Review: Ulysses by James Joyce

Formats available on Project Gutenberg: HTML, EPUB, Kindle, Plucker, QiOO Mobile, Plain text UTF-8.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is the magnum opus of this great Irish writer. In the novel, Joyce expands the use of stream of consciousness that he began in Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Ulysses was, however, written before he became so wrapped up in stream of consciousness that he gave us the nearly unintelligible Finnegan’s Wake.

The novel plots a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he makes his way though Dublin in 1904. That sounds fairly straightforward, but Joyce manages to connect this simple idea with the whole of Homer’s Odyssey and includes a myriad of puns, alternate meanings, allusions, deep characterizations and a fair chunk of humor. The novel is over 260,000 words, and uses a lexicon of more than 30,000. Just think about that for a moment. Does your vocabulary run to that much?

Ulysses is generally regarded as one of — if not the — most important Modernist novel. Joyce was not a prolific writer and this work took him at least seven years to finish. It was first published as a serial before being published as a complete book in 1922. The edition on Gutenberg is based on the pre-1923 print versions. This will allow you to take some small part in the still ongoing ‘Joyce Wars’: the academic discussions around the definitive text of Ulysses. If it wasn’t enough that the story itself attracted the controversy of being involved in an obscenity trial that led to it being banned in the United States for a time (Episode 18 is the problem), there is also controversy over the changes made, by editors, to Joyce’s reputedly poor spelling and punctuation in various editions.

I have already read Joyce’s Ulysses several times — and probably still don’t understand a majority of the references — but I really enjoyed the Gutenberg version. Somehow this Irish exile writing nearly a century ago seems to reach me better from the glow of my PC screen. The print editions I have picked up over the years have always been second-hand or from the library, and are usually filled with ‘helpful’ notes from previous readers. The ebook is well set out and its use of a decent sized font and hard line breaks are much appreciated.

There can be no doubt that Ulysses is a work of genius. A professor at university told me that it was the “greatest prose writing in the English language”, but despite that academic endorsement it’s still fairly accessible to mere mortals like myself. So what do you think? Is it the greatest twentieth century novel? If not, what would be your suggestion?

* * * * *

Paul Callaghan is a freelance online-writer and marketer. He welcomes the chance to discuss any of your writing needs such as website copy, articles, blogging,email campaigns, SEO, business letters, editing, proofreading etc. You can see samples of his writing at www.callaghanwrites.blogspot.com