I've tried 3 or 4 times to read this thing. The furthest I've got is about 100 pages.
The first 1/4 of my copy is all dog-eared and the rest is pristine?
I bought it and gave it a good go because it's supposed to be one of the greatest works of literature.
What am I missing? What can I change about my attitude to help me appreciate the book?
2007-09-21 06:57:35 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
bad spelling. Should be Ulysses
2007-09-21 07:04:51 · update #1
Yeah, actually I too suffered the dog-eared/pristine dichotomy for the first couple goes; but I finally did make it all the way through. On a sentence by sentence basis it is often tremendous; as an entire book though it's hard to see what all the hoopla is about. So there are great lines like: "Over his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins." But I sure didn't feel like the end was worth wading through 800 pages of that stuff for. I'm guessing it had the same impact on publication that T S Eliot's "The Waste Land" did: people loved that poem for the sheer sound (or sounds) of it, even though intellectually it's pretty much a puddle of mud (of course, right at the end of the Great War it no doubt struck a more urgent chord). But Eliot is only 400 lines or so...and at the end of Ulysses I was wondering, is it a satire? Is it intended to be ennobling? Without any answers to these questions. Anyway, just be glad you're not reading Proust. I still want to sue his estate for the two years of my life I figures he owes me.
2007-09-21 21:28:07 · answer #1 · answered by Omar Cayenne 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Just because a book is considered great doesn't mean it's something everyone will enjoy. The inventive use of language and the stream-of-consciousness narratives that make Ulysses a great novel also make it a sometimes difficult read. I also had trouble with all the references to Irish politics and history. Stuart Gilbert's "James Joyce's Ulysses - A Study" may help you figure out some of the obscure parts.
Or, rather than a frontal assault, try reading bits of it at random to see if anything appeals to you. It's written in numerous voices, so you may find some parts of it more accessible than others. Also, reading "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" may give you enough insight into Stephen Daedalus to get you started. But if you don't find any pleasure in it, let it go. There's no stigma to not liking it, and no joy in forcing your way through it because it's "supposed to be" good.
2007-09-21 08:13:32 · answer #2 · answered by injanier 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
No. i'm slightly shocked which you have have been given been assigned the e book yet are not discussing it at college. because of the fact if there have been a variety communicate, you should actual study there what "the large deal" is. For me, the strengths of Dubliners are: its poetry, its realism, and the experience that Joyce is getting under the exterior of our universal illusions. and that i'd desire to disagree with the Ulysses haters: I _love_ Ulysses. it is an complicated puzzle of countless fascination, as though Joyce took each thing all of us comprehend approximately language and became it as much as 11. Then he became it as much as twelve in Finnegan's Wake, yet i've got no longer yet been waiting to wrap my concepts around that one.
2016-10-09 14:41:53 · answer #3 · answered by abdulla 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
No it isn't overrated. However it isn't for everyone. It wasn't for you, that's all. Pax - C
2007-09-21 07:27:41 · answer #4 · answered by Persiphone_Hellecat 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
its not to everyones taste .so give it away and get some stephen king
2007-09-21 07:05:51 · answer #5 · answered by jinx 5 · 2⤊ 0⤋