Ulysses

In the past, Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and even unreadable.
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. William Blake 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. I hold this book to be the most important expression which the
present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from
which none of us can escape. —T. S. Eliot What is so staggering about
“Ulysses” is the fact that behind a thousand veils nothing lies hidden; that
it turns neither toward the mind nor toward the world, but, as cold as the
moon looking on from cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being, and
decay to pursue its course. —Carl Jung The greatest novel of the 20th century.
—Anthony Burgess “Ulysses” is extraordinarily interesting to those who have
patience (and they need it). —John Middleton Murry It is difficult not to
acclaim a masterpiece. —Virginia Woolf