| Product: |
Ulysses - James Joyce |
| Date: |
12/05/08 (136 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: The best reading experience ever
Disadvantages: It ends... I will read it again and again and again...
Ulysses by James Joyce
For me, James Joyce's Ulysses is not just a novel; it is a complete project. When I first read the book a couple of years ago, I was very apprehensive; I prepared some reference books and articles from the Internet, took a deep breath, and yet was unsure as to whether I would be able to appreciate such a difficult book properly. The novel has the same structure of The Odyssey, and I honestly don't remember which one of the two I read first, but I don't believe that reading Homer's epic is a prerequisite for reading Joyce's twentieth century epic.
As I mentioned earlier, there are so many guides that can help you read this book, and this is one of the books in which reading a summary won't spoil your enjoyment, but to make things easier and more fun, I advise you to take a look at Ulysses for Dummies, which summarizes the books using basic moving pictures <http://home.bway.net/hunger/ch1-ulys.html>. In short, the huge 1040 page novel describes a single day in the life of a young man called Stephen Dedalus, an older man called Leopold Bloom, and ends with the ideas of Bloom's wife, Molly. Well, things are not that simple. Each chapter in Ulysses has a different structure, for instance, one of the chapters is written in the form of a play with nothing but a dialogue and no narration, another fantastic chapter follows the development of the English language, and the last famous chapter which concentrates on Molly Bloom has no punctuation marks.
The reason why reading a summary of the novel before reading it is not a problem here is because the novel is not about the seemingly trivial incidents that happen in it, replacing thereby the fantastical stories that take place in The Odyssey, but rather about what you detect from them, and how, according to you, the lives of Stephen and Mr. Bloom are related.
I wrote this review merely to encourage those of you who haven't read this spectacular book to read it as soon as possible, or to add it to the list of books you should read before you die. About the reading experience, I say, the beginning of the novel was somewhat mysterious for me, but bit by bit you become accustomed to Joyce's style and reading becomes much easier for you. I definitely advise you to read other simpler books by Joyce, like Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, before reading this one, to know what you should expect from Ulysses, or even to meet Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait.
Surprisingly, there is actually an adaptation of this strange novel that I watched myself, and it is a 1967 film called Ulysses. The black and white film which is directed by Joseph Strick gives a good idea of the novel, and you might be interested in watching it if you were one of the enthusiastic fans of James Joyce, like me. I couldn't find the film on Amazon, but I borrowed it from a public library.
Happy reading!
<<< Price and Book Info >>>
Price: £6.49 from Amazon
Paperback: 1040 pages
Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (30 Mar 2000)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0141182806
ISBN-13: 978-0141182803
Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13 x 4.3 cm
Summary: The epic of the twentieth century.
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