At a dinner party in the Canton of Ticino, in a house filled with books, I begin leafing through Joyce’s Ulysses in the Mondadori edition. I started it many years ago and gave up almost immediately… it is pure illegibility, the endless, frustrating attempts of a chronically impotent libertine, sadly lacking in genius, a funnel of ugliness that marks the end of the great era of the novel. I put the book back in its place, amen.
Guido Ceronetti
Every June 16, in an annual display of literary fervor and scholarly masochism, the world celebrates Bloomsday, a day dedicated to reliving, step by step, thought by thought, Leopold Bloom’s journey through the streets of Dublin. It is a commemoration as eccentric as its object of worship: James Joyce’s Ulysses. A narrative entelechy that manages to turn an ordinary day into an experience longer than a winter without heating. The only day on the calendar when thousands of people pretend to be reading a book they will never get past page ten of.
Ulysses is a Gothic cathedral of words. Huge, intricate, admirable from afar and completely uninhabitable. You admire it like a storm from a terrace, with a drink in your hand and no intention of going in. Joyce has been elevated by generations of reader-fencers who confuse complexity with depth and density with divinity. What does Ulysses offer us? A whole day reduced to an eternity of redundant thoughts, repressed impulses, and metaphors that multiply like mushrooms on damp bread. And yet I love it like you love an unbearable relative who sings at funerals and steals napkins from restaurants. Because deep down, no one like Joyce can remind us that genius and indulgence can share a bed, breakfast, and typographical delirium.
To enrich this reflection, I have brought together for Bookish & Co. an international selection of renowned literary critics and entomologists (sic), who, as experts in the minuscule and the elusive, have contributed their views on this work written by a mind possessed by encyclopedias and storms. Let the planet pass judgment.
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Étienne Dubois (France):
A certain literary elite, wrapped in tweed and intoxicated by their own erudition, celebrates Bloomsday as if the universe had stopped to watch a man buy kidneys in Dublin. To French eyes, accustomed to Flaubert’s meticulously organized misfortunes, this celebration smells like forgotten cheese: exuberant, excessive, and a little rancid. Joyce, that brilliant barbarian, invented a labyrinth where he himself is the Minotaur, and the readers are poor Theseus without Ariadne’s thread. For example, he has his characters say nonsense such as “A corpse is decomposed flesh, and what is cheese? The corpse of milk.” Ulysses is indigestible prose—a mental choucroute served cold—and yet every year brave souls throw themselves into it, convinced that chaos is a higher form of art.
Dr. Klaus Morgenstern (Germany):
Eighteen hours of narrative to describe an urban walk? Ulysses undoubtedly represents the decline of time as a narrative tool. There is no development, no climax, no ordnung. It is as if Joyce had read Hegel and decided to bully him: “Rest. He has traveled. With? A child. The child. (A child passes through the turnstile). A cloud. A cloud passes. He is almost asleep. He is almost awake.” Do you see? What for some is a monument to modern consciousness is for us an unwitting treatise on structural anxiety. There is no thesis or antithesis, just a drunk walking toward a bed with his wife inside and Shakespeare in his head. If this is art, then The Critique of Pure Reason is a romantic comedy.
Vittorio Lazzari (Italy):
A novel that borders on comic opera. Ulysses is the literary equivalent of a five-hour Mass in Latin with no choir, no incense, and a priest who talks only about his traumatic childhood. Where is the passion? Where is the drama? Where is the moment when someone cries “mamma mia” and throws himself into the river for love? Nothing, just gems like these: “Oh, that beautiful thing was the only true thing in life, and he said, ‘Do as you wish,’ and I gave him the flower of my body, and he pressed me against the wall.” Just stream of consciousness, fried kidneys, and internal monologues that make even Leopardi seem like an optimistic influencer. Joyce has turned the everyday into a religion, but without miracles or redemption. It’s an opera without music, just the libretto read aloud by a man wearing a hat. Yet the world applauds. Of course: modern art loves the incomprehensible. If tomorrow someone publishes a restaurant menu with footnotes in Sanskrit, they’re sure to win a prize. And there I’ll be, eating pasta, watching from afar as they burn incense in front of a book that no one understands, but everyone pretends to revere.
Arkady Petrov (Russia):
We cannot help but see in Ulysses the confirmation that the Western soul is lost, and that modern man, like Leopold Bloom, wanders not only through Dublin, but through an empty world, without God, without destiny or purpose. Joyce, in his brutal lucidity, has created a verbal coffin for the spirit. It’s all there: marital loneliness, glorified banality, obsessive thinking that goes round and round like a broken cartwheel in the mud of existence. Tovarich, savor this excerpt: “The life of a man of any value is a continuous allegory, and very few eyes can see the allegory.” We read it and say, “Poor thing.” Because in Russia, if you’re going to suffer for a thousand pages, at least someone has to die, or redeem themselves, or set something on fire. But here, not even that. Just the slow parade of an alienated soul, drinking tea with buttered bread, while the clock ticks on, cruel and meaningless. It’s La Nausée, before Sartre, but with more references to Shakespeare and less alcohol than would be prudent.
Marcelino Quevedo (Spain):
Ulysses is an exaggeration. We, who have spent centuries dealing with long novels and characters who spend entire chapters talking to dead mules or confusing windmills with giants, could have some patience… but this borders on reader masochism. There is no plot or honor to save, not even a decent duel. Just a man wandering around Dublin as if looking for some patatas bravas on a Sunday. And for what? To show that modern life is absurd? Thanks, we already knew that. Here we call that “going out for a few beers with your high school friends.” Joyce’s Ulysses is like a plate of tripe served cold and without bread: very artistic, but no one wants to finish it. Of course, everyone pretends to have read it, just as they pretend to understand Góngora. Deep down, what bothers us is not that it’s unreadable, but that they sell it to us as essential reading. Are sentences like these essential? “Mr. Bloom, walking, found himself somewhat impeded by the small, rapid clouds of mosquitoes that appear along the river in July.” Well, Mr. Joyce, if I have to choose between this and Lazarillo, I’ll stick with the rogue: at least he was hungry, but he didn’t have delusions of literary immortality.
Hendrik van Daalen (Netherlands):
Ulysses is like building a dam to hold back a flood. We appreciate efficiency, clarity, and ideas that fit into a single paragraph without exploding at the edges like a bicycle without brakes going downhill. Joyce, on the other hand, seems determined to turn every trivial thought into a three-story maze with windows into the subconscious. Everything is saturated: with symbols, with references, with words that could say something but prefer to surf on syllables. If a Dutchman had written this novel, it would be a six-page pamphlet with a map, a timetable, and a useful ending. Where is the practical sense? Where is the linguistic economy? There is no channel here that can contain so much overflow: “Bronze for gold, the horseshoes ringing, steel sounding imperthnthn thnthn.” And the strangest thing: it’s not even funny. If you’re going to torture the reader, at least offer them some good cheese, a cold beer, or a discount to the museum. But no: Joyce’s only offerings are kidneys and Catholic guilt, and in twenty-page portions at that.
Solveig Nystrom (Norway):
Ulysses reads like a winter that never ends. Long, dark, and full of thoughts that lead nowhere except inward, to an emotional cave where one encounters the voice of one’s mother and a recipe for meatballs. Joyce, with his tireless exploration of the self, seems convinced that every little action contains an ocean. We Nordics don’t argue with that. What bothers us is the noise. There are too many words for so little salvation. In our lands, when a man walks around all day without purpose, it is considered a symptom, rather than a masterpiece. Here, however, they celebrate this wandering as a mirror of the human condition: “Where was Moses when the candle went out? / That was the first point, said Stephen. / The lamp had been lit. Moses had not come. It was the darkest hour.” Well, in the North, we also look out the window and think about death, but we don’t turn it into a thousand-page novel. We write it in a haiku, throw it into the fjord, and get on with our lives. Because silence, at least, does not pretend to be revolutionary.
Haruki Aoyama (Japan):
Ulysses is a profound and insistently noisy experience. It is a novel that does not allow you to breathe, that pushes every thought at the reader as if afraid that silence would devour it. We find depth in the brief: a falling flower, an empty cup, a blank page. Joyce, on the other hand, seems to fear emptiness like a ghost: “The consciousness of Dublin in 1904, in its entirety, could only be approached through the simultaneous perception of all its parts, its inhabitants, their thoughts, their actions, their pasts and their futures.” Everything is full. Every page is overflowing with references, fragments, a density hungry for meaning. In Japan, a man walking through the city for a day could also become a novel, but in it the moments would be barely whispered. The absence of words would say more than any stream of consciousness. Ulysses is a garden with no space between the stones: overflowing, overwhelming, almost impatient. And that, curiously, is the form of Western loneliness.
Tariq El-Gamal (Egypt):
Ulysses is proof that the descendants of the northern barbarians still believe that complicated equals eternal. We, who write in stone and build empires with geometry and metaphor, know that a story does not need to confuse you to be profound. Joyce seems determined to hide his wisdom as if it were a hieroglyph on a pyramid without a map, but without the courtesy of a sphinx that at least gives you a clue. Ulysses spreads out like the Nile in flood. However, it does not fertilize anything. It only floods. In our tradition, a story must have weight, and the verb must be as clear as the sun over Thebes. Here, however, the sun has hidden behind clouds of references, and the reader walks like a blind man among ruins. There is beauty, but also a certain contempt for the listener. And that, in our land, is a narrative sin.
Eitan Malka (Israel):
Ulysses is like an extended version of the Talmud, but without the courtesy of a rabbi to explain anything to you. Page after page of unanswered questions, endless digressions, and characters who think more than they live. In our tradition, we are used to dense text, commentary on commentary on commentary. But what Joyce does is not exegesis: it is pretentious mischief. Where is the story? Where is the conflict that matters? Even the Old Testament, with all its severity, has action: exiles, wars, epiphanies. Ulysses, on the other hand, is like sitting in a synagogue where the sermon never ends and everyone is whispering in Greek, Latin, and onomatopoeia. We read it anyway. Because deep down, we recognize obstinacy as a form of faith. Only this time, the faith is in the author, and the miracle… that someone finishes the book and still remembers its name.
Amadou Bâ (Senegal):
Ulysses is a drum tuned to a frequency that only some pretend to hear. For us, recounting a day in the life of a man should have rhythm, cadence, call and response. It should invoke the wisdom of the griot, rather than the chaos of the neurotic. Joyce tries to make thought a dance, but he forgets that even the freest dance needs a beat. The stream of consciousness here stumbles. And one wonders where the collective voice has gone, the story that unites, that sings, that is passed down under the ceiba tree from generation to generation. In Ulysses, each character seems trapped in their own skull, repeating obsessions as if they were prayers to indifferent gods. We believe in narrative as a bridge, not a labyrinth. And while we admire the effort, we think that this novel, for all its ambition, forgot to look at the other. And without the other, the story becomes an echo. And echoes, in the end, do not nourish.
J.D. Whitemore (United States):
Ulises is… well, complicated. It was sold to us as “the most important book ever written,” so we bought it in hardcover, opened it with a craft beer by our side, and then left it forgotten on the coffee table like a trophy of cultural suffering. It’s not that we don’t understand it, we just don’t care. Without explosions, redemption, or at least a three-act story arc, we lose interest on page two. For us, it’s like climbing Everest in flip-flops: pointless, painful, but very prestigious on LinkedIn. What Joyce called innovation, we see as someone who didn’t take a good writing workshop. Show, don’t tell, buddy. And if you’re going to write a thousand pages about one day, at least give it a twist at the end. Like Bloom was a robot, or at least a bourbon-induced dream. Something that makes us feel like the time spent was worth it. Right?
Octavio Ramírez (Mexico):
Ulysses is like a poorly organized party: all the guests talk at the same time, no one can find the piñata, and in the end, you don’t know if you’re crying because you’re moved or because a barrage of classical references fell on your head. Joyce set out to capture everyday life with surgical precision, and boy did he ever succeed… My friends, take this passage: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the internal organs of beasts and birds. He liked thick soup made from giblets, nutty-tasting sweetbreads, stuffed roasted heart, slices of liver fried with breadcrumbs, fried cod roe. What he liked best were grilled lamb kidneys, which gave his palate a delicate taste of slightly perfumed urine.” Here we have our own daily epics: crossing the city during rush hour, surviving bureaucracy, tracking down the culprit who took your favorite topper. And we do it with a rhythmic narrative, with mischief, with some background music. Ulysses, on the other hand, seems to have been written by someone who swallowed a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and then had insomnia. We find it hard to empathize with Bloom, because if you’re going to tell the story of everyday life, do it like Rulfo: brief, dry, and with ghosts. Joyce went the other way: a long, cobbled road with no shade. And in the end, not even a mezcalito.
Martín Cuccittini (Argentina):
Ulysses is a typical case of an author who thought he was more important than his work. And that, for us, is a metaphysical sin. Because let’s face it: the idea is interesting, the attempt is brave, the execution… a trap. A literary sleight of hand. Joyce plagiarizes himself with style. You can tell he was brilliant, but also that no one dared to publish him. In Argentina, we know about dense books, complicated authors, labyrinthine metaphors; we have Borges, Macedonio, Pizarnik… but none of them make you feel like you’re in the middle of a reading simulation where the prize is saying you finished it. Ulysses became a kind of rite of passage for intellectuals who don’t dare say “I found it boring.” And what did Joyce do? He locked us in a supermarket of symbols with no emergency exit: “The tree of the starry sky hung with moist blue-night fruits. The great sweet earth, a plum pudding in the sky.” And like good Argentines, we argue about whether it’s brilliant or pretentious delirium. And like good Argentines, we keep reading it. Because, even though we curse it, the guy had something. But someone please explain to me why it takes so many pages to describe breakfast. Would it have been so hard to write “eggs, kidneys, and anguish”?
René Padilla (Cuba):
Ulysses is a bus that never arrives, but everyone insists that it’s just around the corner. You sit down, wait, and in the meantime, Joyce tells you every thought that crossed the mind of a man in Dublin as if they were divine revelations. But, my friend, in Cuba, a day is also very eventful: there are queues, power cuts, heat, guava, politics, Santeria, bolero, and reggaeton, and sometimes all of that on the same block. And no one has written a thousand-page novel about that. The thing about Ulysses is that it’s pure intellectual voltage without any emotional discharge. Here we value words spoken with rhythm, with double meanings: something that makes you laugh and think at the same time. Joyce, on the other hand, throws his entire library at you with force, as if he were fighting for a Nobel Prize he didn’t get. We appreciate the effort, but we finish reading it like someone who has just been through a cyclone: dizzy, tired, and wondering if all that was necessary. Because in the end, dude, if you’re going to write about everyday life, add a little music, a laugh, a mango tree. What’s with all the guilt, Shakespeare and kidneys?
Lachlan Reid (Australia):
Ulysses is like trying to build a barbecue with instructions in ancient Greek. They promise you a revelatory experience and you end up with an intellectual hangover and the feeling that someone has ripped you off on a Sunday. Here we value well-told stories: beginning, middle, end… maybe a kangaroo that escapes in the middle. But Joyce decided to take a day like any other and turn it into a psychological expedition into the depths of the narrative swamp. And well, it’s fine to be ambitious, but was it necessary to make it so unentertaining? Every sentence seems like a bet against the reader’s patience. We tried, we really did. Some even take it to the beach, hoping the wind will blow away the densest pages. But no. There’s Bloom, walking and thinking, walking and thinking, as if it were cerebral action cinema. In Australia, if you’re going to make someone walk all day, at least let them encounter a snake, a wave, or a beer. Anything else is noise. A lot of noise.
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And so, after traveling halfway around the world with this anthology of exasperated opinions, we can conclude that Ulysses is a mirror in which every culture sees its neurosis reflected. Some call it a masterpiece; others, a typographical crime. I prefer to think of it as a printed Rorschach test: you see in it what you fear, what you hate, what you aspire to understand. Joyce, with his pen drunk on itself, achieved the miracle of writing something that almost no one understands and that everyone is afraid to admit they don’t understand. Bravo. May his legacy continue to cause insomnia in students, debates in bars, and annotated editions that weigh more than a baby elephant. Because in the end, Ulysses survives. And that, deep down, is the most Irish thing there is.
