ULYSSES, by James Joyce, written in 1904, but not published in the United States until 1934, after having the ban lifted by Judge John M. Woosley. My copy was published by Modern Library in 1992.
This book is a day in Dublin, following the characters of Steven Dedalus, Mr. Leonard Bloom and a host of characters that intersect with these two characters. It is a book that is humorous, sacrilegious, racist, perverse and full of characters discussing in pubs, sex, pregnancy, religion, Hamlet and if the ghost is actually Shakespeare's grandfather, politics, death, and just thoughts about everything.
The writing can best be described as different, we go from conversational prose to poetry to song to written with newspaper headings describing what will come next to writing in play form, to the style of question asking who, what where and when and then back to narrative, we have run on sentences, connectedwords that make up the entirety of this book.
A friend of mine said if you don't have time to read it than just read the first and last paragraph in each section, my thought is but first you have to determine the sections. I would also be miss the tingting tingly feeling when you realize that if someone criticizes you for runonsentences, say a teacher, you can calmly point to James Joyce and ask them what they think about his work. Genius maybe, nerve racking definitely.
No comments:
Post a Comment