Product Description

Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it. It was never meant to be an abstruse a book for the elite, argues Declan Kiberd. It is a book for the common people, and offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book's hero, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante and the Bible (on all of which Joyce drew in the writing of his book).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48577 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize in 1995. It is one of the most influential works on Irish culture published in the last twenty years. His Irish Classics came out in 2000 and won the prestigious Lannan Prize in the USA. He is the Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin and is a widely respected broadcaster, critic and reviewer.

Customer Reviews

Enthusiastic, But Not A Beginner's Guide
First of all, I enjoyed the book and it made me want to read Ulysses again (which I'm doing now), so it certainly achieved something. Declan Kiberd is an eloquent enthusiast and advocate for Joyce. And I loved his idea that you should treat Ulysses like a favourite album, and skip the bits you don't like - a refreshingly liberating approach to a book that can drag at times.

I was disappointed, though, that the author assumes you will know Ulysses fairly well already. So, for example, he refers to the "Ithaca" chapter, or the "Eumaeus" chapter, and you're supposed to know which they are. And in his discussion of the Oxen of the Sun sequence, in which Joyce parodies a number of old styles of written English, again, you're already supposed to know which bits parody which styles (I don't - I wouldn't know a parody or an original passage by John Henry Newman if my chips came wrapped in it).

And I wish Professor Kiberd didn't regard every activity that comes to nothing as "masturbatory", or every group activity like a sing-along as a form of orgasm. But maybe that's what studying Joyce does to you?

It's a good read if, like me, you're an amateur fan and want some insights and a good reason to take the original down from the shelves. But does anyone seriously think any more that reading a novel - even Ulysses - will change the way you live..?

Readable and helpful guide
This is a readable and entertaining guide to Ulysses, attempting to place Joyce's book back in the hands of the ordinary citizen rather than the academic. Thoroughly recommended to all fans of Joyce and to those who would like to dip a toe into the Irish sea.