Have almost finished rereading Declan Kiberd's excellent Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living. Found it slipped down a little more easily this time round, though I still found the final chapters went a bit over my not terribly elevated head. Still I enjoyed the flights of fancy on Joyce's relations to Homer, Dante, the New Testament and Shakespeare, though preferring the generally more earthbound stuff as DK makes his way through the great modernist epic on a chapter-by-chapter basis.
What I'm sure the critic gets right is the novelist's deep understanding of the importance of the everyday, especially in developing our understanding of what it might mean to live decently. It doesn't sound like much of a theme, I suppose, but Joyce is the most surprising of writers. (And my appetite has been well and truly whetted for another go at the greatest novel of the 20C.)
No comments:
Post a Comment