Ulysses by James Joyce

This was finally going to be the year I read Ulysses, and for my first time through I decided I was going to just dive in and read it all on my own, without notes or any preparation, and only a vague memory of the larger plot points of the original Homer epic. I did not expect it to take me four months to do it.

I have no fear of big, difficult books — I breezed right through 2666 and Infinite Jest and the complete works of Mark Danielewski — so I thought “just how hard could it be?” The answer is very hard. To understand and experience Ulysses I had to give it my full attention and read it far more closely than I’m used to reading. And both those things are difficult to me to do at the end of the day in bed when I normally read. If I had a glass or wine or two for dinner, forget it, I did not have nearly the focus I needed for this book and I had to put it aside and read other things.

That said I am completely captivated by this book, I don’t regret having spent the time, and I already have plans to re-read it later with better preparation. The writing is loose and impressionistic and there were times when I had feelings and sensations in my head from reading it and I had no idea how they got there. Joyce’s skill with writing is on a level I did not even realize existed, and I have not the faintest clue of how he did it. In that respect, I loved it, just loved it.

Four stars instead of five mostly as a reflection of my own inadequacies in understanding this book. Will re-evaluate on the next reading.

This is one of the books that appears on lists of "books you ought to read before you die", and "greatest novels of the 20th century".

I can't remember where and how I acquired my copy; I've had it for years, and it's been on my "to read sometime" mental list ever since then. As time passed, I became more aware of the possibility of dying without reading it.

Another reason for reading it was that I did English I at the University of Natal (now University of KwaZulu-Natal) in the 1960s. The English Department at that time was thoroughly Leavisite, and a friend of mine who was doing English Honours (a post-graduate course) was told by a member of the department that he should not read Ulysses because "it will blunt your critical faculties".

The same friend also remarked one day that he had seen a copy of Ulysses on the professor's desk, and we wondered if he had confiscated it from a student to protect his critical faculties.

So I thought that my critical faculties aren't going to be much use to me when I'm dead, so I'll take the risk and try to read it before I die.

I have to say that I was underwhelmed.

I debated whether to give it two stars or three, and eventually decided on three because I admired Joyce's ingenuity, though without really appreciating it. When I think of great novels of the 20th century, I think I agree with the hoi polloi rather than the lit crit crowd, and would give Tolkien's [b:The Lord of the Rings|34|The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Part 1)|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156043001s/34.jpg|3204327] first place.

Ulysses is usually classified as a "modern" novel, and I suppose in a way it is. The height of literary and artistic modernity was after the First World War, and that's when it was written. There was the Bauhaus school of architecture and all that kind of thing.

But it is written about a day in 1904. That was before my marents were born. That was when my grandfather was getting married. So the people in the book are of the vintage of my grandfather's older brother. It was the Edwardian era, which seems altogether remote. Though I didn't live through it, I have the impression that the world before the First World War was utterly different from the world that followed that conflict. It was a different culture, a different landscape. Russia, the largest country on earth, was under Bolshevik rule. Clothes were entirely different. Motor vehicles and aeroplanes were no longer experimental toys for the rich, but became part of everyday life.

So Joyce was remembering a vanished past when he wrote Ulysses, and as I read it, I was trying to imagine it in its setting, the Edwardian clothes and attitudes, and all that went with them. Joyce experimented with new techniques of writing, new ways of describing things. In that his novel marks a break with the past, but one can admire his technical artistry without really appreciating it. For a "modern" novel I prefer Sartre's [b:Nausea|298275|Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)|Jean-Paul Sartre|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173498908s/298275.jpg|1319935]. At least it is set in modern times. OK, 1904 isn't exactly premodern, but still.