
Ulysses (AmazonClassics Edition)
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $34.29
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Aidan Kelly
-
Alana Kerr Collins
-
By:
-
James Joyce
James Joyce’s landmark novel traces the course of three characters on one summer day in Dublin. First, there’s middle-aged wanderer and appeasing cuckold Leopold Bloom. He crosses paths with Stephen Dedalus, a young aspiring writer flirting with indulgence. Among a gallery of generous, ebullient, and brawling Dubliners, Bloom and Dedalus find in each other, for a few hours, a spiritual father and son. Then there’s Molly, Leopold’s wife. Conflicted about love, marriage, motherhood, and sexual longing, she’ll spend her afternoon with a lover. Later, as day turns to night, with Leopold beside her, Molly brings an odyssey to an indelible end.
With its Homeric allusions, labyrinthine digressions, and shifting narrative styles, James Joyce’s universal epic of the human condition achieves a singular and everlasting grandeur.
Revised edition: Previously published as Ulysses, this edition of Ulysses (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.
Public Domain (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...




















People who viewed this also viewed...


















a classic
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I haven’t seen or heard Aidan Kelly do anything else, as far as I know, but he takes off with Ulysses like he’s been practicing for years. It’s a lively reading in a voice that sounds VERY Irish. He clearly appreciates the humor in the novel, and he does a good job orchestrating the voices. His voice has enough variety and energy to keep the pace going — not much chance of mistaking Bantam Lyons for Nosey Flynn this innings. I was able to listen to it for long stretches, often hearing things as if for the first time.
One of the big test cases in the book is Episode 12, the “Cyclops” chapter. This is a cacophony of comic voices and characters mixed in with increasingly absurd parodies of news accounts and Victorian translations of medieval romances. Kelly pulls it off beautifully, and in fact I enjoyed it so much that as soon as it was done I listened to it a second time. The other big test case is the “Circe” episode, a hallucinogenic nightmare that must be a nightmare for the narrator: it’s written as a playscript, but one where gas jets talk and Leopold Bloom’s sexual fantasies take off with a vengeance. Once again Kelly comes through: I would put his insane reading of this episode up against any of the others.
When all is said and done, I’d have to say that really, this is one of my favorite recordings of the book. It has a liveliness about it that I find missing from some of the others, a liveliness that makes Dublin come alive. One of the things I especially enjoyed is that Kelly actually sings the songs, including the clock chimes, instead of just repeating the lyrics sing-song as is the case in several audio versions of the book.
As is the case with many recordings of Ulysses, an actress takes over the proceedings for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. In this case it's Alana Kerr Collins, another performer I was not otherwise with; but as with Aidan Kelly, my ignorance of her career says more about me than about her. The book as a whole is an Olympic event, but Molly’s monologue, the two-hour half-asleep musings of Bloom’s wife, is a particular challenge: the text is virtually without punctuation, and the reader has to fish out the emotional continuity from what looks at first glance like a word salad. Collins takes to it like a life-long Joycean, capturing the rhythm of Molly’s thoughts with careful pauses, and brings the novel to a triumphant conclusion on its final quiet YES. Listening to her brilliant reading of this episode, I can believe that Molly Bloom has a career as a singer.
Not much to say about the book itself. It’s one of the funniest ever written and one of the saddest. (A good example of both: Leopold Bloom’s interior monologue, at the end of a burial service, includes a jingle: “Hope you’re well and not in hell.”) As Captain Kirk once said of Spock, of all the books I have read, Ulysses is the most HUMAN.
If you’re coming to it for the first time, my advice is: get what you can from it and don't worry about the rest of it. Nobody can get it on a first reading. It will come in time. Get one of the many study guides available to keep you on track. You don’t need to understand every reference to appreciate what’s happening to the characters, but you might need a straightforward narrative summary to cut through the internal monologues.
(Speaking of the episodes.... one of the drawbacks as far as this recording is concerned is that each “episode” in the book is divided into multiple tracks, and there are no episode numbers or titles to let you know where you are. It may help to know that there are 18 episodes in the book organized into 3 parts. In the recording, the episodes are separated by short pauses. )
Good job all around. Bottom line: this performance of Ulysses is golden. I'm going to keep my eye out for other titles by both narrators.
Golden
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A Novel About Nothing
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Rich and sometimes disgusting
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Story? What story?
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A definitive reading
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A Brilliant Performance of a Terrible Book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.