Quote of the day...
1 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Wednesday, February 15 at Wednesday, February 15, 2006.
Conversation between a First World War veteran and James Joyce, where the veteran is trying to suggest that Joyce is a bit of a pansy for not joining the Great Battle....
Veteran - "So, Joyce, what did you do during the Great War?"
Joyce - "I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?"
And a fair old achievement that is - Ulysses is a monster of a book:
Veteran - "So, Joyce, what did you do during the Great War?"
Joyce - "I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?"
And a fair old achievement that is - Ulysses is a monster of a book:
"Ulysses is a massive novel: 267,000 words in total from a vocabulary of 30,000 words, with most editions weighing in at between 800 to 1000 pages, and divided into 18 chapters.....
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on a list the 100 best novels in English of the 20th Century"
There is another great story about Joyce talking with someone who asked him how his book, Ulysses, was coming along. He replied along the lines of: "Great! I've worked for a week and finally finished the sentence I've been working on."
The book is amazingly thick with metaphors, references, and puns. When I studied it in college (a whole course dedicated to this book!) I had to read several other books and go LINE BY LINE in an attempt to grasp all that Joyce was saying.
For example, each chapter corresponds not only with a chapter of Homer's Odessey, but also with bodily organs (i.e. Chapter 1 has a predominant theme of "heart", Chapter 6 with "lungs"); as if the book, taken as a whole, makes up a man.
It's also said that reading the book aloud takes exactly 24 hours. One of these Bloomsdays...