Ulysses Ineluctably Audited
Written: Feb 24 '00 (Updated Apr 11 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: You will definitely expand your vocabulary
Cons: If you can make it to the finish line.
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| Stloraine's Full Review: Joyce James |
Ulysses, Recorded Books, first officially authorized unabridged version by the Trustees of the Joyce Estate, 30 cassettes, 42.5 hours. Narrated by Donal Donnally and Miriam Healy-Louie.
James Joyce had the idea for this book over ten years, and then he labored on its writing for over another seven years. It was first published in full book form in Paris, France in 1922, after having already been banned in the United States for obscene content during its serialization.
Poetry is best listened to and Joyce is a narrative poet at heart. I could not follow a thread of a story in this tome, which revolved partly around three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his unfaithful wife Molly. I was a bewildered tourist in a carriage pulled through the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day in which the events of the entire book center and the day on which he met his wife. It was a ride wherein the driver had no map, no schedule, no goal, but explored at his heart's whim.
At times I was disgusted to see (hear) the sights, at others awed by the rushing words lifting me suddenly from the dingy sights of the back lanes of Dublin to "The Martian Lybian floods," (fast forward to 1997-98 and the recent discovery of flood plains on Mars, and there is an area of Mars named Lybia) the moon, magnetism and the solar system, and then plunged into the depths of the ocean: "When Johnny comes marching home again, if he ever does." "Many a sailor has sunk to the bottom of the sea, Davey Jones' Locker." "I wonder if fish ever get seasick."
At times I thought I couldn't take any more, to wit, descriptions of a row of sheep carcasses hanging upside down, "Their dead eyes follow you throughout eternity." Now we're at a seaside picnic of young mothers and their infants and young children, gurgling sounds, sweet smiles, barefeet running in the sand, silver sea strands reaching toward them, so lovely. I was afraid, anticipating a sudden switch to something unpleasant but the happy scene continued--just a rare beautiful day in the life of the young and still hopeful. And I amazed myself when I actually quit the computer to listen raptly to a journey which suddenly plunged into the flowing green depths of the ocean and somehow ended up in the stars. I reran the tape and listened to it over again.
It was then I understood what had earned the praise and admiration for his writing. While his subject matter is unconnected like the experiences of an explorer traversing this road for the first time, his sentence construction does what the best writer should do: clearly conveys the meaning of his thought I never had a problem understanding what he was saying. His words, no matter how long or how complex the sentences, are concise, his thoughts absolutely clear and whatever he says is understandably presented. In fact, I think it is his use of long, descriptive adverbs that helps his narration along so well. Rather than the preferred many simple short words cluttering up a thought, he combines the actions in very active, descriptive adverbial verb modifiers.
"The ineluctable modality of the audible. The ineluctable modality of the visible. The ineluctable modality of the visual." That is, the sounds and sights from which we cannot escape because that is where we are and what we experience through our senses and thusly our life.
To read or listen to this book, it is highly recommended that the reader who is unaquainted with Joyce's high literary style begin by reading "Dubliners" and next "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." If there is one thing to be gained from reading Joyce, it is an extended vocabulary. He must have used at least half of the words in the English language. He is a video cam in a day in which there were no videographers to record the daily actual sounds and events of the normal daily uncomfortable, depressing, onerous, drudgeries of human existence. So he has to describe it in word symbols which almost seem to create a more direct path to the brain, to stimulate it to see and hear more strongly than when actually portrayed by the medium of celluloid and digital technology. Imagination creates its own reality.
I think that The Dead, the last story in his first book, Dubliners, rewritten, would have given this book a powerful ending, instead it dwindles away, as if Joyce got tired of his journey and just sat down on the grassy hillside on Gibralter where Molly softly whispers, "I will, I will" to Bloom's proposal. Something had come between them and perhaps the first was also the last.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Stloraine
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Location: Star Town, Milky Way Galaxy
Reviews written: 158
Trusted by: 74 members
About Me:
Writer, pianist, mystic. Pisces. Love to see movies, swim, study paleontology, astronomy and ancient history.
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