Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living [Hardcover]

Kiberd's book--lucid, learned, free of jargon and pretension--can make for a wonderful companion along the journey through Joyce's wondrous epic.--Sudip Bose

Declan Kiberd explains why James Joyce's great modernist masterpiece is in fact a book that can teach ordinary people how to live better lives.

Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it. It was never meant to be an abstruse a book for the elite, argues Declan Kiberd. It is a book for the common people, and offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book’s hero, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante and the Bible (on all of which Joyce drew in the writing of his book).

This great modernist masterpiece, which for many readers seems so intimidating, is one of the great books that can teach us how to live better lives. Declan Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people, rooted in their experience and offering a democratic and humane vision of a tolerant, decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book’s hero, shows the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the streets of Dublin. In his apparently banal way he sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante and the Bible – all sources that Joyce drew on in the writing of his book. Ulysses and Us can also be read as a guide to Joyce, his novel and its context in the history of Ireland, and of Dublin, where the action of Ulysses takes place over a single day. Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it, designed to remove it from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Joyce industry and restore it to its shocking, democratic origins. Kiberd has written a moving and controversial book, free of literary-critical jargon and specialist concerns. With it he confirms his position as one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals.

‘The most exciting book I know on the most exciting novel ever written. Declan Kiberd’s brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce’s greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces and restores it to being what its maker intended: a treasury of joys, a guide to enlightened living. Ulysses, finally, is a book about a friendship between a sometimes difficult young genius and a man made wise by life. No novel ever had a more understanding friend than Declan Kiberd.’ Joseph O’Connor, author of Redemption Falls and Star of the Sea ‘A feast. This book will reach and move many ordinary and extraordinary readers.’ Edna O’Brien

Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize in 1995. It is one of the most influential works on Irish culture published in the last twenty years. His Irish Classics came out in 2000 and won the prestigious Lannan Prize in the USA. He is the Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin and is a widely respected broadcaster, critic and reviewer.