Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Where to begin with this? It's certainly liveliest, most inventive writing I've ever encountered. Joyce thought he could do anything with language, and this book is his testament to that. Each chapters takes on a completely different style, causing you to readjust your brain to a new way of seeing, a new means of representing this world. But it's not done pretentiously or superfluously, as many claim - it is all to serve a unified whole. The notion is to make the book as many different things as possible. How many 'things' can literature be? How many aspects of life can it capture, in how many different ways? Joyce seems to ask those questions here. He does push literature to its limits. Each chapter is a part of the body. Each chapter is a re-exploration of the past (using The Odyssey). Each chapter is a colour, an hour, an art... the Gilbert/Linati schematas provided at the end of my edition were helpful in seeing these parallels.

Are you going to be wildly entertained with each page of the book? Of course not - it is slow-going in parts- and you will like some chapters better than others. But perhaps this is all part of the experience - the chapters that speak to you more than others will perhaps help you discover things about your own self. The book ends like a thunderbolt, and a life-affirming one at that. You leave Ulysses feeling excited to take on life with even more fervour than before - Molly makes you feel so.

Finished just after Bloomsday, 2014.