Walter Bowne

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Walter Bowne is currently reading

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

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Mar 09, 2024 08:01PM

Walter Bowne is currently reading

Stephen Hero

by James Joyce

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Mar 01, 2024 06:33PM

Walter Bowne is currently reading

Ulysses

by James Joyce

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Reading for the 4th time

read in July 2020

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Walter Bowne said: " It amazes me those who start to listen or to read this monumental work without doing some research. "It's too hard to follow." "It doesn't make sense." Great writers, says Thoreau, require great readers, As one with a Masters degree in English and Rh It amazes me those who start to listen or to read this monumental work without doing some research. "It's too hard to follow." "It doesn't make sense." Great writers, says Thoreau, require great readers, As one with a Masters degree in English and Rhetoric, I knew a lot about Joyce. I've taught Dubliners, and I've read "Portrait" twice. But I was always weary of Ulysses. Was it, like Twain said, such a classic that no wants to read it but everyone wants to brag about having read it? I knew enough about the fame and infamy of the book, with its ban in UK and US, as pornography.... a claim that I thought outrageous until I got to the amazing end of the novel... Molly's brilliant soliloquy. It's still shocking and intimately human.

I knew I wanted a professional guide, someone above my paygrade and degree, to help me through the Universe of Joyce and Dublin and 1904. I needed a Virgil to take me through the wonders of this OtherWorld, much like Dante. So I purchased a new edition of the novel, followed along on Audible, which made me think and speak like a variety of Irish characters throughout the last month, and I also purchased the brilliant lecture series on Audible on Ulysses from Heffernan from Dartmouth. He was outstanding.

The voice on the production was outstanding. You don't enter this novel as a beach read or something you can listen to on your way to work. Or at the gym. Pick Malcolm Gladwell or James Patterson. Ulysses justly deserves to be on the top of the MLA list of Greatest Novels of All Time. It smashed what a novel was thought to be. It plays with so many voices and structures, and yet it is tightly woven with plot points that come back like North Stars. And sometimes even with reading and listening, I did get lost, but I felt like it didn't matter because the words were poetry and the poetry was the wind and the current and the universe pumping through me, and then a moment of clarity, or inisght, about a suicide or nationalism, or anti-Semitsim, or Molly's candor, or Bloom's need for a son.... so much... the novel really needs 24 lectures. And even more.

So if you're not up to the challenge yet... Start somewhere else. It took me 51 years to get here. Perhaps I needed that age and my experiences to appreciate the intricate world that Joyce creates. I image myself sitting down with him in Paris, having a drink, and I wonder what we would talk about. His range and knowledge of the world, of history, science, religion.... it really humbles a person. But I think Joyce being an Irishman would laugh heartily, welcome me like a Stephen Dedalus, and not talk down to me, IDK. But please avoid all the negatives about this book. It is only pretentious for those to shy to admit "not getting it." Great art deserves to be studied and appreciated. But great art drives deep into the soul, like a great painting at the d'Orsay or a Mozart Requiem. You may not like it, but that is not Mozart's problem. I would suggest doing what I did: listen to the lecture on each chapter; listen to the book here, and follow along in a printed edition.

Some chapters, like the last forty pages with five or six sentences, I listened to while walking and gardening. It made total sense, and Molly's final words will forever remain with me, The printed page of Molly's words is intimidating, and it doesn't need to be. She's a singer. She's thinking. We do not think ort sing with punctuation. Allow Joyce to take you on the voyager through the history of the English language and the history of Ireland. You will come across topics, like uber-Nationalism and anti-Semitism, that will still shock you. This is 1922. The world still had so much death and war to face.... and these issues are still with us , sadly.

As far as the recording, who could complain? The various voices of all these characters are different and ring true. There was never a time I thought, well, that could have been better. And I also teach public speaking at a university. Molly's voice at the end is mesmerizing.

The entrance to Hades states: Abandon All Hope all Ye Who Enter. For Ulysses, it should read the opposite. The book is about hope and progress and forgiveness and saying 'yes." Enter this novel with an open mind. Listen and read lectures on the work. It is meant to be dissected. And lastly, allow the poetry to take you away from the politics and COVID. It's 1904.

"Leave the extraordinary to the journalists," Joyce says, or Bloom. I forget. "To the writer, give us the ordinary." We are all wanderers like Odyesseus. We all have adventures. The ordinary can become the extraordinary in the hands of a surpreme writer, like Shakespeare or Joyce. This is Ireland's Hamlet, I think. But it's not just Ireland.

It's for the whole world. ...more "

Jul 06, 2020 01:56PM · see review

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