Yes! Another vexing week of Name that Bookcover and one more lucky Missoulian has earned an MPL booklight. Congratulations to Abe A. for submitting his correct guess to our Facebook page!James Joyce, who wrote Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegan's Wake in addition to Ulysses stated the following regarding his work: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality. "
Up for the challenge? Here's a synopsis of Ulysses:
Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable... None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.
Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism. --James Marcus, Amazon.com
You have four more chances to Name That Bookcover and be entered into a raffle for a fabulous MPL booklight! Check back this Monday for our next exciting installment of Name That Bookcover and be sure to make a guess! You can submit online via the MPL blog, Twitter, or Facebook pages, or see a friendly staff person at the Missoula Public Library Accounts Desk to make a submission in person. Yes.
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