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

The average rating for Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-11 00:00:00 Christopher Driver A righthearted but wrongheaded attempt to reboot Ulysses as a fount of the zen wisdom of everyday life and a book every ordinary reader should eagerly glom onto. This is a very stupid idea. God bless Declan Kibert for having such a stupid idea, but God curse all his friends and editors for not strenuously dissuading him from writing this turgid self-defeating attempt to do the impossible. He's an academic who rages against the elitism of academia, the abstruseness of the professors, and wants to lead a people's revolution to take back Ulysses from their undead mottled hands and torch their fusty theses and caper up and down the quadrangle yelling "Free Joyce from the Joyceans!" . He says : It should be as accessible to ordinary readers as once were the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet. I dunno, this kind of jazz baffles me. What readers did those things have? Er, none except the teeny weeny eeny minority who were literate, so by definition, not "ordinary". Maybe some ordinary types got to see Hamlet and hear the Odyssey being declaimed. Anyway, he says Any teacher knows that many students today sprinkle their essays with quotations from the lyrics of rock music and from popular films. This suggests that they still yearn for instruction from artists on how to live. And he proposes that Ulysses is the thing to replace the aphorisms of Eminem and Katy Perry. You know, I think somebody slipped something in Declan's drink when he wasn't looking. Ulysses is not for the ordinary reader, however you teach it. That's the main problem. But the other, worse, problem is that Declan writes in the same way that all the jawbreaking Joyceans do. Let's open this book at random. Page 176. Although Bloom can at one moment feel that all is lost, turning down the frieze on a doily in a gesture which reverses that in the morning when he straightened Molly's bedspread, his use of water imagery suggests acceptance of what has happened between her and Boylan : "as easy stop the sea". Hours later, Molly will use the same image of the sea to explain her adventure so this line also carries a suggestion that the Blooms are married not just in law but in the profound depths of a shared imaginative life. Just the same professorial Joycean jabber and blather you have read, or hopefully, avoided, in a jillion previous tomes. I don't need it, neither do you. You need to read Ulysses instead because you're not an ordinary reader. Read on and off over the the last 2 years, but today I just got f-f-f-f-f-f-fed up of it.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-15 00:00:00 Jared Fessenden Hey, pleb! Ever fancied reading the second hardest masterwork by James Joyce, but felt too damn plebeian to do so? Has it ever occurred to you, as you sit in your disreputable alehouse quaffing toxic hemlocks to escape the hell of your nine-to-five backbreaking manual occupation, that a 933pp novel about a cuddly Jewish-Irishman and his quirks is the solution to the pain of being born poor, dumb and drunk? Maybe you haven't read a book since school, and even then, you only skim-read the first two pages, you lardy ignoramus? Perhaps you think, in your infinite plebitude, James Joyce is a runner-up on The X-Factor? Oh, you silly proletariat fool! Come hither, does Declan Kiberd have a book for you! In fact'no he doesn't. He has a book for us clever people who have already read Ulysses. A book written especially so us eggheads can feel better about our elitist tendencies and continue to plough our self-regarding furrows by pretending we are reading a text written for the Everyman rather than Everyman-in-a-Thousand. See what I did there? Or are you too busy rolling around in your own vomit to notice? Kiberd's book is at its most engaging when moving section by section, although overall it reads more like a brilliant riff on his most beloved book rather than a coherent reading of Ulysses for the plebs. Nice try, though.