Maureen Dowd at The New York Times on James Joyce's Ulysses (and U.S. politics).
"Colm Toibin, the renowned Irish writer who teaches my class [at Columbia University, where I’m studying for a master’s in English literature], wrote in The Financial Times about the book: 'For the ordinary reader, it has the same cachet as running a marathon does for the ordinary athlete,” he said. “It is a challenge and then, for those who have read the book, a matter of pride.
"'Ulysses, he added, 'in all its generosity of style, its plenitude, the open sensuality of its characters, its lack of piety and respect for authority, its placing of a freethinking cosmopolitan Jewish man at its center, can be read as a contribution to the Irish argument, the tone of the book as a blueprint for what Irish life might be like after independence.'
"Small moments, Toibin said, 'glitter and shimmer' because of Joyce’s wild flights of language.'"
See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 59.
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