Beginning Ulysses, Or What on Earth am I Reading?

Today I started reading Ulysses. I sat in a bookshop filled with glee and read the first twenty pages. If I’m this proud from twenty pages, how satisfying will this book be when I read hundreds of pages? When I finish? Normally I don’t like to know too much about the plot or themes of a book before I’ve read it. However, due to the extreme challenge that this book is rumoured to be, I don’t want to get all the way through and not pick up on the most basic of details – I know I won’t understand it all, so I at least want to grasp the bones of it.

Here is what I have found out so far, correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m compiling this initial outline before reading from a fair few different websites, but most credit must go to this.

Ulysses is split into three parts and eighteen episodes, each reflecting a character or incident of The Odyssey. There are no episode or chapter titles in the book itself, but they do appear in Joyce’s outline. The novel is set on June 16th 1904 between 8am and 3am.

Part I: The Telemachiad

• Episode I – Telemachus, 8am
• Episode II – Nestor, 10am
• Episode III – Proteus, 11am

Part II: The Odyssey

• Episode IV – Calypso, 8am
• Episode V – Lotus-Eaters, 10am
• Episode VI – Hades, 11am
• Episode VII – Aeolus, 12pm
• Episode VIII – Lestrygonians, 1pm
• Episode IX – Scylla and Charybdis, 2pm
• Episode X – Wandering Rocks, 3pm
• Episode XI – Sirens, 4pm
• Episode XII – Cyclops, 5pm
• Episode XIII – Nausicaa, 8pm
• Episode XIV – Oxen of the Sun, 10pm
• Episode XV – Circe, 12am

Part III: The Nostos

• Episode XVI –  Eumaeus, 1am
• Episode XVII – Ithaca, 2am
• Episode XVIII – Penelope, 3am / unspecified

Apologies if you have no interest in James Joyce, Bloomsday or Ulysses because my next few posts will be about all three! Plus I’ll need a guide to The Odyssey. Now I’m off to read a little bit more….

Bloomsday and a Week with Joyce

“What did you do in the Great War Mr. Joyce?”
“I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?”

Bloomsday, June 16th, is almost here. Despite my earlier reservations (IMMENSE FEAR) about reading James Joyce at all, let alone Ulysses, I am actually now quite excited. The readalong, should my excitement become contagious, is hosted by o and her sign up post is here.

Rather tragically, my work life is unsympathetic to my wish to drink coffee and sit around reading all day, and I have to go to work on Bloomsday itself. But, instead missing all of the fun, I have decided to spend a whole week in celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and my education in both matters. To help me, because obviously this is going to be a huge challenge, I’ll be listening to BBC Radio 4’s celebratory programmes which I read about here.

In theory, my week will be going a bit like this:

• Monday: Go and buy a copy of Ulysses. It is (I think) about 750 pages, how handy, about 100 pages per day. Try and read a substantial chunk to get going.
• Tuesday: Read more Ulysses.
• Wednesday: Repeat.
• Thursday: More reading, listen to In Our Time on Radio 4, which “will discuss the background to Ulysses, considering its historical and literary context, its themes, contents and style, and the impact it has had since publication”. Useful!
• Friday: Reading.
• Saturday: The big day, read as much as I can, propose a toast to Mr. Joyce.
• Sunday: IN THEORY finish reading Ulysses. Listen to the BBC dramatisation.

Goodbye To All That: War Books [5/15]

I am so pleased to have finally read this book, I loved it, and reading it after All Quiet on the Western Front was perfect timing. Robert Graves’ autobiography is totally gripping and completely different to what I was expecting – Goodbye To All That covers the horrors of war in a really cold, detached way. The opposite of Remarque’s emotional prose, but just as moving. A real testament to how good this autobiography is: even the beginning was interesting. Normally, I’m not a fan of the first few chapters of biographies, but Graves writing made me interested in everything he had to say. His childhood seemed to be a quintessentially English upper class one, although a boys boarding school seemed to be not without its own problems! This was so readable because of the immediacy, his memories are very clear and honest.

Graves spent his army life as an Officer, mostly at the front, until he was wounded. There are the horrible scenes you would come to expect in a truthful account of the trenches but the part that separated this for me was his thoughts about the continuation of the war past 1916.

We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.

What has made this book stand out from the other war books I have read so far, is that the book continues after the war. I suppose because there was a future for Graves, although it wasn’t the one he may have thought about as a young man prior to his army life. I really enjoyed reading about his marriage to Nancy, a feminist quite ahead of her time! His life as a poet also meant he was meeting a lot of writers who we now regard as iconic, like Siegfried Sassoon, T. E. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. A really sad part towards the end is when Graves mentions losing his son in the Second World War. As his generation becomes the elders, his children suffer the same horrors.

All Quiet on the Western Front: War Books [3/15]

Now he is lying there – and for what reason? Everybody in the whole world ought to be made to walk past his bed and be told: ‘This is Franz Kemmerich, he’s nineteen and a half, and he doesn’t want to die! Don’t let him die!

All Quiet on the Western Front is a book that never loses force. Originally I was only going to read war books I hadn’t read before but why leave out the best? I have read this book before and am pleased to report that it is still just as devastating and worthwhile the second time around. I’m quite confident that by the end of this reading project I will still recommend this book as the one to read.

I won’t go into the plot, because I’m sure everyone knows the story: German soldier fighting on the Western front in WWI. The fact that the novel is about German soldiers highlights why we should commemorate all the soldiers who died in the war, not just the ones from our own country. The most important part of the book is that you could be reading about any soldier from either side. This post is heavy on the quotes because Remarque’s writing is somehow both horrific and beautiful, and puts into words what I couldn’t begin to articulate.

Paul Baumer is just about as experienced as you can manage to be for a front line soldier, which makes it easy to forget that he is only nineteen. During the battles he fights instinctively, acts compassionately, appears fearless. It isn’t until after the fighting stops that I remembered how young and destroyed he really is:

The trucks roll monotonously onwards, the shouts are monotonous , the falling rain is monotonous. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead men up at the front of the truck, on the body of the little recruit with a wound that is far too big for his hip, it’s falling on Kemmerich’s grave and it’s falling in our hearts.

That is the quote I remember best from reading this book a few years ago. It completely captures the sheer despair and futility of these soldiers prolonging their lives. Yes, they can survive one battle but in order to face what? Paul and his comrades occasionally talk about what they would do if the war finishes and the answers tend to revolve around satisfying the body; girls, food, alcohol, sleep. Any discussion beyond that is depressing; they are the lost generation and they know it.

We’re no longer young men. We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don’t believe in those things anymore; We believe in the war.

The absorption of young men’s lives into the war is something I don’t always consider when thinking about war novels. Yes, most of their time is taken up with fighting and whilst they get leave to see their families perhaps this isn’t the relief you might have thought it was. The soldiers think about home with nostalgia – firmly anchored in the past:

The [memories] are silent because that is something incomprehensible to us. There is no silence at the front and the spell of the front is so strong that we are never away from it. […] The quietness is the reason why all these images awaken in us not so much desire as sadness – a vast and inexplicable melancholy. These scenes existed once – but they will never return. They are gone, they are another world, a world that is in the past for us.

Surprisingly some of the most upsetting parts of the novel happen when Paul is at home on leave. The soldiers have an unspoken, unanimous decision to never reveal the reality of what happens at the front to their families. Consequently Paul has to see and do horrible things and never speak of them to anyone who cares about him, which makes for agonising reading. Is it better that his family didn’t know what his life had become? Does morale win wars or prolong them?

Can there ever be a novel that should be required for everyone to read? Are the World Wars a Western concern? Completely simplifying what could be a lengthy argument, my opinion is that war is war and everyone should know what it really costs.

A Farewell to Arms: War Books [2/15]

I picked A Farewell to Arms to follow Birdsong because I thought the two books would be quite different. Hemingway is writing in part from his own experiences as an American soldier in the Italian army who whilst fighting for the same side is likely to have faced different situations from an English soldier in France. There were great differences in the authors’ writing styles. Hemingway is cold and clinical with description whereas Faulks does not shy away from long descriptive passages. I thought both books were very moving, but for different reasons: I knew the characters in Birdsong, I was attached to them, and I was given a lot of sensory detail about their situations. A Farewell to Arms was completely different: The matter of fact way that Hemingway describes events makes reading them feel like you are being punched in the stomach.

What made this book stand out for me against other WWI novels was its portrayal of the relationship between Catherine and Henry. Unlike Stephen and Isabelle in Birdsong, romance was flesh and blood in this soldier’s life and not just a haunting memory. However, I’m struggling to work out what Hemingway means by writing women the way he does. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that Catherine was the weak link in A Farewell to Arms and I think I’m inclined to agree. She seems to be slightly unnatural, maybe a bit one-dimensional. What is she really like? I’ve no idea.

The last thing I picked up on when I read A Farewell to Arms was how many soldiers died outside the battlefield. They were shot by superiors, caught the flu, starved, or succumbed to medical complications. Death takes on a completely different meaning during wartime and the grim reality of dying seems to spiral out of control.

What makes this such a worthy war novel is the ending.

DON’T READ THIS LAST BIT IF YOU DON’T LIKE SPOILERS:

Catherine and the baby dying hammers home the message that no good has come of this war. No new life, no regeneration – what has been destroyed by war will always have been destroyed. If Henry had gone on to live a happy life with wife and child the book wouldn’t have been the same at all – you can’t un-see things, you can’t undo war.

Birdsong: War Books [1/15]

The reading project has officially begun: I am reading the WWI books first, and have started with Birdsong  by Sebastian Faulks.

Birdsong  is written with three story lines that intertwine: It begins in 1910 with a love affair, travels underneath the trenches over 1916-1918, and ends with a granddaughter in the 1970s. From reading around, this book seems to be one that divides opinion. However, I loved it and think it is a very accomplished modern story about the war.

I was surprised when the book began with a budding relationship but I think it helped to understand the characters before they were thrown into some very extreme circumstances. Giving an insight into people’s lives before the war helped me to imagine the sort of thing men might have been fighting for and I liked how Faulks included the men’s letters home. What separates this novel from others I have read before was the focus on the tunnels underneath no man’s land. There were miners on the British and German sides tunneling towards each other with mines to plant. Reading these parts of the book was so uncomfortable – Faulks is really good at making you feel completely claustrophobic.

There is a really moving paragraph written about the aftermath of Battle of the Somme:

Stephen had noticed nothing but the silence that followed the guns. Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning.

‘Oh God, oh God.’ Weir began to cry. ‘What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We’ve done something terrible, we’ll never get back to how it was before.’

The book, like All Quiet on the Western Front, contrasts the fighting on the battlefields with elements of nature like the birds singing. I think this technique is so effective because it highlights war as an aberration in nature. It is these bits that stick in my mind as being particularly sad.

The only part of the book I wasn’t too keen on was the 1970s story. In it, Elizabeth is starting to learn about her family history around wartime. It seemed almost false, because Elizabeth seems to be pretty stupid – I mean, we learned about WWI at school, surely they did in the seventies as well? On the other hand, whilst I know bits about the war and have visited some of the battlefields in France and Belgium, I don’t know as much about what my own great grandparents did. This is something I would like to find out more about.

Next I am moving on to another WWI classic: A Farewell to Arms.

Now the Sun is Finally Shining, How About Some Books About War?

After my Tudor reading, I fancy a mini reading project based around War literature. There are obviously lots of brilliant books about a lot of wars around the world so I’ve narrowed my selection down to books written about WWI and WWII, as I find this period of history interesting.

I’ve picked eight books that are all on my Classics Club list. Two birds, one stone and all that, and this way I can also stick to my attempt to stop buying new books and read the ones I already have.

• Faulks, Sebastian, Birdsong
• Gibbons, Stella, Westwood
• Graves, Robert, Goodbye To All That
• Grossman, Vasily, Life and Fate
• Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms
• Nemirovsky, Irene, Suite Française
• Vonnegut, Kurt, Cat’s Cradle
• Wells, H. G., The War of the Worlds

And will add to this list some novels written recently:

• Beauman, Ned, Boxer Beetle 
• Hollinghurst, Alan, The Stranger’s Child
• Kerr, Philip, Berlin Noir
• Littell, Jonathan, The Kindly Ones
• Young, Louisa, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

So, thirteen books, six about the WWI and seven about WWII. I could read them chronologically, I could read the modern novels separately, I might read the two science fiction novels together. I’m not sure I’ll manage to read all of these in a row – I have an unspecified timeframe, but as you know I chop and change what my reading plans are whenever I feel like it. But if this works, I have similar lists for projects that I could start. I’m looking at you, gigantic stack of Edwardian novels…

The books have been moved to their new home – in an oppressive stack next to my bed. I’m feeling quite enthusiastic – it’ll be brilliant to have read all of these books. I am also quite curious to see if any of them will replace my current (I’m not sure ‘favourite’ is the right word) most admired war novel: All Quiet on the Western Front. If any of them even come close, I’ll be onto a winner because that book is truly astounding. Actually, make that fourteen books because I’ll have to re-read this one too.

Edit: I’ve just managed to get hold of a copy of Regeneration by Pat Barker so now there are fifteen books!

Umm, What?

I’ve just been reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner for a book group: I don’t get it, or particularly like it. This book appears on countless reading lists and William Faulkner is a much admired author and so on but I don’t understand why.

Calling all Faulkner fans! Tell me what I am missing!

I thought I had managed to come to appreciate stream of consciousness novels, but in this one I didn’t really like anyone and I wasn’t ever entirely sure what was happening. Without question, Faulkner dives completely into one character – they all have very distinct and separate voices – I just didn’t manage to catch up.

Things I did like:

• The atmosphere: the hot days in the fields
• Images like the buzzards circling over the coffin
• Vardaman’s mother/fish narration
• The descriptions of the divide between town and country

Perhaps I needed to read this paying it much more attention, to be honest I have been rushing because I want to get on with re-reading Wolf Hall before Bring Up the Bodies is released on the 10th. When it comes to reading ‘classics’ I have a tendency to think I should enjoy them, or at least be able to appreciate why other people enjoy them. They are classics for a reason, after all.

So if you’ve read this or any other Faulkner novels I want to be corrected! Tips for reading, what you love best about his writing, what you think I should pay more attention to… It will be very welcome.

It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the Fiesta

I continued on my Hemingway kick by reading a full length novel rather than short stories: Hemingway’s first novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. The book follows a group of friends as they travel from Paris to Pamplona in Spain to watch the running of the bulls. Jake, the narrator, is in love with Brett. Brett is engaged to Mike. Brett is having an affair with Robert. Robert is in love with Brett… and so on. The relationships in the novel are quite modern, all the characters seem free to chase after whoever they like. Whilst this is a liberated portrayal, it doesn’t seem to make people happy. The opposite, in fact! The jealousy and sadness from these relationships is really touching.

Without ever mentioning the war, other than to hint about Jake’s injuries, the whole book smacks with the aimlessness of a lost generation. Hemingway isn’t judgmental about the way his characters behave, but maybe the whole book is a comment about whether the world provided for young men after the war. I’m sure there must be something to the writer of the novel being the most tragic character… There was understandably a lot of male insecurity after the war, as people tried to come to terms with what being a man meant. I think the characters in this book are struggling with this.

All these ideas are tied together with the bullfights; passion, violence, heart and soul, work, achievement, recognition, tradition, masculinity, bravery. Bullfighting represents everything the novel talks about. I really enjoyed this novel but I think it requires a lot of thought. On the surface the story is quite simple, but the more I think about it the greater its depths. I don’t think it is a book I could confidently say I understand after just one reading.

Men Without Women

I’ve just read the collection of short stories Men Without Women. I’m not often drawn to short stories but they suit Hemingway’s style – he says so much with so few words. I have to admit sometimes the stories were so subtle I had to re-read them a couple of times, but it was certainly worth it.

My favourite stories in the collection were two of his more famous works: Hills Like White Elephants and In Another Country. Both have a sadness to the relationships between men and women that seem incredibly poignant. In Hills Like White Elephants the story is entirely based around what isn’t said. The couple sitting having a beer before catching a train have an involved history and are struggling with how to move their relationship forward. There is truth and love, jealousy and emptiness; it is like a battle between them to see who can care the most whilst making the other as unhappy as possible.

In Another Country is a touching story dealing with war heroes, cowardice, guilt and grief. Big themes for a seven page story! The feeling I have when reading Hemingway’s writing is that he fully knows his subject. It was something I thought when I read The Old Man and the Sea too. Unlike other writers, he doesn’t smack you in the face with how much he knows, or how much research he has done. Instead there is just an underlying authoritative tone, where I was quite willing to accept anything he said as truth.

Brilliant, but not quite as epic as The Old Man and the Sea.