MJ Nicholls's review of Ulysses (original) (raw)

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MJ Nicholls's Reviews > Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce

Ulysses
by

2386804

First, about the haste. This book is a page-turner. Forget Stephen King. Joyce is the man you read in bed, furiously tongue-fingering the pages to see what seminal modernist technique he invents, masters, inverts, spins on its head like a circus freak with a whirligig in his bonce. The first five episodes set the pace perfectly, setting the reader up for the all-singing all-dancing feats of outrageous showboating that follow in the remaining thirteen chapters, each adding a few Jenga blocks to the superseding chapters to challenge the reader and keep her on her toes. Look, Joyce loves his reader! He’s the most unpatronising author this side of L.L. Cool J.! Joyce believes in you. He believes everyone has the capacity within them to crack his boggling Enigma code, and if that isn’t some heartwarming Sunday school moral, what is? So what if Joyce was wrong and every reader would need The New Bloomsday Book merely to scratch the surface of this amorphous, expanding superbrain of a book? Ulysses is an infinite novel. Unlike Finnegans Wake, where every attempt at some semblance of lucidity and meaning falls flat—the book a distant satellite fated to drift forever in space—Ulysses is an infinitely re-readable supernova of emotional and intellectual replenishment. Pure aesthetic pleasure. Everything that followed Ulysses expanded, plundered and rehashed Ulysses. It was the end and beginning of literature. If you like any books at all, anything post-Ulysses, you’re an ideal candidate to read Ulysses. It will break your heart, and your brain. End of.

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Reading Progress

August 12, 2012 –Started Reading

August 12, 2012 – Shelved

August 12, 2012 –11.47% "First five episodes licked."

August 13, 2012 –25.19% "Hades, Aeolus, The Lestrygonians done. Thumping good read, this."

August 14, 2012 –48.23% "Scylla and Charybdis, The Wandering Rocks, The Sirens and The Cyclops blitzed. What an exhausting delight!"

August 15, 2012 –75.46% "Nausicaa, Oxen of the Sun and Circe, conquered. BLOODY HELL."

August 16, 2012 –96.68% "Eumaeus, Ithaca done, halfway through Penelope. My stamina is shot for the day so I'll finish tomorrow, oh Yes. Obviously I think this book is a staggering headblasting mindexpanding novel of such relentless cleverness and heartbreak I can barely stutter out a single English sentence in praise. I'll try tomorrow."

August 17, 2012 – Shelved as:novels

August 17, 2012 –Finished Reading

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