Customer Reviews

Ulysses and Us

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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.

"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.