Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it. It was never meant to be an abstruse a book for the elite, argues Declan Kiberd. It is a book for the common people, and offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book's hero, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante and the Bible (on all of which Joyce drew in the writing of his book).
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Kiberd's book--lucid, learned, free of jargon and pretension--can make for a wonderful companion along the journey through Joyce's wondrous epic.--Sudip Bose
About the Author
Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize in 1995. It is one of the most influential works on Irish culture published in the last twenty years. His Irish Classics came out in 2000 and won the prestigious Lannan Prize in the USA. He is the Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin and is a widely respected broadcaster, critic and reviewer.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How to read a book,
By Bibliomane "Bibliomane" (Mystic, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ulysses and Us (Hardcover)
Declan Kiberd has written a guide that anyone newly coming to Ulysses should read, read and then praise. Kiberd has an exacting eye, a fine sense of moral balance, an eager curiosity, and a love for a book that he has read, reread, and will read again. This is not a technical treatise; it is not shrouded in a dense fabric of academic agendas. It is the result of a wise and witty man who wants to tell us, tell all of us, how to read a very good book. He keeps in mind that it is a book about human beings, and not just about words. To every episode in the book he brings a humane sensibility and a prose style that rides easy on the page. We have too long sequestered the book in classrooms; Kiberd brings it out into the large and public spaces of our lives.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Written in an Accessible Style,
By Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Ulysses and Us (Hardcover)
"Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece" is, of course, a work of literary criticism, centered on the monumental, epic novel of the famous, but now little-read Irish writer James Joyce. It was written by Declan Kiberd, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin, and the author of Inventing Ireland: Literature of the Modern Nation.Kiberd is, of course, an academic, and we'd be surprised to hear that he didn't specialize in Joyce; yet it is his useful thesis that academics have taken charge of this reputedly difficult, iconic modernist work, and frightened the general reading public away from it, and nobody can argue with that. I myself read Joyce's Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Signet Classics) in college, but was frightened of "Ulysses," and Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), and wasn't going to go near them without credit for the reading of them. Yet Kiberd shows that James wrote this modern classic not as an "esoteric tome for a scholarly few," but "about and for the common person." Furthermore, Kiberd shows us that the book is an encomium of the life of the common person, as lived in Dublin at the time James set it, 1904; as well as at the time that James was writing it on the continent of Europe, in the neutral safety of Switzerland, as World War I raged around him. The author certainly proved his thesis to me, and furthermore, writes in an accessible style, leavened with humor, on what might be a difficult topic. Of course, it's better to read this after, or while, reading "Ulysses," and best, I suppose, to read it if you are familiar with that modernist text, but I got a lot out of this book strictly as it was written, on the page: Kiberd follows the text of that reputedly "difficult because of its stream-of-consciousness style and immense complexity," book, chapter by chapter, line by line, and explains it as he goes. Recommended for those interested in Irish or modern literature.
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