Ulysses

What can I say about such a mind-blowing book? I could barely decide how many stars I would give it since it divided my opinion so. No wonder it's so controversial. There were a few chapters I absolutely hated (Scylla and Charbidis anyone?) and I thought I would end up disliking Joyce too for inflicting some of it and being such an arrogant know everything at times. Yet I find myself admiring him a great deal and wanting to re-read the book at some point if only to try and make some more sense of it. The technique astonishes, but I can't give it a glowing review because frankly I didn't like it that much. It grated in parts. Maybe that's why it's so revered though, and why I wanted to read it again, because it challenges in a way that very few other books manage.

I'd like to read it with some proper guides handy so that I don't have to keep flipping to the end notes. Nevertheless, I've found some good guides online.

Anyway, it got three stars in the end. I won't be going around boasting I've read it or attending the next Bloom's day, but I am glad to have read it and to have finished it, as I think if I'd given up half-way through I wouldn't have ever read it or finished it in the future. Glad to have read it in the version I did as well, the free ebook was apparently broken! Also, it had been edited. I know the text I read was full of a lot of mistakes (it was the 1922 version), but I'd rather that than something that has been edited in too heavy-handed a way.

“Grant me, Lord, the courage and the joy / I need to scale the summit of this day”, wrote Jorge Luis Borges of Ulysses.[1] Both are needed, courage and joy, since the most challenging works of literature should be enjoyable in their difficulty. When it comes to Joyce's great work, a colossus among the colossi, it's quite impossible to write about the reading experience succinctly, to the point, and well. I'm trying, though.In the words of Jeri Johnson in her excellent Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Ulysses, “Joyce's Book has so colonized twentieth-century Anglophone culture that we can never now enter it for the first time,” [2] also that “Jennifer Levine suggests imagining that this book is called Hamlet to ‘regain a sense of it as a text brought into deliberate collision with a powerful predecessor'.” [3]Indeed, it's rather impossible to just rush into the work headlong without the foreboding sensation that one is about to embark on a journey that's difficult and full of so many intertextual riddles that there are several volumes that simply trace all the references. But this is not how I've enjoyed reading Joyce. I think the need to find out specific meanings and references will come later, but for me the best way to exprience the work has been to discard all theories, annotations and commentaries. Their turn will come later, if at all. At some points I wholly forgot the Greek Ulysses aspect of it altogether, not a bad thing at the slightest. Because, truth be told, this is a massively entertaining book. Funny and witty. Yes, at times quite challenging, but isn't all of literature? It's our investment that makes things the way they are, most of the time.So, without delving too deeply into the abyss of literary criticism, I can only say that reading Joyce without any commentary than one's own is extremely gratifying. I have the beautiful Orchises edition – it's a facsimile edition of the first edition, and it's among the most beautiful books I own. It's nice to read, and unobtrusive.Is it a difficult novel, then? I think we will all be better off when we realize that such questions, ultimately, serve no great purpose. If the answer is “yes”, does it really dilute one's yearning to read it? Does it strengthen it? And should it? If the answer is “no”, what difference does it make? For me, parts of it are more demanding than others, yet when I eventually revisit it, they might not be. “See for yourself” is my friendly advice, and, above all, decide for yourself. But if there is anything I'm more certain of saying in terms of Joyce's work, it is to echo the wonderful and oft-quoted sentiment by Jorge Luis Borges that it is “rereading, not reading” what counts. Let's forget for a moment the hype and the fixation on difficulty, and instead try to read books like they were great friends: not only worthy of attention but so close to us that they know us better than we might think.I like reading Ulysses, but equally I love listening to it. There is something about Joyce's language and his way of expressing things that lends beautifully to oral performance. His words float, soar and swerve, and I think we are incredibly lucky to have an audiobook of the work that is without equal. The version I refer to is the one released by Naxos in 2008. Narrated by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan, it is an unabridged recording (27 hours and 21 minutes) that has not only been expertly read, it's actually recorded and mixed wonderfully, and it's amongst the best audiobooks I've ever encountered.Also, the [b:Complete Poems and Selected Letters 75493 Complete Poems and Selected Letters Hart Crane https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309200646l/75493.SY75.jpg 24498213] of Hart Crane's complete poetry and selected letters has, in his correspondence with a friend, a fascinating contemporary perspective on the Ulysses ban in the United States, and how the book was ultimately successfully smuggled from Paris.Endnotes:[1] Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce in In Praise of Darkness (1969), collected in The Sonnets (Penguin Books, 2010), p. 125.[2] Jeri Johnson, Introduction, in James Joyce: Ulysses (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. x.[3] ibid., xi. Johnson quotes from Levine's essay Ulysses, in Derek Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 131–32.23 February,2o14