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Much like a pair of bickering ex-lovers, James Joyce’s famous novel “Ulysses�� and I have a complex love-hate relationship. The modernist novel, taking place in a veriety of beautiful yet frustratingly opaque and often guite dull literary techniques, and tracing the lives of protagonists Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus throughout early twentieth century Dublin, is an emotional rollercoaster, the two most common emotions experienced being awe and boredom.

Perhaps the main source of the conflicting reactions I have to this novel is its structure. While the four or five chapters introducing Leopold Bloom (beginning about fifty pages into the novel) have something of a stylistic homogeneity, a large majority of the (unnamed, although the critics have created a title scheme which I shall use here) chapters are unique. There is a chapter of newspaper headlines, a play, a series of questions and answers, and the final unpuncuated stream-of-conciousness, known as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy (by far the novel’s most famous section, so much so that it spawned a Kate Bush song, “The Sensual World��). A number of these chapters were simply a joy to read, and showcased Joyce’s brilliant descriptive powers, unmatched by any writer living or dead. For example, the third chapter, “Proteus��, in which Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach, is delightfully worded and complexly brilliant, if a little obscure. A novel with phrases like “his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars�� is difficult to hate. The musical chapter, “Sirens�� is even better, fizzing with energy and vitality and despite being largely nonsensical containing the novel’s best language. The play chapter, known as “Circe�� by critics, is brilliant for a whole different reason, relatively free of beautiful language but containing much delightful hallucinatory weirdness, such as a talking soap and conjoined twins representing the states of drunkenness and sobriety.

However, often Joyce’s love of experimentation got the better of him, creating some frustratingly tedious and smirkingly obscure chapters, full of pretentious literary references and the needless exclusion of punctuation (and I’m not even talking about Molly Bloom’s chapter here). The newspaper chapter is about the novel’s most tedious, mainly consisting of several very boring men talking about events which only residents of Dublin from 1904 would know about (leading to endless trips to the notes section). “Oxen of the Sun��, which takes place in a maternity hospital, is perhaps the novel’s most dense, illustrating the history of the English language through many difficult styles and containing an opening sentence which I’ve read twenty times and still have little clue as to what it is trying to say. The novel’s penultimate chapter, “Ithaca��, despite beginning well with some amusing logic games and beautiful descriptions of the many functions of water, eventually dissolved into nothing more than a pointless series of random and irrelevant descriptions of things, including quite a long list of train stations.

Overall, “Ulysses�� is a book which I loved and hated in equal measure, providng some of the most exhilarating reading experiences of my life, as well as some of the most insanely frustrating ones. It is a novel I will no doubt read again at some point in the (presumably very distant) future, because there is so much more to get out of such a dense and complex book. But for now, I am glad to be rid of it.