Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce is one of two of the greatest works of fiction of the twentieth century (the second being the multi-volume In Search of Lost time by Marcel Proust). Its greatness is only exceeded by the number of readers who have shied away from attempting to read this monumental achievement, because of its reputation for extreme difficulty. This is unfortunate. Although a few of the eighteen episodes that comprise the book are difficult, much of the book, by far the greater portion, is readily accessible. Modernism was laced with at least one conservative streak: Its proponents endorsed the notion of looking backward to the classics so as to bring the unalloyed gold of their content forward, to make them new in association with the stylistic innovations of post-World War I Europe. Joyce based his story of Leopold Bloom, an advertisement canvasser in Dublin, and Stephen Daedalus, the artist as a young man, on Homer’s Odyssey. In episodes spanning one day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, and corresponding to eighteen episodes of the Greek Classic, Ulysses (the Latin translation of the name Odysseus) is filled with references and allusions employed to create a meta-novel in which the interior thoughts of Bloom, Daedalus and Bloom’s wife, Molly, are set down to describe their subjective as well as a narrator’s objective view of reality. Each of the eighteen episodes use a different and individualized style sufficient to set forth an encyclopedia of the writer’s vast knowledge, focused primarily on an Irishman’s point of view regarding the state of Irish as well as English literature from Beowulf to Modernism.  (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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