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This one is long, so here is my short review if you only have 10 seconds: I love it. Now we begin.

The used bookstore I frequent is run by a gregarious and erudite gentleman. My short visits are often anything but, where a “casual browse�� will turn into a discussion about literary criticism, Heidegger, childbirth, strip clubs in Des Moines, and anything and everything under the sun. Recently, for what must have been the 100th time, I asked him whether he had read Ulysses, and if so, what had he thought of it. This time, I finally took in the answer. He told me that he had read it, insofar as you could call the action of your eyes touching every word in a book “reading��. He said that he had picked up the book in the final years of high school and that he hadn’t taken in much. When I questioned his motives, he was honest: “hubris��. Fair enough.

These stories aren’t rare. Over and over again, you hear about the cautionary tales surrounding Ulysses. Sean Latham puts together a list of why you should read Ulysses (a list containing such items as “because it is there�� and “because it is a humane and intellectual challenge��), but even he can’t help saying that the most devoted Joyce scholars ask themselves this question from time to time. “Every year or so,�� he says, “news arrives of some iconoclast who dismisses the work as nonsense, condemns its complexity as elitist, or laments the way it has destroyed the fine traditions of the novel. Make no mistake, there is something to such grievances.�� More on this in a bit. I picked up Ulysses some time in February, being finally determined to read it. My intentions were in part hubristic, I have to be honest. Mostly, however, they were from curiosity. I wanted to continue my travels with Stephen Dedalus, the colourful cast of Dublin, and the variety of lenses through which these tales would be relayed. I suppose I didn’t think too much about a why when it was happening, but I knew that I wanted to. That was the first step. I got Stephen, initially. That was fine. But then the trapdoors opened up under me, throwing me into the lap of Leopold Bloom in a cart steered by Joyce with expert precision.



I will use the Homeric episode names to refer to specific sections of the book, despite some big names not being a fan of that practice (ahem, Nabokov; also more on that in a bit). Bloom’s episodes were filled with nothing but a pure, innocent, radiant energy that I could not integrate into my idea of a novel. I mean to say that I spent an inordinate amount of non-reading time thinking about his movement within the city, his way of life, and in turn, life in general. I was drawn to his vulnerability, his unwillingness to take moral shortcuts, and at the same time his defenceless fumbling into immoral situations (what is our opinion about masturbating on a beach? Hands up for immoral). To be sure, one cannot ignore episodes the like of Scylla and Charybdis, which is a monumental literary achievement in and of itself, but it’s hard to set those above Cyclops, Hades, Ithaca.



When looking back and looking at the historical narrative of the publication of Ulysses, we become nervous �� retrospectively. What a wild ride. Shakespeare and Company and Sylvia Beach need to have been a part of the Paris landscape at the right moment and the right time. They need to have met at the right party, to have hit it off, etc. etc. Thankfully, Joyce was humble enough in this meeting �� Kevin Birmingham mentions that Beach saw Joyce as a sensitive and vulnerable man with more than his fair share of fears on a long list �� including horses, heights, the ocean, and more than anything else, thunderstorms, the sound of thunder (which might sound something like Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk). He pronounced the name of the novel that he was writing “Oolissays��. He fought against the banning of his work (a history all to itself). I have done a tiny amount of research surrounding this novel so far, but certainly plan to do more. I cannot help but be fascinated with everything it has gone through (and perhaps will go through).

Back to my attempt at describing why I like this book. I spoke about Bloom. But I think that’s as much as I can do for a first reading. I have stuck to him like my rock, my safety. I am going to bring in the opinion of some great literary scholars to help me along. We can start with Jorge Luis Borges, who discussed the variety of viewpoints in the book as a point of attraction, saying that “conjecture, suspicion, fleeting thought, memories, lazy thinking, and the carefully conceived enjoy equal privilege in this book; a single point of view is noticeably absent��. “In Ulysses,�� he said, “there are sentences, there are paragraphs, that are not inferior to Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Browne.�� And perhaps the most Borgesian way of describing this book is the most apt way of describing it: “A total reality teems vociferously in the pages of Ulysses, and not the mediocre reality of those who notice in the world only the abstract operations of the mind and its ambitious fear of not being able to overcome death, nor that other reality that enters only our senses, juxtaposing our flesh and the streets, the moon and the well. The duality of existence dwells within this book, an ontological anxiety that is amazed not merely at being but at being in this particular world where there are entranceways and words and playing cards and electric writing upon the translucence of the night.��



It’s funny, really, all of this mayhem about the way the book is written. Joyce told Frank Budgen that although Ulysses and the Wake were filled with rich language and tough to crack nuts, what he meant to convey was ultimately quite simple. I agree. He also said that his fixation on style made Ulysses “an extremely tiresome book��. I disagree. We get so many novels about the ordinary anyway, why not present yours with a bit of flair? Does there need to be a reason? If anything, if it’s done well, the style may be the reason it sticks around in people’s mind, the point of impact for many.

The style is unique, that need not be repeated. Sometimes elements of the story seem to be absolute nonsense. The term “retrospective arrangement�� occurs several times in the novel, and recent analysts of the book seems to think that this alludes to to a third-party “arranger�� coming in and retrospectively arranging elements of plot, character, and narrative. Certainly this seems to echo with those of us who have made it out of the living nightmare that is the Circe episode. Oxen of the Sun is bloated and a bit dated, showing the embryonic development of the language of English, parodying writers that many have not heard of, let alone read, starting with preliterate pagan incantations and ending with the nineteenth century and “modern�� slang. Wandering Rocks gives the reader the sense of being a drone camera over Dublin, while Aeolus reads like your little brother yelling into your ear every 30 seconds.

Then there is my favourite episode in the entire book, Ithaca. Joyce called Ithaca the “ugly duckling of the book�� and at the same time his “favourite episode��. I could not disagree more with the former (surely we need to look at the obsolete shitshow that is Oxen?) and agree more with the latter. Ithaca was the difference between this book landing on to my favourites shelf or not. Joyce said it best when he mentioned that the episode had a “tranquilising spectrality��, being “a mathematico-astronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen��. Finally, Penelope. Molly. Another used bookstore owner not too far from the one I began with saw me picking up my third copy of the book (I have a problem) and pointed to it with the utmost conviction, saying only “That Molly Bloom stuff in the end is quite something.�� Yes. Yes it is Yes. D. H. Lawrence described Penelope as “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written��. This makes my hopes and dreams for Lady Chatterley's Lover plummet. It certainly wasn’t that, but I am willing to accept that it was ground-breaking at the time. I saw a video of a first edition copy of Ulysses, where the pages were uncut, with the massive exception of Penelope. We just can’t help it, can we? Stream of consciousness mixed with softcore-ish erotica. Another fun fact about the Penelope episode was brought to my attention by Patrick Hasting (I owe his book a good review, incoming). Robert McAlmon, an American Poet, was drinking with Joyce and offered to type up fifty pages of Penelope for him. In his memoir, Being Geniuses Together, he talked about the event:

The next day [Joyce] gave me the handwritten script, and his handwriting is minute and hen-scrawly; very difficult to decipher. With the script he gave me four notebooks, and throughout the script were marks in red, yellow, blue, purple, and green, referring to phrases which must be inserted from one of the notebooks. For about three pages I was painstaking, and actually retyped one page to get the insertions in the right place. After that I thought, “Molly might just as well think this or that a page or two later, or not at all,�� and made the insertions wherever I happened to be typing. Years later I asked Joyce if he had noticed that I’d altered the mystic arrangement of Molly’s thought, and he said that he had, but agreed with my viewpoint.

What a guy.



I also want to discuss the general reception of this novel, now and historically. I promised I would come back to it at the beginning. Here is a tough pill to swallow: it doesn’t matter whether you like Ulysses or not. What does matter is how you react to it. If you don’t like it and are gracious in not liking it, in a “maybe the book just wasn’t for you?�� way, fair enough. You are probably a pleasant person to be around. You probably handle life well. You are probably happy. By the same token, if you like the book as a trophy you lord over others, you have deeper issues. Staying humble and staying in one’s lane is so important, perhaps one of the only keys we know of that will lead to a fulfilled life. The reaction to Ulysses, then, can be our own little shitty version of the Rorschach test. My friend and I were talking about this, and he tossed out the term “humour wizard�� in reference to the snarky crowd attempting aphorisms and one-liners with respect to reviewing this book, a la “Life is too short to read Ulysses.�� To me, these are the same people who see growth, achievement, and meaning in immediate numbers, immediate feedback, immediate dopamine spikes. In that case, here, this might give your life meaning: BLOOM GETS CUCKED. Huh. There it is. I guess nothing else happens in the book. Wow! SAVED! I just pocketed 50-60 hours. What are the chances that I use those saved hours in a way that I will be happy with on my deathbed? Not high. Again, let me repeat the caveat: if you have some sort of visceral reaction that lets you know that this is not your cup of tea, fair enough. But I think everything depends on asking that all-important word, maybe the word that rivals “love�� in being the most important word: “Why?�� Why did I dislike this book? Why did I like this book? Surely we owe this to ourselves when interacting with literature, no? Life may be too short for Ulysses, but I am willing to bet that the people employing this line of reasoning without explication haven’t finished too many other long-term projects in their lives that they are proud of �� diets, sleeping routines, reading regimens, behavioural modifications, tools picked up on a whim and dropped after a few days, all in an attempt to feel something.

This can be seen with some big names in our recent history. You have those that enjoy the book, singing its praises, and it looks as though each has a unique reason:

- Vladimir Nabokov: “I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn’t even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce’s champion game.��

- T. S. Eliot: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. These are postulates for anything that I have to say about it, and I have no wish to waste the reader’s time by elaborating my eulogies; it has given me all the surprise, delight, and terror that I can require, and I will leave it at that.��

- Ernest Hemingway: “Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It’ll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them every night in Michaud’s where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week.��

- George Orwell: “I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.��

- Salman Rushdie: “I can think of books that made little explosions in my mind, showing me literary possibilities I hadn’t dreamed of until I read them. James Joyce’s Ulysses was one such book.��

And then there are those that are very against Ulysses. There seems to be a common pattern throughout their reviews, that it was long/hard/boring, and that they took that personally:

- Paulo Coelho: “Today writers want to impress other writers . . . One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.�� [Alan’s commentary: This coming from the bald fraud who took the entire text of his nothing book from Night 351 of The Thousand and One Nights, so tread carefully. Here is my review of that thing.]

- Aldous Huxley: “In spite of its very numerous qualities—it is, among other things, a kind of technical handbook, in which the young novelist can study all the possible and many of the quite impossible ways of telling a story��Ulysses is one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant. This is due to the total absence from the book of any sort of conflict.��

- Jonathan Franzen: “[I couldn’t finish] Ulysses. I needed a graduate thesis adviser to crack a whip over my head, and didn’t have one.�� [Alan’s commentary: Jonathan Franzen’s micropenis rears its ugly head yet again. I have never disliked an author more without having read a single work by him/her. is a Wikipedia article about his article on difficult books and why they hurt his feelings.]

- Carl Jung: ��Ulysses is a book which pours along for seven hundred and thirty-five pages, a stream of time of seven hundred and thirty-five days which all consist in one single and senseless every day of Everyman, the completely irrelevant 16th day of June 1904, in Dublin—a day on which, in all truth, nothing happens�� The seven hundred and thirty-five pages that contain nothing by no means consist of blank paper but are closely printed. You read and read and read and you pretend to understand what you read. Occasionally you drop through an air pocket into another sentence, but when once the proper degree of resignation has been reached you accustom yourself to anything. So I, too, read to page one hundred and thirty-five with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way.�� [Alan’s commentary: Those close to me will know this one hurt. A lot.]

The source for these can be found .

Okay, let’s bring this to an end with more Nabokov:

What then is the main theme of the book? It’s very simple.

1) The hopeless past. Bloom’s infant son has died long ago, but the vision remains in his blood and brain.

2) The ridiculous and tragic present. Bloom still loves his wife Molly, but he lets Fate have its way. He knows that in the afternoon at 4:30 of this Mid-June day Boylan, her dashing impresario, concert agent, will visit Molly �� and Bloom does nothing to prevent it. He tries fastidiously to keep out of Fate’s way, but actually throughout the day is continuously on the point of running into Boylan.

3) The pathetic future. Bloom also keeps running into another young man �� Stephen Dedalus. Bloom gradually realizes that this may be another little attention on the part of Fate. If his wife must have lovers then sensitive, artistic Stephen would be a better one than vulgar Boylan. In fact, Stephen could give Molly lessons, could help her with her Italian pronunciations in her profession as a singer, could be in short a refining influence, as Bloom pathetically thinks.

This is the main theme: Bloom and Fate.

I love this from Nabokov. One more thing is important for me: the highs and lows of life may bring us to write letters to certain others, using pseudonyms that mask a face we are not proud of �� however, at the end of the day, our entire world may revolve on the single moment in which our significant other is deciding whether to make us breakfast in bed.