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    Is James Joyce's Ulysses The Hardest Novel To Finish?

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    thodorosmoraitis
    This document discusses James Joyce's novel Ulysses and the difficulty many readers have in finishing it. It summarizes the author's own failed attempts to get past page 46 of the book, noting the dense language and unfamiliar style make it a challenge to absorb. While praising aspects like its celebration of freedom, the author expresses frustration at not being able to fully enjoy and complete such a renowned work of literature. The piece also mentions different opinions critics like Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov had of Ulysses and its effect on readers. In the end, the author asks others who love the book what might help them persist to the finish line.

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    Is James Joyce's Ulysses The Hardest Novel To Finish?

    Uploaded by

    thodorosmoraitis
    36 views2 pages
    This document discusses James Joyce's novel Ulysses and the difficulty many readers have in finishing it. It summarizes the author's own failed attempts to get past page 46 of the book, noting the dense language and unfamiliar style make it a challenge to absorb. While praising aspects like its celebration of freedom, the author expresses frustration at not being able to fully enjoy and complete such a renowned work of literature. The piece also mentions different opinions critics like Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov had of Ulysses and its effect on readers. In the end, the author asks others who love the book what might help them persist to the finish line.

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    Literary criticism

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    James Joyce' Ulysses

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    This document discusses James Joyce's novel Ulysses and the difficulty many readers have in finishing it. It summarizes the author's own failed attempts to get past page 46 of the book, noting the dense language and unfamiliar style make it a challenge to absorb. While praising aspects like its celebration of freedom, the author expresses frustration at not being able to fully enjoy and complete such a renowned work of literature. The piece also mentions different opinions critics like Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov had of Ulysses and its effect on readers. In the end, the author asks others who love the book what might help them persist to the finish line.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    36 views2 pages

    Is James Joyce's Ulysses The Hardest Novel To Finish?

    Uploaded by

    thodorosmoraitis
    This document discusses James Joyce's novel Ulysses and the difficulty many readers have in finishing it. It summarizes the author's own failed attempts to get past page 46 of the book, noting the dense language and unfamiliar style make it a challenge to absorb. While praising aspects like its celebration of freedom, the author expresses frustration at not being able to fully enjoy and complete such a renowned work of literature. The piece also mentions different opinions critics like Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov had of Ulysses and its effect on readers. In the end, the author asks others who love the book what might help them persist to the finish line.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    Is James Joyce's Ulysses the hardest

    novel to finish?
    James Joyce died 75 years ago this week, leaving a lifetime of books beloved
    by many... and Ulysses, heralded as both the best novel in the English
    language and the hardest to read. So what do you do if you get stuck?

    Wednesday 13 January 2016 17.26 GMTLast modified on Monday 6


    February 2017 14.36 GMT

    When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses, he was so exhausted that


    he didnt write a line of prose for a year. I can believe it; I needed a
    nap after reading 40 pages.

    For the last three months, Ive glared at its fat, lumpen form on my
    floor with a vague sense of personal failure. Ive opened Ulysses
    twice, determined to finish it, and achieved getting all the way to page
    46 (its a bit longer than that). I have read so little both times I
    started that I have never bothered with a bookmark; it seemed too
    sad flagging such a hollow achievement.

    At first, it was fun. Ulysses isnt like anything else Ive read. There are
    a plethora of lines that I immediately decided to use on a daily basis,
    like: Lend us a loan of your noserag (Ho! thought I, filing it away
    for things to say next time I have a cold) and: Well have a glorious
    drunk to astonish the druidy druids (filed away under things to
    holler on a night out).

    Even when staring at cramped pages without absorbing a word, I


    thought nice thoughts about it: I like the community this book has
    spawned, its inherent sense of freedom and celebration of all things
    rude and true. I like that it created a holiday. I like that the anarchic
    style and language allows for readers to pick and choose how they
    read it some recommend skipping chapter three, some
    recommend reading it only after reading ABOUT it, some
    recommend reading it mostly aloud but I still get stuck.

    Why do I get stuck? Im not entirely sure myself. On the Most


    difficult novels list on Goodreads, Joyce takes the top two spots, with
    Ulysses in top position and Finnegans Wake plodding behind for
    second place. A lot of the Goodreads top 10 Moby-Dick, Gravitys
    Rainbow are weighty tomes, but I like big books (and I cannot lie). I
    think what is holding me hostage to page 46 is the language: the big
    fat bursts of Chaucerian English, sprinkled with slang and jaunty
    dialogue that, while entertaining me, is also leaving me a little lost.
    There are a few other worthy works of literature Ive yet to read
    including fellow top 10-ers Infinite Jest and War and Peace but
    they only spark little pangs of shame that I have not read and/or
    enjoyed them. I really want to love Ulysses and I feel deeply
    frustrated that all the while appreciating its uniqueness and its
    weightiness and its Joyceness, I cant finish the damn thing.

    Virginia Woolf thought Ulysses was not in her words


    bollocks, calling it in her words an illiterate, underbred book as
    she raged in her diaries about the pressure to finish it: I... have been
    amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters--
    to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, &
    disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
    But then Nabokov loved it. It seems Ulysses is a different experience
    for everyone: Ive read it likened to sex (sometimes unpleasant, big
    pay off at the end), Jazz-fusion (an innovative of genre), and a boxing
    match (wanting to punch yourself in the face at page 46, probably).

    I like James Joyce: I enjoyed Dubliners, his excellent choice of


    spectacles and his frankly odd erotic letters to Nora Barnacle (Dirty
    little Fuckbird is another fantastic Joyce-ism, filed away under
    things I wont say in front of my nan). So, people who love Ulysses,
    what am I getting wrong? Or is it okay to struggle, and proceed
    victorious to page 800-odd on the third, fourth, eighteenth try?

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