Ulysses

Ulysses is the most famous difficult book in English, and much of its reputation for difficulty is deserved. It is also funny, tender, filthy, musical and deeply human, and it rewards the effort far more generously than its reputation suggests.

The novel follows a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, now celebrated every year as Bloomsday. Its three main characters are Stephen Dedalus, a brilliant, brooding young writer; Leopold Bloom, a kind, curious, Jewish advertising salesman; and Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife, a singer who is planning an afternoon tryst with another man. Bloom knows, and spends the day wandering the city, avoiding home.

Each of the eighteen episodes loosely mirrors part of Homer’s Odyssey, with Bloom as a modern, unheroic Odysseus, Stephen as the searching son and Molly as a complex reworking of Penelope. But you do not need to know Homer to enjoy the book. What matters more is that each episode is written in a different style. One unfolds like a newspaper, with headlines; one imitates the whole history of English prose; one is written as a play-script nightmare in a brothel; one is a long series of questions and answers.

Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness is central to the novel: the reader is placed inside his characters’ heads, following their thoughts as they skip, wander, and loop back. Bloom’s inner voice, in particular, is a delight. He worries about money, thinks about breakfast, notices advertisements, remembers his dead son and his late father, feels small jealousies and large compassion. He is one of the most completely imagined ordinary people in literature.

The book ends with Molly’s extended monologue, with almost no punctuation, which moves from irritation and gossip to memory and finally to a great affirmation. It is one of the most celebrated passages in modern fiction.

Honesty requires a warning. Some episodes, especially the early Stephen chapters and the stylistic experiments in the middle, are demanding, and dense with Irish history, Catholic theology and literary allusion. The book was banned for obscenity in the United States until 1933, and its frank sexual content still surprises readers. A companion guide, such as Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book, or an annotated edition helps enormously, and reading some passages aloud brings the language to life.