Matthew Ted's review of Ulysses (original) (raw)

Goodreads Choice Awards 2024 Opening Round

Discover new books on Goodreads

Meet your next favorite book

Matthew Ted's Reviews > Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce

Ulysses
by

57003346

22nd book of 2022.

2nd reading. Reading Ulysses again, which I didn’t imagine doing until the end of this year, but couldn’t resist starting it on its birthday, opened up many more doors within it. As well as having read Ellmann’s brilliant biography on him, too. Ithaca still makes me laugh the most, and it was Joyce’s own favourite too: I see why. I also adore Hades. Bloom’s humanity is restorative to read in the time we are living in right now. There’s something about getting to the end of the novel, 900+ pages, and realising that it’s just one day, it makes you realise the hugeness and, at the same time, smallness of life. The book is a masterpiece and it’s sad that so many people never even try it because of its reputation, which honestly taints it. There are hard bits, no doubt, but the general feeling of the novel, its illuminating ordinariness, completely outweighs that. And above it’s funny, funnier than Pynchon and Wallace and the postmodernists on the whole. It’s honest, funny, surprising (still!), filled with piss and semen and menstrual blood and shit, it’s filled with dirty streets and spots, drunken men, adulterers, prostitutes, but actually, it’s probably one of the best books about life ever written. Joyce once said to Djuna Barnes, ‘A writer should never write about the extraordinary. That is for the journalist.’ And yet, his writing of the ordinary is so extraordinary. Just like last time, when I put it down for the day and went out walking, I felt like I was inside Ulysses, or somehow Ulysses was outside of me, all around me. One of those books that does get close to being somewhat, somehow, life changing.

ULYSSES FAST FACTS FROM RICHARD ELLMANN’S JAMES JOYCE

—‘Leopold was the first name of Signorina Popper’s father in Trieste; Bloom was the name of two or three families who lived in Dublin when Joyce was young.’
—Leopold Bloom was partly based off the man who would later be known as Italo Svevo.
—‘Ezra Pound, for example, insists that the purpose of using the Odyssey is merely structural, to give solidity to a relatively plotless work. But for Joyce the counterpoint was important because it revealed something about Bloom, about Homer, and about existence.’
—Asked why he entitled his book Ulysses, Joyce replied, ‘It is my system of working.’’
—‘The theme of Ulysses is simple, and Joyce achieves it through the characters of Bloom, Molly, and Stephen. Casual kindness overcomes unconscionable power.’
—‘In later life Carr, who loathed the sight of Joyce, told his wife unconcernedly that Joyce had presented him as a bullying villain in Ulysses.’
—‘He worked 1,000 hours by his own calculation on the episode [Oxen and the Sun].’
—After finishing Circe he commented, ‘‘I think it is the strongest thing I have written.’’
—But ‘then he hurried on to Ithaca, which he described to Miss Weaver as my ‘last (and stormiest) cape,’ ‘the ugly duckling of the book and therefore, I suppose, my favourite.’’
—‘Perhaps I have tried to do too much in this book,’ he worried.’
—Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who was translating Ulysses, actually came up with the final word. It ended with ‘I will’ and Benoist-Méchin said it should be ‘Yes’. They argued for hours until Joyce said, ‘‘Yes, you’re right. The book must end with yes. It must end with the most positive word in the human language.’’
—‘‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read,’ Joyce replied, ‘life isn’t fit to live.’’
—‘Joyce announced proudly that the unused notes [of _Ulysses_] weighed twelve kilos.
—'When a young man came up to him and Zurich and said, 'May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?' Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, 'No, it did lots of other things too.’’
____________________

1st reading, 2019. Now, I have a lot to say. Firstly, my reading of this book has been a secret. I say secret like anyone cared anyway. I didn’t take it out with me, I didn’t put it on Goodreads and I told none of my reader friends. I read it in bed late into the night and early in the morning.

I actually started Ulysses to get over heartbreak. I read in a book once about a man who had his heart broken so he translated the whole of Don Quixote to take his mind off things. As a four year relationship of mine ended and I suddenly felt like I was floating in a limbo with all this free time and sudden loneliness. So, on the 31st August, I picked up the hardest and most intimidating thing on my bookcase simply to occupy me, like translating Don Quixote. I had no intention or idea that I would ever finish it – especially not a month later, today, on the 1st October. It’s a shame September doesn’t have 31 days so it could have been the 31st to the 31st of the following month but 31st to the 1st still has a nice ring, I guess.

Before I talk about the book itself, I want to say one more thing. During my time at University, I, partly jokingly and partly not, hated on James Joyce. I read Dubliners and didn’t get along with it. My housemate started Ulysses so it became a joke between us to hate on it, and Joyce. It was the usual. God, he’s so arrogant! Who would even read it! It’s not even a novel! You can imagine us, in our early twenties, bumming around our student home, talking badly about Joyce. It’s where Martin Amis went wrong, being too young and talking badly about some literary greats. Some people hold their beliefs about Joyce though, there are some horribly negative (funnily so) reviews on Goodreads for this book. I’ve read them many times, before even reading the first page. We all know the most famous one: Life’s just too damn short to read Ulysses.

You can imagine my surprise then, as the pages were disappearing behind me and I wasn’t despising the book, not at all, I was enjoying it. There was a time near the beginning when I considered dropping it. There’s so many other things I want to read, what’s the point in sticking to this? I only picked it up in an emotional low, I didn’t really mean it. But then I thought, no, I’ve picked it up. Let’s see where this goes. Halfway through I was thinking, I want to try and get it done before Christmas. And then the pages kept flashing by. I began enjoying it more and more. Until, I read over one hundred pages yesterday and finished it in bed this morning.

My first thought on finishing? I want to go back and read the whole thing again. On reflection, all the most wildest images and scenes are returning to me? It’s like coming out of a stupor; it’s strange reading about one day in Dublin over a whole month of your life. So much happened to me and the characters were reflecting on things I read two weeks ago, but it was only their morning. I bring back the image of Buck Mulligan shaving in the beginning, or picking noses on the beach, or masturbating on the beach, or fireworks, lame legs, men becoming women and giving birth to eight children, dead mothers bursting in manifestation, Stephen getting knocked out in the street, the wandering rocks, the citizen, the phonetic sounds in the beginning of the Sirens… In other words, utter madness. But in all that madness (and me researching alongside the madness to check I’ve understood the madness) the strangest clarity. The strangest sense of understanding without possibly, truly understanding.

I recently had a poetry lecture by a lecturer well loved who comes out with the best lines and explanations, you can’t help but write them down. He said (on poetry):

“No one asks what classical music means, they just let it happen. People seem to think that they need to beat a confession out of a poem and if it doesn’t confess, it’s a bad poem. I would say to that, you’re just a bad torturer, and a bad reader.”

Partly, I think this is applicable to Ulysses. Of course, I’m not saying that if you don’t understand it or don’t read it or dislike it you’re a bad reader. But for me, the madness of Ulysses can sometimes be felt or perceived rather than wholly understood. I didn’t understand every single word, far from it, but it didn’t stop me enjoying the book, following the plot and the feelings of the characters. I’ve spent a long time saying many things about Joyce and I take a lot of them back, not all of them, but a lot of them. There’s no denying this novel is one of the greatest things ever written. As an aspiring writer it’s opened a million doorways in one novel about what’s possible. How did this come out of Joyce’s brain? How is this even possible? It seems extraordinary to look at the book now and know what it contains between it’s pages. It’s uncanny. A script within a novel? A question and answer during a novel? Bursting into the dreams and the subconscious of characters, a chapter with no punctuation, and all those made-up words. It is, really, a masterpiece. And if you know me, it’s surprising that I would say that. My favourite two episodes by far were Circe and Ithaca. The book gets considerably both harder and more enjoyable towards the end. Some chapters I didn’t care for as much, but that’s the same with all books, right?

So, I haven’t given it five stars because it’s Ulysses. I’ve given it five stars because it is a feat, whether you like it or not. It’s one of the most ambitious things I’ve ever read and Joyce created this, came up this, made this world, this single day, out of only words. It also shows me the power of words, that literally anything is possible. Maybe, only if you’re as smart as Joyce though.

To those who want to read it, I would say just try. Let your mind open its pores and let Ulysses in. It’s worth it. It's mad and funny and powerful and original and it has changed my writing too. I now understand how Ulysses has changed the world of novels forever. I just want the whole thing to start over from the beginning. And two months ago I could never imagine reading more than ten pages of it. Ulysses is a masterpiece. Joyce, I’m sorry about what I’ve said in the past. I was wrong. And that’s something I never admit to being: wrong.

Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read_Ulysses_.

Sign In »

Reading Progress

February 27, 2018 – Shelved

February 27, 2018 – Shelved as:to-read

August 31, 2019 –Started Reading

October 1, 2019 – Shelved as:to-read

October 1, 2019 –Finished Reading

February 2, 2022 –Started Reading

February 2, 2022 –3.54% "2nd reading commences. I had the feeling I wanted to read this again this year, wondered about June time as I'll be in Paris again (and how fitting) but it turns out I could not resist starting it today on its 100th birthday and J.A.J.'s birthday too."

February 2, 2022 –6.86% "Part I done; already I'm feeling the difference in understanding. Proteus was way more enjoyable than my first reading, all those rambling thoughts and ending it with nose-picking, it's just wonderful. Plus some of the sentences, gems like, 'mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb.'

It's no longer his birthday here in England. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman."

February 6, 2022 –21.44% "Love the Hades episode still, just brilliant. Aeolus less so, but quite like the newspaper headline style going on. Plus the 'K.M.A' as 'kiss my arse' and 'K.M.R.I.A.' as 'kiss my royal Irish arse' will never get old, 100 years old and still makes me smirk. But not as much as Bloom looking at the 'I.N.R.I' on the priest's back and thinking, 'iron nails ran in': genius."

February 9, 2022 –32.15% "Into Wandering Rocks which I didn't like much on my first reading but I'm appreciating more now, seeing how Joyce has all the characters crossing one another's paths, a giant dirty web of Dublin."

February 13, 2022 –48.23% "Anti-Semites throw biscuit tins."

February 18, 2022 –64.31% "Should be done next week. Oxen and the Sun is still quite the enigma, the end is just Joyce stretching his legs a little before Finnegans Wake. And, like when reading Finnegans Wake, it works far better when read aloud."

February 21, 2022 –76.63% "Circe really is something else. Actually got huge Gravity's Rainbow vibes from it, which I hadn't read when I first read Ulysses."

February 23, 2022 –85.74% "What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom's thought about Stephen? He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not."

February 24, 2022 –Finished Reading

Comments Showing 1-31 of 31 (31 new)

back to top

Add a reference:

Search for a book to add a reference

add: link cover

Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.

Login animation