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In Brief | In Brief Review

Navigating the labyrinth

A guide to Ulysses as a comic novel

By Sarah Davison

September 2, 2022 Read this issue

IN THIS REVIEW

THE GUIDE TO JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

328pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. Paperback, $21.95.

Patrick Hastings

W hen James Joyce smiled and said “the demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole
life to reading my works”, he really was not joking. Patrick Hastings is one of many to answer that call,
having spent much of his professional life reading and teaching Ulysses. The fruit of his labour of love is
The Guide to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, a book that grew out of his convivial and much-consulted website
UlyssesGuide.com. The tone of the Guide is similarly informal. Written with warmth, affection, clarity and insight, it is full
of observations and witty asides that remind readers that Ulysses – whatever else it may be – is a comic novel.

To make this modernist masterpiece and “its labyrinthine systems of style, characterization, and allusion” readily

accessible to the novice is no mean feat. Many works on Ulysses are so densely detailed and bogged down in minutiae
that they are themselves something of a trial to get through. For decades Harry Blamires’s New Bloomsday Book (1966)
has been the standard companion for diligent students. Hastings’s Guide is much kinder to its readers. It proceeds from
the premiss that Ulysses is written in a way that assumes it has already been read. It supplies the explanation and context

necessary to ground readers securely so that they can be entranced by the poetry of Joyce’s prose and moved by the
human story of everyday life elevated to the status of myth without being baffled.

Hastings goes through the book chapter by chapter, offering lucid overviews to give readers the momentum and

confidence to overcome the difficulties that might otherwise challenge them at every turn. With refreshing pragmatism,
he even identifies sections that first-time readers can afford to skim. He celebrates the richly rewarding reading

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experience that Ulysses offers without getting mired in scholarly debates, encouraging the development of individual

interpretations. Enticing suggestions for further reading appear at the end of each chapter summary. The appendices
include helpful annotated chronologies of the respective days of the novel’s two (anti-)heroes, Stephen Dedalus and
Leopold Bloom, and a simplified schema that elucidates Joyce’s play with Homer’s Odyssey.

Joyce studies is an industry in itself, and a prolific one at that, but The Guide to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” genuinely merits
its singular title, rendering the novel Joyce jokingly called “uselessly unreadable” pleasurably readable. Hastings’s book is

thoroughly useable, and many first-time Joyceans will find it indispensable as they embark on the lifelong adventure that
is reading Ulysses.

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS at the TLS Shop

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