- Hardcover: 800 pages
- Publisher: Random House; Reissue edition (Mar 5 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0375507949
- ISBN-13: 978-0375507946
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 15.2 x 4.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 816 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (254 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,894,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From 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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From AudioFile
It is an imposing enough task to attempt a quality unabridged recording of James Joyce's ULYSSES. Add to that the aim to provide the listener with 18 smoothly segued musical transitions consisting of songs and opera excerpts mentioned in the novel; a booklet with a track-by-track commentary, introduction, and explanatory essays; and finally a CD-ROM packed with further supplements (Web links, booklists, interviews with the performers, sound files of Joyce reading excerpts, and more)--and you have as ambitious and rewarding an audio production as any that exists, an audio experience that truly deserves to be cherished. Joyce's celebrated novel follows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as they travel in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Joyce's inspiration was THE ODYSSEY and the fullness of humanity he recognized in Odysseus, whose adventures he obliquely recreates in the wanderings of Bloom. Following along with the novel while listening to the discs reveals the enormous care that director Roger Marsh and reader Jim Norton lavish on the project. Their orchestrated performance is a work of love and respect for Joyce and his experimental, poetic, funny, musical epic book. Jim Norton has a wonderfully rich and friendly voice, appreciative of the humor and cadences of the text and even of the onomatopoetic textual noises of cat purrs, door creaks, and print-press groans: "Everything speaks in its own way." His performance turns a challenging book into an inviting, even a hypnotic, one. Marcella Riordan satisfyingly performs the dialogue of Molly Bloom, including the 24,000-word unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness passage that concludes the novel. Readers of ULYSSES have long been encouraged to read out loud the more difficult sections for added comprehension and enjoyment of the language. Now, thanks to Naxos, the entire book is available in a performance to savor. It is safe to say that anyone wanting to experience the preeminent work of modern fiction has in this package the perfect audio companion. G.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
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First Sentence
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Creative Genius Unbound.,
By
This review is from: Ulysses (Hardcover)
We're approaching the 100th anniversary of the action in Ulysses and I've taken my copy out and began to reread it. No other book I know of has more power to inspire or instill creative thought. His symbolism and skill is simply astounding. Anthony Burgess once said that many times he'd think of Ulysses and then think about his own work, "Why bother?" I know what he meant, but the power of the characters and style gives everday writers like myself something to strive for. This book is worth more than ten creative writing courses in the Ivy League. Even if I wanted to, I could never forget it.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
CD only,
By Ben Franklin Intermediate School (Pacifica, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Ulysses (Audio CD)
Do not buy this CD to listen to in the car! The selections and interpretation of this abridged audio edition are unimpeachchable. However the reader, gifted with a clear and expressive voice, presents most of the narration sotto voce, which is inaudible on the road even at top volume.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
--Introibo ad altare Dei,
By "the_perennial_philosophy" (SJ, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Ulysses (Hardcover)
I wrote this review previously w/ my other Amazon account but now that I changed email addresses, I'm going to publish this review in this accountUlysses is considered by me to be the greatest book ever written. Now the following review is just the very basic storyline, in order to even begin to fathom the magnitude of it's magnificence, you need to read the other reviews and so here it is. It describes in florid detail a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus, a young would-be-writer -- a character based on Joyce himself. Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman, spends the day wandering through the streets and offices, pubs and brothels of 1904 Dublin
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