Last time, I wrote a reeeally long post about Ulysses. I'm not going to do that this time. But I am going to talk about Ulysses again. In this case, the Modern Library named it the best book of the 20th Century, if not the best book of all time. Is that the case?

Well, to be honest, I don't know. I'm not exactly in a position to influence anything, other than those who read this post. And I'm pretty sure the people at the Modern Library aren't exactly dropping by too often.

Ulysses is a tough book. Joyce goes all over the place to tell his story. Part of the novel is told in newspaper headlines. Another part in the form of a script. He changes points of view, sometimes to characters who are never named, and who are not in the action before or after their moment in the sun, as it were. It's incredible, and sometimes the text just sings. Sometimes literally. There are two places where there is music.

I haven't read anything like this. I skimmed through Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, and his experiments don't seem to be as effective as Joyces. Where Foer sometimes obscures text (the words run together until the page goes black), Joyce never tries to hide what he's saying. He just sometimes make you work for the meaning.

I read Parade's End by Ford Maddox Ford, one of Joyce's contemporaries, and while Ford certainly puts the reader through the motions, it's nothing on the level on which Joyce is working (blogger's note: I loved Parade's End moreso than Ulysses, but not by a lot.) Even Faulker was playing around with language, but I'm thinking they're still in two different leagues.

The difference between Joyce and his contemporaries is this: Joyce took more risks.

I think that's it, really, and years after his death, he's being rewarded for it.