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James Joyce adapted the structure of one of history's oldest and most familiar stories to his tale of Leopold Bloom's one-day odyssey through Dublin to produce a landmark in 20th-century literature. Evoking in rich, sensory details the streets, pubs, brothels, and shops of Dublin, focusing on seemingly insignificant detail, "Ulysses" is a triumphant celebration of an ordinary man. 4 cassettes.

Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus

Customer Reviews:

• Uses the reader as an active part of the story
  Ulysses takes place the 16th of June 1904 in Dublin, the day where James Joyce had his first date with his wife to come and in a sense you can argue that Ulysses is Joyce's attemt to write That Great Love-novel. But, how to acomplish yhis ambition, when Romeo and Juliet and Anna Karenina is allready written? Joyce's solution is to redefine what the concept of a Great Love novel is all about. Instead of regarding the reader as someone to ammuse and seduce - someone that has the passive role of observing the story, Joyce combats the reader and makes the readers experience of reading the book as a crusial part of his story.
  
  Even the 16th of May 1904 was a long time ago and happend far away as Joyce wrote Ulysses in Trieste, Zurich and Paris from 1914 to 1921, Joyce describes virtually every detail that happened in Dublin that special day, long ago, far away. Even the fact that James Joyce wasn't much of a husband, drinking heavily when he had money, often was out of work and in conflict with his family because of his drinking, spending and unemployment, working on Ulysses - against his doctors strict orders as it would make him blind - when he was in a state of working, his wife hanged on to him all this time. In the same way the book appears difficult to read, and goes on "forever" in the sense of pages, places and number and level of hidden meanings you can dedicate a
  life to, Ulysses simply gets too much for many of its readers, making them give in, regarding it to complicated, difficult to understand, simply not worth the effort. In the same manner, the most obvious conclusion to draw from a marriage with James Joyce, might be that it was not worth the effort. As soon as I understood that this probably was exactly the point Joice was trying to make though, it was like I would not and could not let him prove that he was right and unlike my previous attemts to finnish the novel, I succeded. Blessing or curse - I guess this feeling of denying to give in, is excactly what can make a relatationship like this go on.
  
  As far as I know, Joyce is the first writer to introduce this projective way of writing - integrate the readers feelings and reactions to what he reads as a vital part of the story. After though, this projective writing is used by several writers - for instance when Bret Easton Ellis writes in a manner that makes the reader of American Psycho feel as bored as his main character Patrick Bateman feels - illustrating that he has more in common with you and me than we care about, or when Jerome David Sallinger in A Perfect day for Bananafish at the last line of the shortstory makes you realize that he has wrapped you arond his little finger all the time, manipulated you to think what he wants you to think, feel what he wants you to feel, leaving you with the predjustises that he wanted you to have , in order not to make you see the fatal conclution.
  
  It is obviously other ways to read Ulysses. You find a lot of them in the other customers review. It can be a good advice to put a copy of the so called Ulysses schema in the book when you try to read it, to make it easier to orient in time, space and theme. Make an internet search and you will find it.
  
  I hope you will finnish Ulysses with a sense of having read something that made it worth-while:)...more info
• Ten Reasons to Re-read Ulysses
  1. When you tried it in college, it was a task, a challenge, an intellectual mountain to climb, a test of your literary mettle. Perhaps if you read it apart from any course, as I did, you felt you failed.
  
  2. In the intervening time you've read perhaps hundreds of Modernist and post-modernist novels by Joyce's acknowledged progeny, those whose numbers are legion: from William Faulkner to Beckett to Barth to Perec to Eggers to Coover to Calvino to Kundera, from "Wittgenstein's Mistress" to "Wittgenstein's Nephew," from Jeanette Winterson to Louis Paul Boon and Gilbert Sorrentino to Peter Handke. These you have relished and enjoyed tremendously. Why, then, not tackle their progenitor, the master himself, again?
  
  3. A book is no longer in any way a notch in your belt; you read for enjoyment, enlightenment, enrichment, a sense of connectedness, all the right reasons and some that aren't.
  
  3. You can start with your old paperback, and if Ulysses again proves too difficult, you can toss it aside, no harm done.
  
  4. If the old paperback falls apart and you find you're still reading, you can buy a new copy.
  
  5. You're not in such an all-fired hurry any more. You have the sense to adapt to Joyce's demands and slow down your reading speed, recognizing that this is like a prose poem. Take five minutes on one given page, what's the rush? The writing is finely tooled enough to deserve it.
  
  5. Your maturity allows you to see beyond the Masterpiece Syndrome and the Scholar's Paradise that Ulysses became to enjoy what a romp it is. This is fun! for God's sake. Joyce is forty different kinds of comedian, veering from irony to black comedy to sly humor to sheer buffoonery.
  
  6. Each section being in a different style is itself royally entertaining, and Joyce is masterly in all of them. This is a buffet prepared by a virtuoso chef, and if you hang onto your hat, it's exhilarating as all get out.
  
  7. The unexpected effect of all this variety is that the three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom are more vivid and real than they could possibly be otherwise. Various sections familiarize us with their intimate habits, personal effects, private thoughts, and the way others see them; and by regarding them through different stylistic lenses, Joyce effects unusual familiarity and allows these fictional entities to assume the palpability of real people.
  
  8. We feel great affection for these characters, and Joyce achieves this while depicting them not as highly exceptional, heroic souls but rather average, idiosyncratic and unremarkable people. Even the highly intelligent, poetic Stephen is a typically self-dramatizing, youthful romantic. And yes, though the novel is rife with comic turns, there is poignancy, great and generous humanity.
  
  9. The novel is a sensuous feast, the words chosen always with an ear for sound in the reciprocal service of memorable, ultravivid images. You can dog-ear a dictionary (to many disappointments, considering Joyce's flamboyant taste for arcana and neologisms) or not; your workable vocabulary will suffice for much, if not most, of the glorious language. In this regard Joyce is a wizard, a magician unsurpassed by any poet in memory.
  
  10. As another reviewer here noted, you will have the urge, once you've come to the last line, to immediately begin again. Keep your new copy handy. This is such a kaleidoscope, a ride of a book, that you'll want to read it a third time, soon enough.
  ...more info
• People All Miss The Point
  I first ready Ulysses when I was 20 and on summer break from college. I read it with the annotated version as a guide. It was work but it was fun work. Here are a few things people never talk about with Ulysses:
  
  1. It's a very, very funny book
  2. At it's heart, it's about a young man trying to recover from the death of his mother and a middle aged man trying to cope with his marital crisis and the buried sadness over his dead son and father. Nothing overly obscure or elitist or intellectual there, I don't think.
  3. The verbal pyrotechnics serve the story. Joyce wanted to describe one day and make it entertaining. All the literary references serve the purpose of adding richness, depth, timelessness and universality to a story about ordinary Dublin citizens wandering around on a warm early summer's day.
  4. Ultimately, this book is a love story--the least sentimental love story ever written but it's about Stephen's conflicted love for his mother, Molly and Poldy's conflicted love for each other, and Joyce's conflicted love for Ireland. The book is about, as Stephen says, "the affirmation of the human spirit". He's not being sarcastic when he says that.
  
  Ulysses is a novel in brilliant technicolor. I've read nearly all the major literary classics and they are all in black and white by comparison. ...more info
• Warning " look inside book" option is out of date
  Ulysses (Everyman's Library, 100) When I ordered this book,(oct 08) the "look inside book" option showed the copy with blue covers, title on cover. But I received one with red covers, title on spine,the dust jackets are identical. Other reviews praise the blue covered volume, now out of date. If this matters to you, now you know you will receive the red covered volume.With my return, amazon may update the "look inside" book to show current red covers so you get what you ordered....more info
• "Fast Who?" Critques Joyce
  Apparently drowning in a sea of Hollywood treatments and modern corporate literature's cheap formulaic approach to life, cheap disgusting Paso Robles wine, and the American penchant for telling it like it ain't; i too can fail to conquer intellectual challenges and then run off a series of prep school insults.
  
  Just because the Emperor is naked, doesn't mean he is dumb. When one experiences such a massive failure of imagination and intellect as some here, do what the corporate clowns of quasi capitalist/fascists' tell you to do, and medicate the problem away.
  
  Alternatively make the effort to understand, or to understand that you do not understand, Ulysses by James Joyce
  ...more info
• Not unreadable
  "Ulysses" has the reputation of being unreadable - or readable only for literature students and professors - but also of being the most influential work in 20th literature. The latter might be true, because most books written afterwards have somehow used the stream-of-consciousness-technique and the non-linear storytelling. Mostly, the book is really about language and its relation to the modern world. Joyce wanted to use a different approach to language to make it consistent with the increasing complexity of every-day-life in a big city. I think that even modern movie experiments such as David Lynchs "Mulholland Drive" go back to Joyce' ideas to really dig deep in the complicated psyche of an individual, for which traditional storytelling is not sufficient.
  
  But is it really unreadable? The book certainly needs some preparation and some effort from your side, more than most other books. But once you are well prepared, the Ulysses is actually well readable, and at most time even a lot of fun. And often you do not wonder why it was heavily criticized at the time it came out. For example, most of modern literature which uses a lot of profanity and vulgarity looks like children books when compared to the Circe-chapter, a sado-masochistic fantasy of the protagonist. Joyce' language skill makes this chapter breathtaking, a pure adventure.
  
  At other times, the book is a pure delight, for example "Wandering Rocks" or "Penelope". If you listen to your intuition, even the latter (which is the most legendary chapter of the "Ulysses") is not difficult to read. But then, there are also parts where Joyce' experiment with language fails: For example the "Oxen of the Sun" is just bothersome and really unreadable.
  
  As I said, the book is only fun if you are well prepared for it. You should definitely read Joyce "Dubliners" first, which is an easy to read collection of short stories. It introduces some of the characters which return in the "Ulysses", and this gives you helpful background information. Even more important, read "Portrait of the Artist", which is a portrait of Steven as a young man. He has a main role in "Ulysses", and "Portrait" already introduces a lot of the central ideas of Steven and "Ulysses" in general.
  
  Other books which are comparable in style and intention but easier to read are Virginia Woolfs' "Miss Delloway" and John Dos Passos' "Manhattan Transfer", definitely two books which warm you up for the idea of "stream of consciousness".
  
  All in all, Ulysses is an experiment with language which is a lot of fun, but which does not work for all parts of the book.
  
  ...more info
• Amazon Recommends I: James Joyce's Ulysses
  Hello from this particular corner of the abstract retail market.
  
  What a delight to have Amazon recommend the novel I've made practically a point in life to get around to reading! It provided just the necessary final incentive needed to throw all the "wait 'til a good time" aside and actually just read it, which of course is ultimately how it needs to be read.
  
  "Ulysses" is famous for being "impenetrable" and "unreadable", but is far from either. Just like other formal experiments in writing, like Beat era writing, Thomas Pynchon novels, and more recently novels by such authors as David Foster Wallace (may he rest in peace) and Mark Z. Danielewsky, it's not a matter so much of understanding everything and getting the plot as it is of letting the book take you along on its own terms. In the case of "Ulysses" specifically, each chapter is it's own new formal experiment, and it is of my humble opinion that you are allowed to like some parts better than others. Those who have a problem with it are those who go into the reading with their own expectations or demands informing their analysis. "Ulysses" is an experience, and one that I think most people should at least try to have to see if it's for them or not (just like skydiving or eating unfamiliar food in a foreign country).
  
  And like most media, the things that make it controversial are quite often beyond the point, and anybody who actually read the text finds that out quickly. This novel is about a lot of things, love, language, intertextuality, Shakespeare, Greek myth, Dublin (it does, after all, fall between the proto-neorealistic writing of "Dubliners" and the intense brooding of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"), humour, and life, and there are other repeated themes, allusions, motifs, and forms to give any critical reader much to play with and brood over, but it certainly is not difficult reading and it definitely isn't smut. Go figure.
  
  In conclusion, this was a great way to start actually following Amazon's recommendation system, and I'm very proud of myself for finally getting around to doing something I really wanted to do after putting it off needlessly for so long.
  
  --PolarisDiB...more info
• The Emperor's New Clothes
  Despite its lofty status as a revered icon of English literature, one only has to fight through a dozen or so pages to reach the painfully obivious conclusion that Ulysses is, in fact, unreadable gibberish.
  The book has no plot, no dramatic arc, no message, a (literally) pedestrian structure, and sentences constructed by means of a random walk through the dictionary as well as through Dublin, Ireland. It has no discernable central thought. No one can tell you what the book is about, for it is about nothing. But wait, perhaps there is an underlying theme, albeit one well hidden.
  Remember the fable of the Emperor's new clothes? Guillible courtiers were induced to beleive that a charlatan tailor had sewn garments for the Emperor that only suitably refined folk could see. In reality, there was nothing there at all. Jame Joyce and generations of literary sycophants have convinced impressionable students that Ulysses is a worthy read.
  When the uninitiaed find the text incoherent, this failure is chalked up to insufficient literary maturity. It can't be the fault of the book's alcohol-addled author.
  "Press on," the professors say, "Ulysses' gloss will be revealed if only one perseveres past the many opaque chapters, thus developing the right sensitivities."
  However, looking longer at this nonsense only reveals the glaring absense of rational content and the transparent emptiness. The self-indulgent Emperor Joyce has no clothes.
  The most damming indictment of this over-wrought tome is the fact that it is impossible to find ten people who have actually finished it. Ulysses is one of those books that everyone has heard of, but no one has read. Hence the market for Ulysses crib cards for use at cocktail parties by poseurs with literary pretensions or by guys with dates with English Lit chicks whom they are trying to bed. Perhaps Ulysses has some tactical utility after all, as an example of inverse Chick Lit.
  One supposes that the stream-of-consciousness descriptions of nose picking, masturbation, and sex broke ground for serious literature when published in the 1920's. Joyce deserves some credit for expanding the gross horizons of writing, but today's target audiences find those subjects ordinary and routine. This taboo-breaking history is hardly sufficient reason to examine Ulysses now. To be timeless literature, a book must speak to fundamental truths about ourselves.
  But what, if anything, does Ulysses tell us about the human condition? I suggest its plot-free message is one Joyce didn't, or couldn't, intend. That is; to trust one's educated common sense. If, to you, a book walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, then it was most likely written by a quack.
  If this stream-of-consciousness genre appeals to you, for a much better read get anything by Hunter S. Thompson. Dr. Gonzo's book will be more coherent, make more sense, and will be better crafted. And, your eyes won't glaze over after ten pages, as they will with Ulysses.
  
  
  
  ...more info
• Hugely dissapointing
  I bought this having been a huge fan of the cartoon series, but Mr Joyce has taken a winning formula and produced a prize turkey. After 20 pages not only had Ulysses failed to even board his spaceship, but I had no idea at all what on earth was going on. Verdict: Rubbish....more info
• DEAD SERIOUS UNIVERSAL THEMES OF LOVE AND DEATH IN LAUGHING PARODIES OF INCOMPETENT ENGLISH
  FOR STUDENTS STRUGGLING WITH THIS GREATEST NOVEL IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE please skip to the twelfth episode, called Cyclops. YOu will find there all the major themes written in an engaging style, and all the threads of the plot. Just jump there and the teacher will think you read the whole not-easily-digestible work.
  
  Each episode is a microcosm and a repeating or respeaking of the same themes. Cyclops probably presents these in the most immediately comprehensible way possible. YOu quickly realize that Joyce throughout the work is MAKING FUN OF THE WAY PEOPLE TALK AND WRITE, from the first turn-of-the-century style to Molly's final stream of consciousness tour-de-force. But throughout Mr. JOyce is doing PARODY, which is exagerrating and making fun of how we speak and write, onoly to show that his underlying themes are impossible to express in modern terms. and so in Cyclops we hear every voice from ancient heroic legend to modern ringside boxing reports and wedding reports.
  
  But the basic themes remain. Mr. Bloom most explicitly states here that Love must be the basis for human interaction, and this is expanded upon. Also and most explicitly are Joyce's political undercurrents, the vile and oppressive nature of the BRitish empire's military force, which continues today stealing oil in Iraq while destroying its cultural heritage. Joyce shows how the same happened to Ireland, destroying resources (lumber) and cattle (under the false pretext of hoof and mouth) and industry as a way to impoverish and enslve the once great nation. The direct indictment of the BRitish naval power is especially explicit. This is my favorite and funniest epsode at the same time. Listen to it around disk eighteen of the forty disk Donal Donnally recording.
  
  THen ask your teacher if the reason Stephen Dedalus (get it? Dead. Alas!) did not kneel to pray for his mother, keeps Kosher, wears black with head carefully covered and wanders alone and lost, finding company only with the alleged Jew Bloom, is that while in Paris between Portrait of the Artist as A YOung Man and this work, he realized he was not a Jesuit Catholic, but on his mother's GOulding side, a Jew, and he returns to Ireland in search of his Jewish community. THis will knock your teacher's socks off.
  
  Please realize that Mr. Joyce himself reported there is not a single serious word in his work, that it is all a joke about the poor way people write. Yet, while there is not a single serious word, the underlying themes are deadly serious matters of life and death, faithlessness in marriage, national identity in the face of brutal (British) imperialist rape and oppression, and the theme of love in all its permutations. Love eternal and carnal is the basis of this book.
  
  My original analysis of this monumental work I assume got reported and dumped, without my saving a copy, so let me only briefly say that you may want the Gabler edition for the most reliable text, even though it loses the important page sized capitals S, M and P as reproduced in the Random House, as well as the important large period or asterix answering the questions "Where?" and is famously poorly bound.
  
  Do get the Donal Donnally (sp.?) recording. Jim Norton's is ABRIDGED grotesquely. Donal's is complete and extremely well done. If you want the basic gist of the novel, listen to Disk eighteen and nineteen of the forty disk recording and you will get the basic message. Love loves to love love.
  
  I am sorry to have lost my complete review written here in Ulysses style for a flavor of the original. Who's knows what lines were offensive. This book is essential reading, and re-reading, but don't get me started or I might get reported again.
  
  Be sure not only to get the Annotated Ulysses, which focusses mostly on historical explanations of places and people, but especially the Schwarz "Reading Joyce's Ulysses" and the Sicari "Joyce's Modernist Allegory", both excellent beginning commentaries that will make the text and intent much clearer to any reader. But the serious reader interested in the deeper socio-historico eleements suggested by joyce should get Dr. Cheng's excellent critique on JOyce racism and colonialism, as well as Attridge's Semicolonial Joyce. And those who get way over their heads with Joyce ought to check out Joyce and G-Men how Hoover killed Joyce's novel in the USA.
  
  The Donal Donnaly recordings really bring the novel to life.
  
  You can find several other commentaries in all price ranges, some by professors eager for tenure and looking to publish or perish, and others that are really helpful. Try Hugh Kenner of course, and the ones which investigate the brutal colonial nature of Ireland's history which Joyce alludes to, to reflect on current world events. It is worth the effort. Even Joseph Campbell has interesting things to say, on how this novel inspired him to begin to explore our world's mythologies, masks and meanings. But his commentary I found surprisingly shallow and at times off the mark. But I grow wordy . . ....more info
• A very helpful essay
  I won't review the book in detail, other than to say that I did enjoy it very much, and there were places where I laughed out loud (particularly when Leopold Bloom wonders whether or not Gods and Goddesses have anuses, then decides to resolve the matter by closely inspecting a statue at the National Museum).
  
  Also, to first time readers: just ignore episode 3. Many people enjoy Episodes 1-2 just fine, then get to episode 3 and stop dead in their tracks. Just skim through it or even skip it altogether. Ulysses is a book to be re-read, not just read once, so don't concern yourself with Episode 3 the first time through. It will make more sense if/when you reread the novel later. (And you should reread it, because you will be amazed at how easy it becomes once you're familiar with the basic plot).
  
  The main reason I'm posting this is to let readers, especially first time readers, know about an essay, "Art and Life, Nature and Culture" by Cheryl Herr, published in "James Joyce's Ulysses: A Casebook." Most articles about Ulysses assume that you agree with the author that Ulysses is a great book, without taking the time to explain WHY it is a great book. Herr's essay explains a few (though definitely not all) of the themes of the novel and why its point is ultimately elusive. Some people get frustrated (I did) thinking that Ulysses is just one big puzzle that can be easily solved if you have the right "key," making it seem mechanical, systematic, and just not fun. This essay challenges that assumption, explaining the mysteries of the novel that can never be fully explained, leaving it open to multiple, even infinite, readings.
  
  Also, although it's necessary to read "A Portrait..." before you read Ulysses, if you don't like "A Portrait," don't worry. I didn't like that novel very much at all (maybe because I'm not Catholic and couldn't appreciate all the passages about sin and hell, but it just didn't get to me) but I loved Ulysses. So don't let a bad experience with that novel dissuade you, either....more info
• Great performance.
  Jim Norton, the actor reading this rendition, is fabulous in all his characters. And he should be: He won the Tony Award this year for Best Featured Actor In A Play. He's Irish, and has exactly the right feel for the piece.
  
  I have only one complaint about this recording: It was recorded at such a low volume that I have to crank my system up to 11 to hear it. But it's worth it!...more info
• I am not qualified to review this book
  I have a BS in English from Ga Tech in the USA. Reading Ulysses was required reading for my degree. Joyce is a great author. Don't read this book unless you must. It's an unfriendly letter written to the world at large: a bravely pounded out and published skull upon a pike at the city gates of Joyce's own mind. Joyce wrote this one work for jerks. He wrote this work for people who cared more for style over substance. Don't read this book. Leave this dark epistle where it is in the store and read Joyce's other works. Let this tome be the tomb of his hatred. Walk away.
  
  Ulysses is still one of the greatest stories I have ever read. However, who in the hell ever reads this book for what it should be: a well written story?
  
  Walk away, turn 30 or 40 or 50, leave college, have a wife and kids or don't, and then come back and read this. And approach Joyce w/o the damn annotations and maps and horse feathers that can only destroy your appreciation of Joyce as an author. If you're reading this review, don't read this book. Read other books and someday . . . read this book only because you want to read this book....more info
• Daylife
  "Ulysses" by James Joyce (1934) is a novel about the interaction of social responsibility and personal desires. It focuses primarily on three characters: Stephen Dedalus a self-absorbed scholar attempting to find his artistic voice, Leopold Bloom who tries to meet his social responsibilities in a culture that is not completely accepting of him, and Molly Bloom (Poldy's wife) who struggles with her feminine destiny.
  
  The novel parallels the structure of Homer's "Odyssey" that chronicles the 10 year struggle of Odysseus to return from war in Troy to his home in Ithaca. Ulysses, the Latin translation of the Greek name Odysseus, is Leopold (Poldy) Bloom who travels the streets of Dublin one Thursday on June 16, 1904. His goal is to accomplish his daily task of meeting his family's economic needs, forming social alliances with Dubliners (including Stephen), and satisfying his own drives for understanding and fulfillment. Odysseus sought to reunite with his wife and assess her fidelity in his absence, and Bloom looks forward to the end of the day when he returns to his home at 7 Eccles Street, concerned about his wife's unfaithfulness.
  
  "Ulysses" is remarkable in its descriptive detail of the physical and psychological environments of Dublin and its characters. The feelings related to immersion in the living Irish city are so strong that there may be some irrational fear of being unable to return to current life. The entrance into the reality of the lives of Stephen, Molly, and Poldy is uncanny as readers become physically and psychically connected to characters. It is a matter of proximity. You lose your own personality as you accompany these people when they converse, walk the streets, visit stores, drink and philosophize, reveal themselves in stream of consciousness monologues, argue, pursue bacchanalian extremes, and have private battles with loss and melancholy.
  
  The reader `sees' everything that day, the external locations and the inner worlds of the characters, with the "ineluctable modality of the visible." This is the direct and complete experience of Joyce's art without the restriction of our own frame of reference, history, obligations, and wants. It is intimidating to realize that your own life is changing, that part of your personal history now contains a new day of your own existence - you have extended your life for a day. Many people throughout the world celebrate a second birthday on June 16 (Bloomsday).
  
  After publication of "Ulysses," I believe that James Joyce (like a few other artists) spent the rest of his life amazed at his creation. As he lay dying in hospital waiting for his wife to return to his bedside, he had to wonder where his inspiration originated, where he summoned the ability to give the gift of another day of life to us all.
  
  The reader can benefit most from "Ulysses" by preparing to read it. Read (re-read) Homers "Odyssey." Pay close attention to the structure, the symbolic content, and the psychology of Odysseus. Odysseus was a flawed hero, externally brave but also self-serving and blind to parts of his own personality (like Bloom). Use "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford to help guide you through the detail of theology, philosophy, psychology, history, rhetoric, and the physical layout of Dublin. This reference work is very good because it allows readers to have their own experiences by providing only supplementary content (facts) that help to understand the myriad allusions presented in the text. I suggest that you enjoy the many beautiful styles of prose presented in the 18 episodes pausing to quickly glance at the definitions in your opened copy of "Ulysses Annotated." Then before reading the next episode, go back and read the complete explanatory entries in this reference book. Give yourself a couple of months to enjoy the novel and add this new day to your life.
  ...more info
• Only a third of it is worth the effort
  This book took me two months of steady reading to finish. I understood about 30% of it. Was it worth it?
  
  Yes:
  
  1. The inner-monologue technique really opened up for me on a second reading, and you realise how close to reality Joyce's representation of inner thought is.
  
  2. The main character is kind of interesting. A bumbling middle-aged man with lots of curiosity for life and sensitivity to others who is subjected to a range of humiliations throughout the day, from the small (being ignored as he says hello) to the highly disturbing (his wife sleeping with another man in their bed). The interesting part is how Bloom deals with these humiliations. Not angry, and not self-consciously depressed - he just continues on with his day and his thoughts, but you sense that these experiences have changed him in some way.
  
  3. There is plenty of interesting commentary on Catholic theology, literary theory, and some of Ireland's history around 1900. If you don't find those subjects interesting, much of this book will bore you.
  
  No:
  
  1. There is no "story". No drama, no build up of suspense, no climax, no resolution. The focus is not on a plot, it is directly on the characters, and to a less interesting extent on the language. Entertainment is hard to come by, unless you are satisfied by faintly humourous banter.
  
  2. Quite a few of the episodes are very self-indulgent. Joyce was a Modernist, so he was trying to play with forms of representation. One of the episodes is written entirely in the form of a song. Good luck making sense of it.
  
  Overall:
  
  The book is not worth reading in toto. But parts of it are. If you want to read the best of the novel, just read the Calypso, Hades, Cyclops, Nausicaa and Penelope episodes. That's about 300 pages, and quite worth the effort. You can read summaries of the rest of the novel from one of the many sites on the net.
  
  P.S. I leave out the episodes featuring Stephen Dedalus because his character is just a regurgitation of all the philosophers he has read. Sounds like a genius at first, but goes nowhere....more info
• Huzza! I made it!
  When I informed a co-worker of my intention to read Ulysses, he replied that his grandmother had read it (as it used to be requisite reading) and pronounced it, "300,000 words about a man crossing the street". That is the sort of dismissal about classical literature that makes me doubly determined to dive in.
  
  Much to my dismay, Ulysses turned out to be 300,000 words about a man crossing the street. Yes, the language is beautiful. Yes, the classical allusions are thought-provoking and on-point. Yes, there is a good deal of lewd behavior and avarice to carry the reader along. Unfortunately Ulysses reminded me why no one writes classical literature any more; its unecessary and outdated verbosity went the way of the Dodo long ago.
  
  When I finally reached Molly's narrative I felt like I was a drowning man finally coming up for air, and when I completed the last line I felt I could finally breathe deep. It's not that Ulysses is unreadable; only that there is little reason to read it in its entirety. Find someone who has edited out everything but the dirty jokes and famously coined phrases in their context and read their edition instead. You'll save yourself 40+ hours....more info
• Don't be afraid to enter the Stream
  I just finished Ulysses (five minutes ago) and was blown away with the psychological insights Joyce was able to display through the characters thought processes' and interactions, both male and female. Once I was able to jump in and ride Joyce's 'Stream of Consciousness'......It was like I was being taken on a wild ride through the human psyche......I'll admit it wasn't easy for me to get into the flow, but once I did I saw why this is often cited as the best book of the 20th century.....
  
  However, getting into the flow was much easier for me than reading some of the ignorant responses to Ulysses posted here. Okay, I'll admit I'm used to blatant ignorance, I live in the United States, but when I saw that two of the most juvenile and mindless responses were from teachers, and one taught literature, I was once again blown away. Luckily, I was able to find some tonic by reading some of the other responses. I haven't lost all hope, there are still a few non-programmed thinkers out there.....
  
  If you are considering reading this book, I strongly suggest you do and I also suggest that before you start it, approach it with an open mind and you'll be taken on a ride you won't soon forget.
  
  ...more info
• A helping hand with Ulysses
  Many others have written in more words than I care to think about concerning the tremendous effort that it takes to read Ulysses, the worth of this expenditure of your time, and of their almost universal admiration for it. There are a few detractors to be sure and Joyce would be ecstatic that his artfulness has indeed led to his "immortality" since he is quoted as saying as much.
  
  I wish to add what seems to be left out almost universally in the many reviews and recommendations. Everywhere you are told to accompany Ulysses by annotations, discussion/interpretation books but almost nowhere are you told to accompany Ulysses by the words Joyce wrote himself. One of the protagonists, Stephen Dedalus, as well as his father Simon, are not first introduced to us in Ulysses. They are introduced in great detail in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". Simon's fall from prosperity to poverty and the impact it has on Stephen/Joyce is crucial background. Understanding that "A Portrait ..." is autobiographical in nature, reveals much about both Joyce and the characters. You are better prepared to meet Stephen with his superior intellect, education, and his feeling of separation from his countrymen and his behavior if you first read "A Portrait ...".
  
  Many of the characters in Ulysses are introduced to us first in the collection of short stories "Dubliners". Easily two dozen characters from the Ulysses, some mentioned only in passing, are much better developed in short stories in Dubliners.
  
  The milieu of Ulysses, as well as the many characters (all meanings intended) Bloom and Dedalus interact with in their meanderings, are better taken in with these two wonderful works helping to embolden you to tackle Ulysses. Both of them are wonderfully approachable, easily read, and are extremely entertaining, full of the wit and wisdom of Joyce. You are certainly more intimately involved with the evolution of Joyce as he proceeds towards Ulysses with these arrows in your quiver.
  
  The structure and basic timeline of the book are dictated by Homer's Odyssey. It is certainly easier to understand why Stephen is Telemachus, Bloom is Odysseus, and Molly is Penelope if you have actually read the Odyssey!
  
  The reviewer goes to Symphony Space on Broadway almost every year for Bloomsday (June 16). Find a similar event near you. Ulysses is a monster "play". It is meant to be enjoyed with others and is much more accessible when experienced aloud. Take the time to understand why people believe this to be the best novel of the 20th century. It will be my favorite forever I am sure.
  
  Lastly, I do not recommend Gabler. It is clearly marked by Amazon and other booksellers as by Joyce and Gabler. Be forewarned that there is much scholarship which seriously detracts from Gabler's additions, subtractions, and modifications as not intended by Joyce. That said, I am absolutely certain that Joyce would have enjoyed the controversy tremendously. Read Ulysses in whatever form you can get it but prepare yourself first with the words and experiences Joyce wanted you to have first....more info
• Good, but far overrated
  firdt off, college english professors, don't bombard me with hate mail (again) because I thought it was just okay, (my own give me that enough). this was an enjoyable read, but that does not make it great. Nor does the fact that it took him seven years to write or was not in ireland at the time, that is impressive, but the book is not. I am not just an uncultured blockhead, I love Joyce, Hemmingway, etc. but this book was not as good as his others. it is bland and pointless. yes he went through a lot to write this, but it took quite a lot to make star wars episode I, case closed...more info
• Mount Everest for Readers
  I can offer little in the way of literary criticism that has not been expounded by scholars about Joyce's masterpiece. What I can offer is the viewpoint of an 'average' reader.
  
  My edition was the 1922 text, and it was prefaced by the original publisher with a simple disclaimer: "The publisher asks the reader's indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances." And it certainly is understandable and necessary: the text is rife with punctuation, spelling and word issues - but it is nearly impossible to tell which are deliberate and which came courtesy of the type setter.
  
  The structure itself is almost more of a literary experiment than a novel. It switches presentations, from interior monologue to grandiose play to question and answers to stream of consciousness. At least that happens in sections, so the reader has some chance of keeping within the structure presented.
  
  I read that Joyce wanted someone to be able to recreate Dublin from the text of this book - that's probably a good way to describe the essence of it. While not every street is named, the character of the city through its inhabitants comes through (often more clearly than what the event does that he is writing about).
  
  It was a struggle to get through this book on my own, and I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it if read as part of a class or discussion group, particularly if there were participants with knowledge of Irish history and specifically Joyce's background. The failings however are more my own versus the text itself.
  ...more info
• Adequate for portability, but not as the main text
  I have read Ulysses a number times and purchased this edition for portability. While the product description indicates the edition is based on the 1984 Gabler edition, the Kindle edition includes a number of errors not present in that text. The company appears to have done a poor job copy editing the final Kindle text. There are a number of typographical errors. Also, in many cases numbers are rendered as letters and visa versa, particularly in the final episode. As Joyce often did not use conventional punctuation, it will be difficult for you to identify them unless you have previously read the book.
  
  If you are reading Ulysses for the first time or for school or study, you should avoid this edition. Its low price makes this edition is useful for casual re-reading....more info
• Tips for reading Ulysses
  Ulysses is not that difficult a book to understand, contrary to what you may have been led to believe. Compared with Finnegans Wake, for instance, it's a cake walk. The book's most frustrating part comes early on, after Stephen leaves his Uncle Richie's house. From here on out, a dictionary (preferably a comprehensive one) becomes invaluable. In my opinion, a good deal of the confusion surrounding Ulysses has arisen out of the fact that most people, upon encountering a word that they do not understand, choose to merely carry on in confusion, as opposed to looking the word up. You would be shocked at how instantly comprehensible this book becomes once a dictionary is employed. Since this book was written as a sort of mock-heroic counterpoint to the Homeric poems, a knowledge of those literary works is also very useful for any competent appreciation of Ulysses....more info
• Oral history
  Stephen Dedalus, Molly Bloom, Milly, Leopold Bloom, Buck Mulligan, and Paddy Dignam, except that Paddy Dignam is dead, (as is poor Rudy), inhabit this tapestry of a book. Dead dog, body bloated, exists just beyond the sands, outside of the Martello tower, Stephen's digs. A dead father, a dead mother populate the story along with sights, smells, but most of all noise-- songs and chants. There are ditties, rhymes, advertisements, sayings remembered, refrains, art songs, Baroque and classical music filling the pages of this book.
  
  There is a great send-up on newspapers and the misinformation embodied in them. Parallels exist with Stephen mourning his mother and Bloom his father. The hectic flush indicates a finished man, a drunkard. Paddy Dignam is dead. Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam considers his last night, boozing.
  
  Molly Bloom is from Gibraltar. Eating liver, Leopold Bloom recalls when Molly laughed at another singer, Ben Dollard, who needed a suit. Poor Mrs. Purefoy has been in labor for three days. Tap, tap, tap sounds the cane of a blind man. Leopold Bloom helps him across the street. Cornelius, Corny, Kelleher is the manager of the funeral establishment. A new character emerges, the citizen. Bloom wants to meet Martin Cunningham about the insurance of Dignam. For an advertisement there must be repetition. That is the secret according to Bloom.
  
  Gerty MacDowell is lady-like, pretty. Words used by Cissy Caffrey embarass her. Another of her companions is Edy Boardman. Gerty wishes that her father had avoided the demon drink. Bloom admires Gerty's beauty and has sympathy for her lameness.
  
  Stephen, a stand-in for the author, uses a self-description of bullock befriending bard. Stephen is seeking a career in literature, and hopes to avoid a career in the church or in journalism. Bloom was warned by his father not to go with drunken goys. Bloom warns Stephen, taking a fatherly interest in his well-being, away from Mulligan.
  
  The most densely written and exciting book of the twentieth century remains exactly that. Its artistry has never been exceeded except, perhaps, in Joyce's FINNEGAN'S WAKE. ...more info
• Greatest novel of the 20th century?
  How should one read Ulysses at the beginning of the 21st century? The Modern English Library rated James Joyce's magnum opus the greatest English-language novel of the 20th century. Was their judgment correct? Perhaps (though a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man does not fall far behind). However, Joyce's novel, which traces the misadventures of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and then Molly Bloom, is of course an echo of the Odyssey. It is also an affirmation of the Hebraic and Hellenic cultures in the West. But that is not really how it should be read. Ulysses is perhaps even more difficult to comprehend now than it was when it was first published in Paris through the Shakespeare Book Co., because Joyce alludes to modernist Irish literature, art, and architecture with breathtaking speed (though it is still far more cogent than Finnegan's Wake). However, you must read Ulysses, it is a rich cathedral of European artistry, from Joyce's command over the vernacular to his groundbreaking `stream-of-consciousness' form. The first section of the novel deals with Stephen, and it can be regarded as a kind of carry-over from a Portrait of the Artist (though a bit more accomplished in form), while the middle section deals with Bloom, one of the strongest characters in the history of Western literature, and certainly one of Joyce's greatest achievements. Bloom is the thrust of the novel. He is the middlebrow that bridges Stephen (the intellectual) with Molly (the tramp), and his observations are the most lucid and revealing about the state of civilization at that time and place. But Ulysses is always funny, and moving and beautiful at the same time. The closing of section one ought to illustrate the strange majesty of Joyce's prose: "He [Stephen] turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship" (51). This curious novel, which unfolds over the course of a single day, will undoubtedly continue to astound and perplex readers and scholars eternally. The way to work your way through Ulysses if it is your first time, is to be mindful of the details; Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is an excellent resource for a listing and explications of the more arcane allusions in Ulysses. Hugh Kenner's critical book is also a first-rate work of criticism for those who want further explication of the `meaning' and significance of the work as a whole. For those who are truly courageous, you can begin to look into the Post-Modernist interpretations of Ulysses from fellows like Derrida and DeMan, but you should be wary of them, as they are often more complex than Joyce was to begin with. ...more info
• A rebuttal of "a rebuttal of "Pretentious intellectual self-absorption""
  I have always considered stream of consciousness as a technique best used for short works in the order of one to ten pages, more than that becomes tiresome.
  
  The author of the review mentioned above points out that in order to understand what's going on, people should read "The New Bloomsday Book", that way they'll save themselves the problem of looking like fools amongst the elites. I'll just say one thing to that; if you need to read a piece of research ("The New Bloomsday Book", etc) in order to appreciate a work of art, visual, literary or otherwise, then the work of art in question has no value whatsoever. I do not need to buy a thick volume on the history, theory and imagery of surrealism to appreciate Dali's paintings, and I sure don't need it to appreciate a work of literature.
  
  And of course there is the "you didn't like/understand it, you're a fool" attitude, very common between so called intellectuals and college poseurs, but, what could anyone do but laugh at that?...more info
• I much prefer the Gabler editon
  I received a copy of this for Christmas many years ago, but before that I used to have a copy of the Ulysses (Gabler Edition) (which is the complete book the way that Joyce would have preferred were it not for censorious typesetters). Comparing both versions, I sadly report that the Modern Library edition is just a lesser work compared to Joyce's true, uncensored vision. Believe it or not, this edition is the bowlderized one...and it still ended up being confiscated due to the Comstock Act! Strange, but true.
  
  As a historical document, the Forward is a wonderful reason to buy this version because it says so darned much about the times in which the obscenity trial took place. Just make sure you can get your hands on the Gabler edition as well to compare notes. You'll see what I mean about the difference between the two. But that's only because I'm a Lit nerd. This may be a passable edition, but it's just not as strong as it could have been due to all the mucking about that was done with the original text during Joyce's lifetime....more info
• Not a novel and not not a novel
  I don't think its helpful to read Ulysses as a novel. If you expect a plot, or a tale or character arcs, or realism, or accessible prose, you will be frustrated. Would you read the Bible with those expectations? Or the Odyssey? And those books along with Hamlet are touchstones for Ulysses but also the caliber of the company Joyce's great book keeps. So how is Ulysses a novel? It has characters that we follow and whose psychology is revealed to us. It uses narrative to move along story elements through the eighteen episodes (though clearly not chapters so more evidence of it not being a novel). There is Bloom's letter to Martha, Boylan's date with Molly and Stephen's homeless fate. Ulysses uses the novel to both explode that form and to honor it as an artistic expression. This aspect of the book; its subverted novelistic qualities is what gives Ulysses its forbidding reputation as unreadable or as pointlessly obscure.
  
  The pleasure in reading Ulysses is not novelistic, it is humanistic, it is to ruminate on the existence of Western Civilization. It is to experience connections to our mythic past and our primal present. It is to ponder where our flawed, suffering, imaginative, humanity will take us as we move through the century beyond the Joyce's creation. More than that it's a chance to contemplate our own capacity for contradiction, ambiguity, creativity, perversity, cleverness and fantasy.
  
  Joyce isn't just showing off his genius. He is displaying the full range of it so that we can participate in it and take of it what we can, if we can and be not afraid of not making sense. There are deeper truths than simple comprehension and Joyce tantalizes us with glimpses of what they could be. ...more info