I’ve made several serious attempts to read Ulysses during the course of my life. Each time I’ve given up, repeatedly being driven to the same conclusion: Ulysses is drivel.
LOL! Same conclusion I came to. And I read a LOT of it but after a while I realized Joyce must have been drunk most of the time he wrote it. If you ever heard the story, he was dictating to someone while writing parts of it and the person made a mistake and Joyce said “leave in in”
Likewise with Finnegan's Wake.
I just don't like it.
Dickens, Steinbeck, Jane Austen, Bronte, et al - I could read them all day long.
Joyce? Just a bore.
If you enjoy symbolism, it is a fascinating book. However you’re also correct.
I relied on interpretations by scholars whose lectures were often more interesting than the book and highly debatable. I also listened to cassette tapes along with a book of an annotated compilation of historical references and meaning.
It was a lot of work but also an insight to another way of thinking about the world.
But I sometimes had the feeling I was having my leg yanked.
Do you think this is difficult to understand or boring?
—
The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one of the jarvies with the request:
—You don’t happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you?
The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the keeper took a die of plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was passed from hand to hand.
—Thank you, the sailor said. He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow stammers, proceeded:
—We come up this morning eleven o’clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this afternoon. There’s my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.
In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket and handed to his neighbour a not very cleanlooking folded document.
—You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked, leaning on the counter.
—Why, the sailor answered upon reflection upon it, I’ve circumnavigated a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage. I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea, the Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. Gospodi pomilyou. That’s how the Russians prays.
—You seen queer sights, don’t be talking, put in a jarvey.
—Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an anchor same as I chew that quid.
He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his teeth, bit ferociously:
—Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.
He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The printed matter on it stated: Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia.
All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.
—Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can’t bear no more children. See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse’s liver raw.
His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for several minutes if not more.
—Know how to keep them off? he inquired generally.
Nobody volunteering a statement he winked, saying:
—Glass. That boggles ’em. Glass.
Absolutely spot on. The book is awful.
Maybe starting at the beginning of the book was the problem. :) That said the art of 'getting into a person's head' is so common in today's modern novels it's easy to miss what a breakthrough this was.
AGREED!
And THAT is why it is declared “extraordinary, monumental, deep and meaningful...by pinhead nut cases.
Just my opinion.
Agreed. I think Ulysses is a metaphor for The Progressive Woke.
I only took one shot at Ulysses. It seems to be a work for those who need to signal their high view of themself.
The sexual content in the first pages is just voyeuristic pandering. Was James Joyce just early version of MI5/6 and CIA looking for maniacs?
I will take Don Quixote over Ulysses anyday.
Same thing here, never could get pass the first few pages.
I hope you give it another chance some day. It’s a wonderful work. I find it deeply moving.