Books: Ulysses - James Joyce
As it's Bloomsday, it's a suitable day to recommend one of the most critically acclaimed and difficult books in the English language, Ulysses. It retells Homer's Odyssey through a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner - the day in question is the 16th of June 1904. From Chapter One Episode Nine:
"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."Click here to read some quotations taken from Ulysses and here to read the famous stream-of-consciousness monologue that closes the book. If you really want to read it, I'll lend it to you. From the ever useful Wikipedia:
"Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose — full of puns, parodies, and allusions — as well as its rich characterisations and broad humour, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century."
1 comment:
I’ve tried to read Ulysses three times in the past, and I failed. Eccentricity is god in this book. But after reading the first 50 pages, I felt extremely gratified. Reading bits of Aristotle helped, but only marginally. It was probably Shakespeare and Borges who led me on, so I delighted in passages like Buck Mulligan’s “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father”, referring to Stephen Dedalus’ idea of Hamlet.
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