by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
Just before Christmas, while waiting for the Old Mountain Tavern’s weekly trivia contest to start (Wednesdays at 7 p.m.), a few of us started chatting about book recommendations. The topic turned—as a conversation about books often does—to books we dislike. Liz Gay suggested that a review of books people hate might make for a fun column.
And you know what? I think Liz is right. So welcome to the first of what I hope to make into an ongoing series: Reviews of Books People Hate.
First up, James Joyce’s Ulysses.
“I can’t,” begins an amusing one-star review of Ulysses on Goodreads. “It fell in my toilet and didn’t dry well, and I’m accepting it as an act of God. I decided against burning it and just threw it out.”
My wife was less forgiving. “The only good thing I can say about Ulysses is that it burned well,” Caroline quipped. It’s not a metaphor, either. Her college has an annual bonfire in which students burn their bad memories. Ulysses was my English-major wife’s contribution.
For those of you not familiar with Ulysses, it’s the second book from Irish novelist James Joyce. Sections of the book were published serially between 1918 and 1920 in a journal called The Little Review. The full novel was published in France 1922.
The entire 700ish pages tell the story of a single day—June 16, 1904, to be precise—in the life of three people living in Dublin. It’s written primarily in a stream-of-consciousness style and is full of literary allusions. The plot—to the extent there is one—has some parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. (Ulysses is the Latin version of Odysseus, hero of Homer’s poem.)
Ulysses is notoriously hard to read. It cycles through dozens of writing styles. One section is written as a play, complete with stage directions. A 70-page chapter is written entirely in Q&A format. Molly Bloom’s (in)famous soliloquy runs for 36 pages that contain only eight sentences, one of which clocks in at around 4,000 words. (For comparison, this column contains 829 words.)
Joyce himself acknowledged the difficulty of the book, writing that “it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”
The writing style makes Ulysses hard to review, as well. One reviewer noted, “I’d quote from [Molly’s soliloquy], but I wouldn’t know where to start or stop.”
Ulysses was controversial from the start. The Little Review stopped publishing chapters of Ulysses when officials sued the journal for circulating obscenity via the U.S. Mail. The full book was eventually published in Paris, but imports of it were banned nearly everywhere. An appeals court case in 1934 made the U.S. the first English-speaking country to allow publication of Ulysses.
Reviewers and intellectuals of Joyce’s own day had mixed opinions. The English writer Virginia Woolf—who used stream-of-consciousness in her own writing—called Ulysses “a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” Privately, she described it as “an illiterate, underbred book.”
Novelist Arnold Bennett described the act of devoting 700 pages to describe 20 hours as “childish caprice” and called the details of the novel “trivial and perfectly futile.”
Readers today aren’t much fonder.
“There are two kinds of people that have read this book: those that say they like this book, and those that aren’t lying,” says one anonymous reader of her experience with an audiobook version. “The last eleven hours [of the book] were so monotonous that my brain shut down, woke up, realized I was still listening and began to pulse with such pain I thought I might have a tumor – I decided to call it James.”
Another suggests that the book is performance art, “a joke upon the English, their language and their pompous attitudes.”
Even positive reviews are often littered with caveats like, “it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be” and “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever read in my life, including Chaucer in Middle English.”
But Ulysses does have its defenders.
The poet T.S. Eliot – a contemporary of Joyce – describes Ulysses as “the most important expression which the present age has found,” and went on to argue that “it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” (It’s worth noting here that Eliot’s own masterpiece – The Waste Land – is nearly as impenetrable as Ulysses.)
Ulysses has even sparked an obscure holiday – Bloomsday – celebrated on June 16, when dedicated Joyceans descend upon Dublin to eat the meals and walk the streets described in Ulysses.
Scholars generally agree that Ulysses is the definitive modernist novel – though, interestingly, they do not agree about what “modernist” actually means. Most everyone agrees that it’s an acquired taste, rather like coffee or scotch – “or hitting your hand with a hammer,” Caroline adds.
Or, to summarize in the least Joycean way possible (briefly) – Ulysses: important but hated.
Got a book you hate that you’d like us to review? Want to defend Ulysses? Drop us a line and let us know – joe@pocahontaslibrary.org
