Oh, well who am I kidding, never gonna happen 😅

Congrats, great review.

Ulysses James Joyce was a quarterly read in 2016. My review. The book is the story of Leopold Bloom, a middle aged married man, father of one adult daughter who spends one day wandering around Dublin. We also meet Stephen Dedalus a young university graduate, want to be author and current educator of young men. Much of the story is told by internal dialogue (stream of consciousness) as the characters travel the streets of Dublin. It is really a story of paternity. Leopold thinks about his dead son. Stephen thinks about his conflicted relationship with his father and Leopold takes on a surrogate father relationship with Stephan. Other stories include infidelity of Bloom's wife Molly. If the story was only that simple. Joyce uses the book Odysseus to form the segments of the book and each segment is a whole new and sometimes not very enjoyable experience. I won't bother to describe because you can read Jen's review (excellent) or go through the questions and get an idea of each section but I agree that this book is best enjoyed if taken on as a project and not a reading experience. It takes work but it can be rewarding. I like the aspect of working at something. Reminds me of researching and studying which I enjoyed. I am glad I read the book. It would have been very controversial at the time with its sexual content (mostly just words) but it does not feel gratuitous like so many books. I give it 4 stars because I did enjoy it and I appreciated the genius of the author but I also felt that Joyce was also flaunting his intelligence towards the readers. The person who deserves 5 stars is the narrator of this audible work. Jim Norton did a splendid job of reading this book. It took work because you can't just read this book and know when to sing, when to give certain styles to the words. What a marvelous job. Marcella Riordan does the voice of Molly. A steady stream of consciousness without much pause or change. Marcella's part does nothing to endear you to Molly.
First Sentence: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Last words: unable to do this one as it would be the entire last chapter I am afraid…. but goes something like this
…..I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes

If you like puzzles and poetry, and are not really interested in reading a story, you might like this book, at least if you take a year and read a hundred pages per month, taking time to analyze and ponder every single line. If this text was a long lost key to the 'grand unified theory of everything', or the only available record on the history and culture of the lost city of Atlantis, such an undertaking could be quite rewarding, since spending that long trying to tease some sense out of a text makes sense where the text has such value. Otherwise, who in their right mind would bother wasting so much time on so much drivel just for a tale about a couple drunk, sexist men in Dublin wandering about town after a funeral?

So, did I enjoy this book? Nope. Would I recommend this book? Nope. Are there thousands of books more worth spending time on compared to this book? Absolutely. I occasionally enjoyed the nerd-factor of recognizing references to other stories, books and authors, and there are lots of these references, but this enjoyment never quite made up for the pointlessness of focusing so much energy on just trying to focus on the text for a few more pages without getting too bored and annoyed. Some classics are just not that good, and this is one of them.

I gave this book 1 star on Goodreads.

After being on my TBR for 3 years it was finally called- yay I guess. This as quite the momentous read to start the year off with and then only get 1 point for it lol. It feels great to finally get this giant of literature that is often considered a ‘must read’ or ‘best ever’ off my to-read list, and overall I did really enjoy and appreciate it and gave it 4 stars.

It was dense, and admittedly I didn’t comb the giant appendix to figure out every piece of symbolism in every part of the book, but still got a lot out of it. I’m sure there’s still far more to get, and apparently Joyce himself bragged to his wife that he put so much into this book that modern lit profs would be untangling this book forever- which he was right about.

The things I did get and like about this book were the parallels with the Odyssey (which I love and am disappointed is not on the list given some other epic poems are), and how they contribute to the theme of finding home/oneself in early 20th century Ireland. I like how the mirroring was also intentionally subverted in certain ways to emphasize certain themes (like Penelope’s chastity versus Molly’s infidelity). The scope of the book also allowed it to become a sampler for pretty much every modernist narrative device- which could have become obnoxious and muddled but I think actually worked overall here. There’s the section that is just questions and answers, the book itself is an example of intertextuality, there’s the POV shifts in the Nausicaa and Cyclops sections, the descent into surrealism from the Circe section, the full on stream of consciousness section Penelope, etc. Part of why I think it works is that they all serve a clear function about Bloom’s imaginings or state of mind, or perceptions of him, it doesn’t feel done just to be done.

The way the timescale (1 day) is so substantially paired back from the years of the original Odyssey is great and significant too. I felt like it really establishes this nice parallel about the epic in everyday life, and how on a micro level- with different monsters and forces against us- we all go on our own hero’s journey.

All of that being said, I thought this was a great book, but I think it does bring up the question of why it is so often considered the greatest novel of all time. Is it really in the things I didn’t read in the appendices? Does making something more complex really make it more superior? I wouldn’t say that it does- I think superiority can often in fact come from economy of language/content, the ability to say a lot with very little, or in successfully being able to make sure everyone understands and feels something as they are reading it. I feel like the contemporary/film equivalent of this is Christopher Nolan, where a lot of dudes who fancy themselves aficionados will say he is far superior to everyone else because of how complicated he makes the narrative structure of his films. I tend to think though that complexity has its place if it serves the message of the work, but does not itself put something above everything else.

So, in that line, I think this was a great piece of literature, but I don’t know that I would hold it up as the absolute pinnacle that many others have.

Pre-2016 review:

****

This was second attempt at reading this modernist masterpiece, and I made it through this time! My rating reflects my reading experience (a three-star) as well as the appreciation for Joyce's genius (definitely five-star). In short, we are following the tribulations of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Dublin on the 16th June 1904. The novel is divided in 18 episodes, which mirror the parts of Homer's Odysseus. If I can hazard a painting/photography comparison, it is almost as if you were visiting an exhibition assembling works of Dali, Picasso, Magritte, Bacon, Miro, Man Ray, all juxtaposed next to each other. You would need to spend some time to understand some of the meaning behind those works, while also trying to find links between these works, despite their various styles.

This is by no means an easy read. You must come prepared and with the expectation that it won't be easy. If you expect Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day or Mrs 'Arris goes to Paris, you shouldn't even start this book. The first three episodes, mostly through the stream-of-consciousness of Stephen Dedalus, are extremely hard, enough to make you give up altogether. But then Bloom is introduced, whose character is much more down-to-earth and easier to understand than the very cerebral and erudite Stephen. The following episodes, despite their various styles, are much easier to go through. There is another hurdle in The Oxen of the Sun, but after that, it becomes a much easier reading experience. The last three episodes were the most enjoyable to read, even Penelope through Molly's stream-of-consciousness, a 40-odd page marathon consisting of less than 10 sentences.

It is impossible to gain an understanding of everything that is going on in this novel, as there are so many jokes and references that probably only Joyce could understand. This being said, more can be gained by having access to a good reading guide (like Gifford's) or to the use of detailed explanatory notes (just like the edition I read, which uses a lot of material from Gifford). Also, this is a novel which should be re-read with the benefit of hindsight, in the sense that you would know how to prepare for it better for the next time.

Here's my piece of advice for those attempting this novel:

1- Preliminary reading: Homer's Odyssey is a must, this will enable you to understand some of the stylistic choices Joyce made for his episodes; all of Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, but also some of the lesser known plays; Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the Bible; some Aristotle and Plato; some history of Ireland, focusing on the late 19th century/beginning of 20th century.
2- Get a good edition with explanatory notes and/or a good reading guide (like Gifford), otherwise you will be quite lost.
3- Read it in bite-size pieces. I tried to limit myself to 25 pages per sitting, and it seemed to work. If you go for longer, you will probably get bored/irritated/lost. If needed, keep some back-up reading material to relieve the possible frustration.
4- Expect not to understand everything (very important), but expect to laugh at times and enjoy the bits that are clearer to understand (Bloom contains a fair few of these moments).