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Title: Ulysses by James Joyce, Jim Norton, Marcella Riordan ISBN: 9-6263401-1-8 Publisher: Naxos Audio Books Pub. Date: September, 1994 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 3 List Price(USD): $26.98 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.87 (305 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An Incredible Literary Journey
Comment: June 16th, 1904 in Dublin - a city under British rule and starting to try and shrug off the weight of the colonial oppression. On this day Joyce sets his "heroes" (heroes that only Joyce could create), Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) and Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus), on their own odysseys through Dublin's streets. Along the way we get a catalog of minor disappointments and victories, major literary experiments and a reading experience to truly last a lifeline.
Stephen Dedalus, the hero from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, is the young student, the educated, literary and artistic individual somewhat based on Joyce himself. Leopold Bloom is the older, cynical 20th century everyman, in search of a son (where Stephen is, to some extents, missing a father). They make their individual journeys around Dublin that day, finally coming together in a chance meeting and then becoming friends.
If you are after a riveting story, you won't find it here - the previous paragraph somes it up! What we get is to walk in these (and other people's) shoes for a day. We experience their small successes - an idle flirtation perhaps; we are with them as they realize some minor disappointment. Joyce termed these experiences ephiphanies and, to some extent, that's what Ulysses is - many, many iter-related and multi-layered ephiphanies.
We also feel part of Dublin the city and Ireland the country. It's difficult looking back now after 80 years of home rule, with its successes and failures, what it must have looked like then unsure of what the future would bring. Joyce gives us a divided picture - we see the "citizen", the nationalistic and stubborn individual who desires freedom at any cost; we see those who are staunchly royalist and who support (flirt with in the case of some of the women) the British soldiers. Joyce's picture is no one-dimensioned protestant-Catholic division either. This element of the book has great interest in it's own right.
Ulysses has parallels from Homer's "The Odyssey". The correspondence from chapter to chapter is highly selective. Some chapters use purely literary techniques to make a parallel (in particular "The Sirens") where others have more pointed comparisons. You do not need to be familiar with The Odyssey to get something out of this book. Familiarity with Joyce's earlier works - Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man - is very useful, as is an understanding of Shakespeare's Hamlet. References to all of these abound.
What you will probably also need is a guide. I used Harry Blamires's "The New Bloomsday Book" and I would seriously recommend using it or something similar on a first reading. Joyce's writing in this book is wonderful but it can be very very difficult. Having someone hold your hand on the journey helps you get much more out of it.
The style of writing changes throughout the book; Joyce was experimenting with literary techniques to help tell the tale and give us insight into his character. Some of these are very successful - some are rather inpenetrable. In particular the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter is very hard-going in parts!
However, unlike some other literary works, Ulysses is always fun. You might find you get the most out of some of it if you read it aloud (or imagine yourself doing so) because much of the work is highly poetical. For the final chapter - the only one told from a female perspective - the heavy stream of consciousness deserves to be read in a gallop, letting the words flow over you.
Joyce wrote this seminal work over a period of seven years and, at times, it felt it would take me that long to finish it. It's certainly not something to embark upon if you won't be able to devote considerable time to it. With so many great books to be read, you may wonder why you should devote this amount of time and energy on a single book. In this case the answer is because it is a unique, wonderful and life-enhancing experience.
Rating: 5
Summary: Exhaustive, exhausting, rewarding
Comment: It's great fun to observe the rancorous--at times vicious--debate this book has engendered among and between its admirers and detractors. Whatever else might be said of "Ulysses," it's clear that everyone who has read it (and even those who have not) has an opinion about it. But for those who are leery of beginning a book of this size and complexity without some guarantee that it is as "GREAT" as its admirers proclaim it to be, I offer these words of advice: take it slowly, don't get overly bogged down by the unorthodox style, and make a diligent effort to understand what Joyce is trying to say. It's easy to treat his ramblings as the workings of a drunk or inscrutable genius, and to "force" one's way through the book without getting anything out of it. I read "Ulysses" for the first time last summer, without annotations and with only a brief on-line summary of each chapter as my guide, and I'm sure I missed an awful lot. But I loved "Ulysses" nonetheless. The inventive style, the devious puns, the poetic prose--all of it amounts to a reading experience that will reward the patient and persistent with a tremendous intellectual and aesthetic (if not emotional) payoff. While it is not my favorite book of all time, I agree with those who say it's the most important novel of the twentieth-century. It so completely altered the literary landscape of its day that, 80 years after its publication, its effects are still being felt (but not always acknowledged) in the works of contemporary writers.
If you want to read this book only because you've been told it was "great" or to tell others you read it (and thus sound "intelligent"), pick up the Cliffs Notes and save yourself some time. If you honestly want to understand *why* this book is frequently cited as the best of the twentieth century, dig in. I plan to revisit "Ulysses" myself in the not-so-distant future.
Rating: 1
Summary: Pretense
Comment: Thats all "fancy writing" is. That and snobbery. For all the great style modern authors may use, they are jsut using it to cover up a total lack of substance. Read a Tolstoy, a Manzoni, a Twain,a dostoyevsky. THey had profoudn things to say and said them simply enough(ok not so much dostoevsky).
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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: 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: 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: 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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