Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece Book

Why James Joyce’s great modernist masterpiece is a book that can teach ordinary people to live better lives.

Publishers Weekly

Kiberd's take on Ulysses should be on every undergraduate syllabus that includes Joyce's epic work, as it is an ideal introduction for the uninitiated—accessible, richly argued, funny and, in a kind of devil's advocacy fashion, begging for rebuttal. The author of the important and controversial Inventing Ireland argues that it is time to “reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of people” and fetch it back from “the more snobbish modernists,” who have conspired to give the book a reputation of being “unreadable by the ordinary people for whom it was intended.” Kiberd places the book in its time—“a world which had known for the first time the possibilities of mass literacy, a time when ordinary laborers read Shakespeare, Ruskin and Macaulay.” Ulysses, says Kiberd is “an epic of the bourgeoisie,” most of the book set in Dublin's public places, where men and women interrelate—the library, the cemetery, shops, pubs, a hospital. As Kiberd works his argument through each chapter of Ulysses, readers will be fascinated by the father-son reconciliation that is at the heart of the novel, and will forever appreciate how the pyrotechnics that dominate the second half are there simply to deepen the explorations of a very simple theme: how to live, and how, like Odysseus, to get home. (Sept.)