Customer Reviews

The Irish Ulysses

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Maria Tymoczko's The Irish Ulysses is an amazing read and a must for anyone interested in Ulysses or James Joyce. It is difficult for me to express, properly, my admiration for this book as it delivers James Joyce to his proper status as hero of the Irish Literary Revival.

I read Maria Tymoczko's The Irish Ulysses shortly after finishing Edna O'Brien's biography of James Joyce. The timing was perfect. In reading Ms. O'Brien's biography, I almost had the sense of reading a scandal sheet and wondered why it is that we so easily confuse a writer's fiction with his or her reality. Why we feel so triumphant in connecting moments in real life with moments in fiction and allowing our imaginations to fill the blanks between those connections.

Ms. Tymoczko resists the temptation to tread the same ground of Joyce's real life and moves, instead, to the Irishness of Ulysses. After reading The Irish Ulysses, I cannot imagine harboring doubt as to its conclusions, nor can I imagine a reader who might fail to see the specifically Irish nature of Ulysses. The argument based on a comparison between various moments in early Irish literature and Ulysses was sound enough, but Ms. Tymoczko does not leave it at that. She thoroughly examines what literature would have been available to Joyce, as well as that which he actually had as part of his library. From newspaper sources to the holdings of the library in Trieste, Ms. Tymoczko leaves little room for doubt that Ulysses is Joyce's creation of an Irish epic to rival that of any nation's literary tradition. I cannot do justice to this book or it's import to the world of Ulysses scholarship.

Maria Tymoczko, long respected Joyce scholar and investigator of ancient, even pre-literate Irish history and legends, in the polyglot original, brings together these two fields of her expertise in a brilliant volume which introduces the reader gently and fully to both.

Anyone intrigued by that greatest novel of the twentieth century: Ulysses (or is it actually the record of the dreaming soul: Finnegans Wake) and hungry for fuller understanding does well to study carefully this large book, bearing both great tomes in hand like Breen outside Barney Kiernan's. Anyone desiring to feel fully the great Irish literary tradition does well as well to study carefully this book, finding the millenium long tradition's fullest culmination within the labyrinthine works of Joyce.

I always feel the greatest commentary on James JOyce is the one I currently consider. This Irish Ulysses is the greatest commentary of Joyce, case closed, and the greatest plea for a recognition of Irish literary tradition and political history, both of which were long denied under the bootheel of the British oppressor.

Kindly see the current price for a NEW copy of the paperback edition. It is less than the cost of shipping, and far less than the cost of less worthy commentary. Please, I encourage you to acquire this multi-levelled text, which opens the door not only to Joyce but thusly to all of Irish literary and historical tradition (have I already said that? sorry, forgive my redundancy!)