The thing to do is to forget that the field of the novel is as limited as the cult of the contemporary best-seller is making it, and to consider that Joyce may be within his rights in turning language into one of the characters of Ulysses (perhaps in Finnegans Wake the only character). In Ulysses, the poeticising and the pastiche and parody serve, as we shall see later, a dramatic enough purpose; they also deepen the human characters by adding to their ordinary human dimensions the dimension first, of history, then of myth.
You can also skip most chapters and come back later without missing too much. Like Wertheimer said, a lot of people get real frustrated at Chapter 3 and give up, but I personally think you can just skip it, especially for a first go through.
Fuck I don't even know what those words mean without context much less in a sentence :ohnoes:
This is good advice though, I'm bad at reading and would need a strategy.
Here's Burgess, ReJoyce, page 22:
So basically don't worry and just vibe with it :cat-vibing:
Secretly a lot of hard books work perfectly fine that way.
I love learning that I am not the only living person to have read that book. We should do a whole thread on Burgess some day.
I'm down. The people who dig Joyce's fart humor will love Inside Mr. Enderby.
The chapter about Shakespeare in Enderby's Dark Lady is fucking magnificent.
You can also skip most chapters and come back later without missing too much. Like Wertheimer said, a lot of people get real frustrated at Chapter 3 and give up, but I personally think you can just skip it, especially for a first go through.