Product Description

This revised volume follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4638 in Books
• Published on: 1990-06-16
• Released on: 1990-06-16
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 783 pages

Amazon.com
Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, 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 a close-focus sort of 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 sheer 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 might 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 indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, 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 accordian 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 naive 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

The New York Times Book Review, Dr. Joseph Collins
Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the 20th century. It will immortalize its author ...

Review
"Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua immortalized Rabelais, and The Brothers Karamazov immortalized Dostoyevsky.... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence."
-The New York Times

"To my mind one of the most significant and beautiful books of our time."
-Gilbert Seldes, in The Nation

"Talk about understanding "feminine psychology"-- I have never read anything to surpass it, and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it."
-Arnold Bennett

"In the last pages of the book, Joyce soars to such rhapsodies of beauty as have probably never been equaled in English prose fiction."
-Edmund Wilson, in The New Republic


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

A helping hand with Ulysses
Many others have written in more words than I care to think about concerning the tremendous effort that it takes to read Ulysses, the worth of this expenditure of your time, and of their almost universal admiration for it. There are a few detractors to be sure and Joyce would be ecstatic that his artfulness has indeed led to his "immortality" since he is quoted as saying as much.

I wish to add what seems to be left out almost universally in the many reviews and recommendations. Everywhere you are told to accompany Ulysses by annotations, discussion/interpretation books but almost nowhere are you told to accompany Ulysses by the words Joyce wrote himself. One of the protagonists, Stephen Dedalus, as well as his father Simon, are not first introduced to us in Ulysses. They are introduced in great detail in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". Simon's fall from prosperity to poverty and the impact it has on Stephen/Joyce is crucial background. Understanding that "A Portrait ..." is autobiographical in nature, reveals much about both Joyce and the characters. You are better prepared to meet Stephen with his superior intellect, education, and his feeling of separation from his countrymen and his behavior if you first read "A Portrait ...".

Many of the characters in Ulysses are introduced to us first in the collection of short stories "Dubliners". Easily two dozen characters from the Ulysses, some mentioned only in passing, are much better developed in short stories in Dubliners.

The milieu of Ulysses, as well as the many characters (all meanings intended) Bloom and Dedalus interact with in their meanderings, are better taken in with these two wonderful works helping to embolden you to tackle Ulysses. Both of them are wonderfully approachable, easily read, and are extremely entertaining, full of the wit and wisdom of Joyce. You are certainly more intimately involved with the evolution of Joyce as he proceeds towards Ulysses with these arrows in your quiver.

The structure and basic timeline of the book are dictated by Homer's Odyssey. It is certainly easier to understand why Stephen is Telemachus, Bloom is Odysseus, and Molly is Penelope if you have actually read the Odyssey!

The reviewer goes to Symphony Space on Broadway almost every year for Bloomsday (June 16). Find a similar event near you. Ulysses is a monster "play". It is meant to be enjoyed with others and is much more accessible when experienced aloud. Take the time to understand why people believe this to be the best novel of the 20th century. It will be my favorite forever I am sure.

Lastly, I do not recommend Gabler. It is clearly marked by Amazon and other booksellers as by Joyce and Gabler. Be forewarned that there is much scholarship which seriously detracts from Gabler's additions, subtractions, and modifications as not intended by Joyce. That said, I am absolutely certain that Joyce would have enjoyed the controversy tremendously. Read Ulysses in whatever form you can get it but prepare yourself first with the words and experiences Joyce wanted you to have first.

Great performance.
Jim Norton, the actor reading this rendition, is fabulous in all his characters. And he should be: He won the Tony Award this year for Best Featured Actor In A Play. He's Irish, and has exactly the right feel for the piece.

I have only one complaint about this recording: It was recorded at such a low volume that I have to crank my system up to 11 to hear it. But it's worth it!

I am not qualified to review this book
I have a BS in English from Ga Tech in the USA. Reading Ulysses was required reading for my degree. Joyce is a great author. Don't read this book unless you must. It's an unfriendly letter written to the world at large: a bravely pounded out and published skull upon a pike at the city gates of Joyce's own mind. Joyce wrote this one work for jerks. He wrote this work for people who cared more for style over substance. Don't read this book. Leave this dark epistle where it is in the store and read Joyce's other works. Let this tome be the tomb of his hatred. Walk away.

Ulysses is still one of the greatest stories I have ever read. However, who in the hell ever reads this book for what it should be: a well written story?

Walk away, turn 30 or 40 or 50, leave college, have a wife and kids or don't, and then come back and read this. And approach Joyce w/o the damn annotations and maps and horse feathers that can only destroy your appreciation of Joyce as an author. If you're reading this review, don't read this book. Read other books and someday . . . read this book only because you want to read this book.