Ulysses
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season736 pages, about 15 hours: the length of 2.3 typical books on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbThree readers report stalling within the first hundred pages, one naming the third chapter, Proteus, as especially hard to follow.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesMrs Dalloway, on the shelf at 224 pages, uses the same single-day stream-of-consciousness technique and was written partly in response to Ulysses.
The case for it
on the length
“The thing that makes Ulysses imposing is, in fact, not the theme but the scale upon which it is developed. It has taken Mr. Joyce seven years to write Ulysses and he has done it in seven hundred and thirty pages which are probably the most completely ‘written’ pages to be seen in any novel since Flaubert.”
Edmund Wilson · The New Republic, 5 July 1922 on Molly Bloom
“But the real star of the show, the one who won my heart, was Molly.”
a book blog on the Ithaca chapter
“I got the hang of it, it became one of my favorites in the book”
a book blog on the stream of consciousness
“the author’s representation of stream of consciousness is breathtaking in detail.”
a book blog
The case against
on the last chapter
“The last chapter, with its lack of punctuation, felt very slow to get through.”
a book blog on Buck Mulligan’s shaving
“All too many readers give up on Ulysses before Buck Mulligan finishes shaving”
Ron Rosenbaum · Slate, 2011 on the length
“The sheer length of it makes it unbearable to pick up”
a book blog on the characters’ names
“many characters have similar names and I kept getting them mixed up.”
a book blog
