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Ulysses
Anyone who tells you they've read this so-called book all the way through is probably lying through their teeth.It is impossible to endure this torture.In fact the military would have already made POW"S read this waste but, I think such cruel and unusual punishment would violate the statutes of the Geneva Convention.It is not that this so- called book is so unmercifully long that ruins it, but that the characters are so boring.Who cares about the characters?Who can stomach the endless trivialities illuminated within the pages of this tomb?You cannot even call this the worst book ever written because a book would first have to be written in order for it to be considered a book,wouldn't it?This joke that the literary community has perpetrated for almost a century has highlighted precisely what a bunch of pompous,bleeting sheep lit crits really are.The joke is on whomever has bothered to waste a nanosecond on this devious farce.My goodness, can't anybody see that the emperor has no clothes?!Is everybody too thickheaded to get the joke or just afraid to seem uncultured or ignorant so they go along with a 80 year old gag and unintentionally show themselves to be pompous?This waste of paper is a genuine TEE-YOU-ARE-DEE,and Joyce the trickster of tricksters.
Ulysses
This is probably the most difficult book I've ever read in my life. I have to read it with the help of two different study guides (Don Gifford and Harry Blamires are good ones)just to understand the allusions and it still takes me fifty times longer to read a section of this than any other book I've ever read. However, this book is like the zenith of literary accomplishments for a reader (if you can make it through). Not for the casual literature fan. On the bright side, I guess I can now brag that I've read Ulysses.
Ulysses
I hated Ulysses...and not just because it's practically unreadable. I actually did manage to more or less read it all the way through, in one long twelve hour night, which I can never have back now. And I don't know about all the nuances and subtleties that it supposedly contains, but the basic thrust of it was clear enough.Ulysses is basically an unbridled attack on the very ideas of heroism, romantic love and sexual fulfillment, and objective literary expression. This is made especially clear by the title's reference to The Odyssey of Homer (Ulysses being the Latin name for the Greek Odysseus)---and the unmistakably unbridgeable contrast between the two books, both in terms of the content of the stories, and their modes of expression.Odysseus is a great man, King of Ithaca, husband of Penelope, father of Telemachus, and a hero of the Trojan war. The Odyssey chronicles his heroic ten-year voyage to return home from the war to his wife and son. Ulysses, on the other hand, is about an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a bumbling buffoon, impotent both in life and in bed. In Homer's view, man is a heroic, even God-like, being---and woman is more than a match for him. In Joyce's, man is metaphysically ridiculous, especially in matters of sex, and woman is his equal in patheticalness.And then there is the literary style Joyce employs to spew forth this sewage. While Homer's epic poem takes the form of strictly-metered verse, Joyce switches literary mode, from straight prose to dialogue to stream of consciousness (among other things), almost at random throughout the work, though it seems to degenerate more and more toward the end.If the point of Ulysses were to break free of outmoded and arbitrary restrictions of classicism, it would be admirable. But that's not what Joyce is doing. He doesn't offer a positive alternative to replace the Homeric values (which I think are genuine values) upon which he's pissing. He's pissing on them just to piss on them. It's pure nihilism, and it's disgusting.Ulysses is obscene, not because of any language it uses or its obsession with sex, but because of its thematic content---the ideas it conveys. The book expresses nothing less than an all-consuming hatred of man and any positive values to which he aspires. And that is why I think Ulysses is one of the most vile and evil books ever written.
Ulysses
Joyce had sometimes been called a writers writer. One reviewer even suggested we should give Ulysses the benefit of a doubt, for the same reason we uneducated lay-folk use to accept on sight modern physics or Einsteins Relativity theory. Now I can think of all sorts of definitions for the meaning and purpose of imaginative literature -- to serve as the arcane Cabala for the initiates of a secretive cult is not one of them. If a novel lacks what it takes to reach every conceivable kind of reader, regardless whether it is to be received as a pleasure or a nuisance, than it is a failure, plain and simple. I may detest what I read -- even successful novels dont come with a gun held to your head -- but Ulysses is simply an empty shell, nothing left to form an opinion or taste either way. A bad writer is just bad, because he cant cope adequately with his task. But there is also a possibility that I may detest a good writer for the waste of skill and talent on something I deem to be an unworthy or badly misguided effort. So even if I may not like what he has to say, I can still be impressed by the beauty and cogency of his delivery. I dont like it, but the man has something to say, and he says it well. But this here is different: can anybody tell me what else it possibly could be than the vain demonstration of stylistic skills from the portfolio of a great talent -- with absolutely nothing to say? God knows, I am all for a reader who pays to a good authors work the respect it deserves and pitches in a bit of his own effort. This should entitle a good reader to carry home something worthwhile. However it is not just the Ulysses, I got the same impression from the entire work of James Joyce, even from his early poems. Except for a precious few luminous moments (the travel of young Steven in the train compartment, the damp and creeping cold atmosphere on the rugby pitch in the Portrait) it really amounts to little more than an exercise in the rhetorics of imaginative writing. It must be me, but I cant help feeling something amateurish in all this contrived effort. Call Joyce a genius, if you like, we all know he was determined to be remembered as the outstanding writer of the 20th century. And we do! We remember his legend the same way we remember Cervantes or Kafka before we open their books. An aura surrounds Ulysses, and this awe may even carry us through a few passages and purple patches, but thats where the comparison ends. Take away the halo from Cervantes and Kafka and you still enjoy a robust read -- I doubt the same can be said of Joyce. He had the gift, and he knew it, but even his consummate admiration for Ibsen didnt help him to find for himself a story worth telling, that is a story which would make his talent shine and captivate the reader. Technically, Ulysses is a superb piece of narrative engineering. A myriad of leitmotifs and themes entwine, separate and meet again each delivered in a variety of different voices and styles. So, ok, a letter torn to tiny shreds into the river carries to a corresponding theme five chapters later, a piece of soap bought in the morning becomes an important item in late afternoon, a galaxy of town-folks revolve around each other and do their daily chores, though mostly in pubs, hospital-canteens and hostelries -- a tat one-sided should it ever become necessary to reconstruct Dublin from scratch. So our Mr. Bloom masturbates over the sight of a crippled girl -- the joke to write parts of this particular passage in the pseudo-elegant journalese of a turn of the century fashion magazine is lost on me: is it supposed to poke fun on the clich beset thoughts in the poor girls mind? In fact Joyce ventriloquizes a lot; all over the book the English language is taken through her paces like a dressage horse, nobody can deny the authors brilliance, and sometimes he even presents a superb artistic flash, like the gold coins the principle is handing out to Stephen. Yet even here I see the author glancing sideways under his eyelids: are we really looking? Do we catch the moment? (Kafka did such things in his sleep.) So what does all this amount to, on some 800 pages, except to small change? Yes, Ulysses has style, a whole museum of styles to be exact, and nothing but style. After you finish it, if you make it through, you will leave it behind like a confused dream, and forget it just as soon.
Ulysses
With _Ulysses_, Joyce truly showed the world what a elitist egotist he was. Unfortunately, too many academics were entranced by occasional flourishes of vivid imagery to see this sham for what it was (and is): An intense act of laziness and hubris by a writer who had trouble telling stories. I think of _Ulysses_ as the precursor to all the self-indulgent pseudo-intellectual garbage that turned so many people off from reading "great literature" over the last 60 some odd years. However, the greatest tragedy comes from the fact that Joyce had talent in spades and showed it on occasion, such as with many of his short stories. If he would have tried to make _Ulysses_ even semi-comprehensible, it may indeed have been as great as some make it out to be. In the end, though, it's all just gibberish without a story to drive it.
Ulysses
I requested Ulises, Spanish version, which was advertised.Instead, I got an old English version for the price of the Spanish one.I contacted the seller and s/he never had the courtesy of getting back to me. I will never buy from this seller again.