Bloomsyear

The centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses – a work described in Finnegans Wake as the ‘usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles’ – will rightly be a cause for much rejoicing in Ireland and elsewhere. The publication of the notoriously ‘unreadable’ novel, set around a day in the lives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom, was such a watershed in the history of fiction and reading that we might classify literary experience as either BU or AU: before or after Ulysses. Whether they love or hate it, has anyone who’s even dipped their toes into the snot-green linguistic sea of Joyce’s protean masterpiece ever felt the same again about novels, language or themselves?