Customer Reviews

yes I said yes I will Yes.: A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday

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While I approached this book with an ambivalent curiosity, for I have never been able to read more than the first thirty pages of "Ulysses", I find "yes I said yes I will Yes", to be an entertaining, intriguing, even inspiring introduction to Joyce's epic of a single day. It mirrors, reflects and refracts the fragmentary theme of the novel itself.

The text itself highlights and articulates both Joyce's intentions in writing such a monster-masterpiece, and others' reactions to reading it. For the uninitiated, "yes I said yes I will Yes" breaks down the mystery behind the whole Joyce legacy into a readable, comprehensible attempt at purity of language and thought, and how the human mind processes everything it encounters on parallel levels: first, the creation of characters who reflect momentary, fleeting glimpses of existence; then, the interpretation of the tale by assorted artists, writers,scholars, and students alike.

"yes I said yes I will yes" is meticulously edited and written, yet it strikes no poses; it emerges as an easily readable and digestible companion and introduction to Joyce and his machinations. Offering both line drawings and photographs of Joyce and others, this slim volume appraches the "Ulysses" dilemma from multiple directions, containing quotes from such writers as Virginia Woolf, who dismissed the book as fancified rubbish. As "yes I said..." suggests, opinions on "Ulysses" run the gamut, as would be expected of such a literary feat; however, it remains reader-friendly, the ideal way to make the acquaintance of perhaps the most influential modern novel.

The parallels drawn by the editor are equally intriguing and informative. Ms. Tully sheds light on how Joyce's version of the Odyssey anticipated, foreshadowed, and still corresponds other early modernist artistic, literary, and cultural movements. The book balances chapters or sections which introduce new contexts of, or aspects for approaching "Ulysses", followed by varying opinions and ideas about Joyce and his work. "yes I said yes I will Yes" forges a timely, necessary bridge between an author whose work often intimidates many of us, and what that work means today. I read it in a single sitting, several times over, and will prize it as a manageable, palatable reference source.

After absorbing this small book about Joyce, Ulysses, and the relevance of Bloomsday, I can return to Ulysses with a renewed sense of confidence and insight. "yes I said..." is well-packaged, presents appealing visual design and layout, plus it's affordable. I only wish it had been issued in hardback -- the pages on my copy already resemble my cocker spaniel's ears.

I fear that some of this book, issued in advance of the centenary of Bloomsday, has already been dated. Much of the material has been prepared for those needing a warm-up to 16 June 2004. Now that's passed, however, there's much to help the Joycean newcomer to Ulysses. It diminishes the Linati schemata that has caused many to rely too heavily on Homeric parallels. It frees readers by showing that whatever their fears, other actors, critics, and readers have shared them. While I wish it would have offered more of a chapter-by-chapter run down just to set the scene for first-timers, and while it pads the book too much with appendices at the expense of tips needed by novices, it does meet a need for the 'amateur' who seeks out Joyce for enjoyment rather than fulfilling a course assignment--a sure way to deaden many an enticing narrative.

The book offers little of the larger context of Joyce's other literary efforts within which to place Ulysses, but given the compression of even an overview and a few points-of-view within 160 pp., Nora Tully earns praise.

A shame her name comes third after the ubiquitous Frank McCourt (who I admit has a couple of decent insights nonetheless from his brief forward) and Isaiah Sheffer, who muses at length about the NYC Symphony Spaced readings each B-day. These personal encounters with the text, then, prepare for Tully's own skillfully arranged array of comments, mainly from past literati (for copyright reasons?) about the novel. Interspersed are mini-essays, the best of which were Mary Gordon's account of how she teaches the Nausicaa episode (you always find something new when returning to a familiar text: for me, she showed me the benediction-monstrance-Gerty's crotch link in a way I hadn't noticed before!); Tennessee Williams' term paper; a Vanity Fair ranking of thinkers by critics in the early 20c; and Robert Spoo's veiled attack, justifiably deserving to be even less muted, on the copyright abuses by the estate keeping Joyce from entering at last the public domain in Britain and Ireland.

A handy map of Dublin; updates on Joyce websites; recommended books and videos; celebrations of B-Day worldwide; cinematic, fictional, dramatic, and musical tributes: these round out a satisfying collection. I wish a review of the various audio versions appeared, for as this book says, listening to Joyce read well adds the musicality and the aurality that the author, myopic as he was, depended upon to convey meaning from an admittedly daunting pile of print. This aside, this pocket guide deserves credit for once again proffering the sheer reward of navigating Ulysses. It'll present you with a stunningly diverse array of styles high and low, boring and amusing: a book that for once shies away from nothing we humans do, and by its accumulation of the mundane, reaches into the heights and depths of our daily life.

Joyce wanted his book to be read 'all the years of the nights' meaning all the lifetimes to come. And as Frank McCourt makes clear in his introduction he succeeded more than any other writer in 'immortalizing ' the day of his greatest work, and making it a kind of universal literary celebration. June 16 ,Bloomsday the day that Joyce met the woman who was to be his lifelong companion, mother of his children and finally wife, Nora Barnacle is the day chosen for the action of Ulysses. In these twenty- four hours Joyce will attempt to give us a complete picture of human life .In its eighteen chapters each of which has its own style, color, character, and each of which corresponds to a chapter of 'Odysseus' Joyce will explore and create worlds within worlds. He will too present us with a vast rich gallery of human characters, including the three major ones the young Joycean alter ego Stephen Daedalus, the wandering Jewish everyman Leopold Bloom, and the ur-feminine Molly Bloom whose love life and passion will provide the song of the great final interior monologue concluding with Bloom's proposal and her yes I said I will Yes.

This present volume while focusing on the celebration which is Bloomsday nonetheless provides many insights into the work itself. Isiah Sheffer's explanation of the way the eighteen chapters can be read as a six- six- six thesis antithesis synthesis , or as a three chapter twelve chapter three chapter story of Daedalaus alone Bloom's wandering and the fictional father- son in some kind of combination of meeting , does add yet another little bit of interpretation to my own sense of the work.

But of course Joyce wrote a work which begged and called for interpretation, and 'Ulysses' is the novel which has brought forth reams of academic scholarship, endless interpretation. It has , and here again is Joyce's great cunning, generated new life for itself through its ongoing interpretations and reinterpretations. And here it is like another central parallel work within the work, Hamlet, which Daedalus reads in his own somewhat Freudian way.

The work has a lyric power , an ongoing lilt , and an immense intelligence. In the 'Oxen in the Sun' episode where Joyce rewrites the history of the English language stylistically and in parody, we feel the master in control paring his fingernails above the ordinary world of writers and readers.

I enjoy this small volume as yet another edition to the ongoing library made around the name of this great mastermaker.

no insight into James JOyce or his writings. A lot of space dedicated to the guy who hosts a yearly reading on BRoadway of very brief excerpts from Ulysses AND OTHER UREALTED WORKS, as broadcast on NPR. I now no longer regret having missed these transmissions. IT is obviously a reluctant reading of snippets from the great work which JOyce urged not a word should be dropped. I already cannot bear hearing the Jim NOrton ABRIDGED recording.

If you want insight and commentary into Ulysses, turn to Kenner and the rest. This book is simply an overblown advertisement. Frank McCourt has very little to say. This book is personalities, not perceptions.

Two stars for being of Ulysses even obliquely, but it will join the other self-interested Ulysses related works in a bottom drawer rather than the preciously brief space on the much visited top shelf.

Ulysses is far TOO IMPORTANT to waste time and space on such commercially self-interested works.