Product Description

Ulysses has been the subject of controversy since copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York Post Office authorities. Today critical interest centres on the authority of the text, and this edition, complete with an invaluable Introduction, notes, and appendices, republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105788 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1056 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession". None of these descriptions, 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 its own 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 astonishing 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 could 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 inforgettable Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, loiter, 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 accordion-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 naïve 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

From the Publisher
Redesigned edition of classic from leading Joyce expert
Ulysses is unquestionably one of the most celebrated novels in the English language, and the text most expressive of the psyche of modern man and woman. It tells the sadly comic story of Leopold Bloom, a good man led by love, who on an otherwise ordinary day is forced to contemplate the void of uncertainty in which we all stand. Danis Rose, one of the world's leading experts on James Joyce, has produced a timely reappraisal of the history of Joyce's writing - a Ulysses for our time. "A fine and loyal act of restoration" Robert McCrum, Observer; "This edition may be the handy, usable Ulysses that we have been waiting for" Fritz Senn, Director, Zurich James Joyce Foundation

Customer Reviews

The Great Universal Urban Novel
Irish dramatists have recently been criticised for continuing to focus on the stereotype stage-Oirish rural Catholic family à la Synge and ignoring the trendy urban wanabees of today who more closely resemble their cousins in Mannheim, Milan or Manchester.

I'm not sure what they're saying about the novelists but apart from McGahern's books they all seem to be about people living in apartments in Dublin 4. Maybe that's because James Joyce was the man who invented the Great Universal Urban Novel by publishing Ulysses back in 1922.

Dublin on 16th June 1904 (the location and date of 'Ulysses') was far more sophisticated and 'multicultural' than it was to be at any time again up to the mid 1990s - that world was banjaxed by the likes of the Legion of Mary and an extreme Catholic Jansenism and isolation that set in with Independence in 1922. (On the negative side Dublin back then also had a third world type gap between rich and poor - with a rate of infant mortality only exceeded in the British Empire by Calcutta).

Ulysses ranges over a plethora of modern sounding topics: relationships, sex, the press, publicity and advertising, popular culture and music, adultery, nationalist posturing and political cynicism, alienation, racial and ethnic prejudice, technology and consumerism - to name just a few. The book's two major characters are both outsiders in the traditional Irish sense - Leopold Bloom is a Jew and Stephen Dedalus a disaffected and now agnostic Catholic.

Joyce does it all in deadpan comic fashion interspersed with parodies of other writers' style. He employs all kinds of cinematic techniques with flashbacks, dissolves and close ups (Joyce was very interested in film and actually opened Dublin's first cinema - the Volta - in 1909, but he didn't prove a great entrepreneur). The technique par excellence in Ulysses is the 'stream of consciousness' e.g. of Molly (Mrs Bloom) in the famously dirty last chapter - Joyce admitted he actually got this technique from an obscure French writer.

If you haven't read Ulysses yet don't be put off by it's hearsay reputation of difficulty - apart from a small number of passages it's easier than many literary modern novels - let me give Captain Corelli's Mandolin as an example - don't confuse it with Finnegans Wake which is another matter altogether. There's lots of excellent stuff on the internet to help you but one thing you'll need to do is to get hold of a good map of Dublin.

Read Ulysses for fun? Are you mad? Er, well no actually
Nearly everybody knows about Joyce's extravagant depiction of one day in early 20th century Dublin, and almost nobody has actually read it (unless forced to do so at school).

The length of the book, the legendary "difficulty" of the English, even the lack of punctuation, all serve to make most potential readers queasy. This perception is enhanced by the enormous volume of secondary writing on the book and Joyce himself. Everything about the text seems to be a license for academics to be pretentious and superiour. Read Ulysses for pleasure? Are you mad? Have you been down the pub with Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus?

As far as I am aware, I am neither mad nor drunk, but I do recommend holding one's literary breath and plunging into this masterpiece.

This book is truly an extraordinary novel. Joyce is a master at depicting and analysing mankind. His ability to describe human emotions on both a concious and sub-concious level is amazing. I am not saying it is easy. To be honest, there are large parts of the book that even after re-reading are way over my head, but too many believe that the book is beyond them. One should not focus on the bad, but the good, and the overall effect of the novel is nothing short of awesome.

So go on, ignore the stigma and the prejudice.

Read Ulysses, for fun.

Unique, incredible, momentous...and difficult
So much has been written about this book in the past eighty years that its reputation alone is enough to dissuade some readers. I think that the reviews printed here reflect the balance of opinion about it, both why it is so revered and why some describe it as being unreadable. For what it is worth, 'Ulysses' is, for me, one of the most sublime monuments in world literature, a book unlike any other, and one that deserves a place among the very small number of classics that should be enjoyed for centuries to come. However, I do understand those that have struggled and failed with it.
Firstly, to like this book is not 'pretentious'. It is perhaps my pretension that made me read it and want to understand it to begin with, but certainly not my pretension that made me enjoy it. These are not to be confused. Secondly, it is 'difficult'. If someone tells you otherwise, I would like to know what they are comparing it to. Joyce's language is convoluted and obscure, and often important events are referred to so obliquely that they bypassed me if my attention was wandering. I have read the book twice and realised that I missed much the first time round. However, the rewards for sticking with it are huge. Thirdly, don't let the scholarly dissection of the book put you off. There are a lot of themes underpinning the book, not least the explicit parallels with the 'Odyssey' and the slightly more implicit theme of the relationships between fathers and sons (paralleled by a reference to Hamlet that runs through the book). However, it would be wrong to view 'Ulysses' as some sort of puzzle to be solved. It is, very simply, a book about a man (Bloom/Daedalus/Joyce) and about Ireland in 1904. For all its scholarly overtones it is about a day in the life of an everyman. He isn't a hero, he doesn't save the world or fight the bad guy and, paradoxically, this should make it more, not less, accessible to most readers. If you are able to overcome the complex structure (which becomes one of the book's joys, honest) and lack of plot then the odyssey through a single day and a single language, and a single city becomes the most incredible journey in literature. I have read it twice, and both times I was unable to out the book out of my head for several days after I had out it down. It felt more like having an important life moment than simply reading a book. I read a lot, but only a couple of books make me feel this way, and this is one. If this (admittedly pretentious sounding) review doesn't put you off, then please make the effort to read this book. It really is worth it.