From the back cover:

"For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921, 'Ulysses' has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction that 'Ulysses' is 'an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments'.

This edition is the standard Random House / Bodley Head text that first appeared in 1960."

Picked up cheaply, especially for May's 'Irish'-themed BC Meetup in York.

Of course, a score of 6 out of 10 on some levels doesn't entirely do justice to what is undoubtedly a momumental achievement of a book ('monumental' in both senses) - it is purely my own personal rating.

I first encountered and 'studied' it at University - and got a mark of, I think, 81% for my essay on it. However, I have to confess now that, at that stage, I hadn't read more than the first few pages of it before finding it impenetratable, giving up on it and instead reading around a bunch of critical essays on it... before cobbling something together that I (luckily correctly, as it turned out) guessed might satisfy the markers.

I then came back to it many years later and finally tackled it. It took FOREVER (I am a pretty slow reader) and can I say it was worth it? Well, yes and no. It was certainly An Experience. Most of it almost certainly went over my head and the many, many literary / mythical / political allusions and satire were probably largely lost on me. And this aspect made it very tough going and, at times, tedious. However, I did admire its sheer daring and was dazzled by its stylistic experimentation (I really did not imagine that anything so bold and weird and, well, modern could come from a period so long ago!) but what impressed me most of all was that Joyce effectively succeeded in charting the inner monologues of ordinary citizens throughout the course of an ordinary day - in incredible detail! Yes, it is over-structured and over-symbolic - and those aspects didn't appeal to me so much - but actually the experience of reading it in the semi-comprehending way I did (kind of surfing its meaning) for me parallelled the stream-of-consciousness form of the book in an interesting way. But is it one I would ever want to read again? No, I don't think so! But I hope whoever picks this up will enjoy it, whether experiencing it for the first time - or (bravely!) returning to it...

releasing, as promised...

Picked up at the Irish themed York Bookcrossing meet.