4 ms·
I enjoyed Ulysses, but only after the first 100 pages. Not sure if this was because the first 100 was lower quality, or if it just took me that long to 'acclima
by Tycho 14y ago
I enjoyed Ulysses, but only after the first 100 pages. Not sure if this was because the first 100 was lower quality, or if it just took me that long to 'acclimatise' to what Joyce was doing.
What I recall not liking was having no idea what was going on. In a given scene I wouldn't be sure where the characters were, how many were there... even who the characters were. Somewhat like looking at one of those Picasso paintings where you recognise a few fragments of familiar objects but the overall picture is just confusion.
I'm tempted to re-read it to see if those things make sense now. Maybe back then I wasn't able to keep track of the abstractness.
- gruseom 14y agoIt may well have been a question of acclimatization. That's a great way of putting it, by the way. I find this is often the case with any great work that is remote from where one is, whether in time or culturally or aesthetically. One must be willing to put in an initial good faith investment to "fund" the effort of reading it, with the expectation of profit later. Usually it begins to pay off before too long. Sometimes it never does. Here's an interesting question. Among books that one has truly appreciated (i.e. excluding total writeoffs), which took the longest time before you broke even?
- frozenport 14y agoIn Faulkner's Sound and The Fury, the first 100 pages are the disjointed mental images. For example, yelling at a golfcourse will trigger paragraphs of memories about his sister Caddy. In contrast to Ulysses we are only given aleatory images for the first 100 pages. I sometimes feel that the work was compromised with such a modernist artifice.