Then, as if by a miracle: Leopold Bloom, at whose entry the author himself feels surprised and touched. It’s hard not to feel that Joyce hates and pities Dedalus, the way we hate and pity the people we used to be. It’s a symptom of poisoned, poisonous ambition and, I would argue from experience, of deep loneliness. You don’t need to listen carefully to know Dedalus wants to be a great writer walking on the bleak beach at Sandymount, even his inner monologue feels half-performed, contrived to attract the plaudits and pity of an imagined audience. Paddy Dawson plays Stephen Dedalus and captures his self-spiting intelligence, his egotism and pain. The RTE players give performances of great clarity and insight. Isn’t the root purpose of modernism to transcribe reality better than realism ever could? As for those scrotumtightening compounds: they fall apart like onions in the pan – you cannot pronounce an unwritten hyphen. This makes sense when you think about it. Joyce’s modernist innovations – mistakes, slips, digressions, truncated thoughts, reversals of sense and grammar – are so much a part of normal speech they hardly register to the ear. Those REFERENTIAL CAPS LOCK OUTBURSTS come down to the level of conversation. How clear this book becomes when heard aloud, retaining its pleasures while shedding its most intimidating tics. If you do, that immense codex of tiny words becomes a voice, a stream of voices, a constant moment of peculiar revelation. RTE’s adaptation of Ulysses is a masterpiece, a rare, enduring example of radio drama as art To all these then – to the unwilling, the lazy, the intimidated and the easily bored – I would say: don’t read Ulysses. Which might come as a relief to people who remember their first reading, perhaps an abortive one, with a sense of being made to feel stupid (‘mind’s darkness, a sloth of the underworld’) or tortured (‘agenbite of inwit’) or imposed on by an author who, even an evangelist would admit, could often be boring – and who went on to write a book so inconceivably boring that it has dwindled, unread, into a byword for things pointlessly difficult and dull. Or perhaps not, since it’s precisely that sense of monolithic, radiant intellect this dramatisation dissolves. ‘Kyrie!’ As someone cries about 14 hours in. It is a masterpiece, a rare, enduring example of radio drama as art. To celebrate, I’ve spent the past month or so listening to Irish national broadcaster RTE’s adaptation of Joyce’s epic. At a moment when contemporary arts coverage, where it exists, is broad but shallow, oversimplified, overexplained and broadcast in 15- or ten-minute bursts that preclude complexity, it’s hard not to feel jealous. There was no abridgement and no explanation: just the text, entire. Radios all over the country emit the words ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’, and don’t stop broadcasting until they have read out every word of Ulysses, down to its last, heart-stopping syllable. ‘Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.’ She has come to him in a dream smelling of wax and rosewood. One is pierced by thoughts of his late mother. Two men – both annoying, one stung with grief and ambition – are having an argument. You can also download ebook versions of Ulysses in the following formats: iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats – Hypertext – Web Friendly Format.Dublin. What makes the audio special is that it features a full-cast, dramatic performance of Ulysses. You can stream the audio right below, or (or via this file) download a big zip file right here. That you will find out when you hear the free audio book made available by. It sprawls over 750 pages, using over 250,000 words, and takes hours to read aloud. Although chronicling one ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom in 1904 Dublin, Ulysses is no small work. Today, it’s widely considered a classic in modernist literature, and The Modern Library went so far as to call it the most important English-language novel published during the 20th century. Published in serial format between 19, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s. This is a novel that needs no introduction, but we will give it a short one anyway.
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