Purchased: in Dublin, June 1975. Read: finally cover to cover in Nanaimo, October 2016. "And now my last evening. A day of some walking and shopping and pleasure at being able to get around this city (and pleasure that I don't have to stay and try to support myself here). A shower. The most wonderful refreshing thing. And a very beautifully bound and set copy of Ulysses. A present to me. Wishing me all the best.” Encountered: Bergman and Fellini; Flann O’Brien (and Myles na Gcopaleen) and Monty Python and Terry Gilliam; much mocking and sneering and hilarious parodies; grand scale opera-on-acid featuring bizarre kaleidoscopic hallucinations with detailed staging and costume direction; Lewis Carrol, Alice and Wonderland (“First the verdict and then the trial!”); several different narrators and voices and an unseen examiner who asks dozens of questions that might be found on a college exam (In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?); and the stunning brilliant Molly Bloom soliloquy that I saw Siobhán McKenna perform at the Gate Theatre on O'Connell Street in 1975. Ulysses.
I “acquired” this Anthony Burgess book on Joyce years ago. There’s a card in it indicates that apparently I was supposed to return it to the Mount Pleasant Library in 1972. Burgess points out as many have that Ulysses is a great comic novel. It served as a useful guide and there’s a vast number of resources on line to bring perspective and road maps into the reading of Ulysses. Burgess calls it a labyrinth.
"Ulysses is a book to own, a book to live with, to borrow it is probably worth than useless, for the sense of urgency imposed by a time-limit for reading it fights against the book’s slow pace, a leisurely music that requires an unhurried ear and yields little to the cursory, newspaper-nurtured eye… Ulysses is, like Paradise Lost, an auditory work and the sounds carry the sense… [T]he whole book has a spatial scheme in which time has been divested of its bullying hurry-along authority… Time is the great enemy, and books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake triumphantly trounce it. Time has to be put in its place.
Ulysses, then, is a labyrinth which we can enter at any point, once we have satisfied ourselves as to its general plan and purpose.. it is a book for the bedside." Chapter 12. The Bedside Labyrinth.
Eimear McBride on her fine novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and reading Ulysses when she was 25 —
