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Each chapter is rated out of ten for difficulty, obscenity, general mindblowing brilliance and beauty of language.

Note : if you're after my short course bluffer's guide to ulysses, here it is :

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

But now... the real thing.


****

1. Telemachus.

Difficulty : 0
Obscenity: 0
General mindblowing brilliance : 8
Beauty of language : 7

Stephen the morose ex-student isn't enjoying life. Lots of brittle dialogue, mainly from motormouth blasphemer Buck Mulligan. Breakfast. An old crone delivers milk (this was before 24 hour Tescos). A modicum of swimming. Sea described as snotgreen.

2. Nestor.

Difficulty : 0
General mindblowing brilliance : 8
Obscenity : 0
Beauty of language : 7

Stephen is teaching history. He has a crap job as a part time teacher because he doesn't know what to do with his life. i can sympathise with that, I still don't. His pupils are mostly eager and polite so God knows how he'd get on in today's hellhole classrooms. Anyway he gets paid and his boss the pompous old git Deasey gives him a letter about foot and mouth disease to give to somebody else which Stephen couldn't give a flying fish about. He mooches off.

3. Proteus

Difficulty : 9
General mindblowing brilliance : 10
Obscenity: 2 (there's some nosepicking and urination)
Beauty of language : 10

Now we get emo Steve trudging along the beach on his way to get a few pints down him, and now the Stream of the Consciousness starts up and gushes and torrents all over the place. And it's all stunningly beautiful. If I was a genius this is exactly how I'd think too. This may be my favourite chapter. May Stephen mooch about forever. Mooch on!

4. Calypso.

Difficulty : 5 (now we are getting used to the S of C and Bloom's S is so much easier than Stephen's S - although also a great deal less lovely)
General mindblowing brilliance : 5
Obscenity : 8
Beauty of language : 3

We jump back to breakfast time and enter the house and mind of Leopold Bloom who's rustling up some breakfast for himself and his dear lady wife. As we are moseying along in Bloom's brain, accompanying him on his trip to the butchers, suddenly out of nowhere we get the c word - and it really isn't anything but a train of thought. Joyce could have included another stray thought. But no. Joyce was completely committed to the truthfulness of his technique and also convinced of his own genius too. Still, it comes as a shock. Later we trip down Bloom's garden to his outside toilet where he has a pleasant bowel movement: "that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right." I mean, Jimmy, is this really necessary? But of course, in Ulysses, it is. The obscenity they found in Ulysses was mostly the disgustingness of minute descriptions of ordinary activities. In movies people never ever used to go to the toilet. Now they do it all the time - what was the first toilet scene in a movie? You could write a list of 20 great toilet scenes. (Contributions welcome.)

It must be said that Bloom's mind is cram-ful of bits and bobs about his own life which are never explained, you just have to pick them up and piece them together if you can be arsed. But for instance Bloom is trying very hard not to think that Molly will be meeting Blazes Boylan in the afternoon and will probably be going to bed with him. It's one of those he-knows-but-does-she-know-he-knows situations. So, all in all, a very uncomfortable chapter.
Oh, since you asked, I just went to my own toilet for the very same Bloomesque purposes - but not being Joyce, I'm not going to tell you anything further. But it was okay! Thanks for asking!


5. The Lotus Eaters.

Difficulty : 4
Obscenity: 4 (see below)
General mindblowing brilliance : 2
Beauty of language : 2

There's a couple of tedious chapters of Ulysses, it must be confessed (aside from the chapter that's deliberately boring!) and this is one. Bloom is off on his rambling day, meets a couple of coves, visits a chemist and then a public bath (this was before the days of houses having bathrooms! Imagine that!). We get a lot of this kind of stuff - (Bloom is at the chemists):

Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid. Smell almost cure you like the dentist's doorbell. Doctor whack. He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature.

I might have to agree with critics of Ulysses here - I don't need every scrap of word association and mental flotsam that swishes through Bloom's bumbling brain. But Joyce thinks I do!

6. Hades.

Difficulty : 3
Obscenity: 2*
General mindblowing brilliance : 2
Beauty of language : 3

Another chapter I'm not a fan of because we're stuck mostly inside the brain of Bloom who's full of Readers Digest tips and quips and boring "I wonder if" and Molly this and Milly that. The Homeric parallels : yes, well, he goes to a funeral and thinks about death and rotting and such, so that's Hades. Helen's friend Eleanor is living with us at the moment and she CLAIMED to have read Ulysses as part of a course on epics but when pressed admitted that she had SKIMMED it and didn't like it much to which I said "Skimmed? SKIMMED? You can't skim the greatest modernist work of literature in English! Faugh! Crivens! Help ma Bob! I think I'm coming down with the apoplexy so I am!" Even the tedious chapters, of which this is one, have to be read word by word, line by line.

* the only trace of rudeness I could find in hades was this - Bloom is thinking about precisely when his son (deceased) was conceived: "Must have been that morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs at it by the wall... Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins." To readers of 2010 it all seems somewhat coarse, yes, but to readers of the 1920s these stray remarks were incendiary. However I would like to complain about this otherwise handsome Modern Library hardback edition I'm reading. This is one of the two available hardbacks of Ulysses and it comes wreathed with introductions, blurbs and reprints of judicial decisions all of which are entirely to do with the alleged obscenity of the book. Hence I thought I would reread it partly with that in mind. But really, who cares any more about that? Get rid of all this stuff. Let's have an introduction all about the crackle and the pity and the joy and fire of this bizarre book.

*

7. Aeolus.

Difficulty : 5
Obscenity: 0
General mindblowing brilliance : 2
Beauty of language : 3

Oh dear - do I actually like this damned masterpiece at all? Another tiresome chapter full of huffy snippy geezers sniping and out-quoting and oneupmanshipping each other. Next! Quick!

Review continues here

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