How to read Ulysses

In the labyrinthine basement studio of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Irish actor Barry McGovern is doing something that would be inconceivable in any other country. Remarkably, he’s reading the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses out loud. Even more remarkably, a substantial audience are paying good money to sit and watch him. He’s been hard at it for five days, and he still has two days to go: 33 hours (plus toilet breaks) spread over an entire week.

Like a lot of people, I’ve always found Ulysses a dreadful struggle, so why do I persevere with it? Partly snobbery, of course. Having scratched a living for 30 years writing about the arts, I’ve lost count of all the boffins who’ve told me it’s the most important novel of the 20^th Century, yet I could never make head nor tail of it. Was there something wrong with me? Maybe a visit to Bloomsday, Dublin’s annual James Joyce jamboree, would help me get inside the book which even Joyce himself called ‘usylessly [sic] unreadable.