He spent most of his adulthood living a precarious existence travelling between Paris, Zurich and Trieste with Nora and their two children, Giorgio and Lucia. James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest of ten children. The other reason is that the entirety of Ulysses is set on a single day in June: on the 16th, to be precise, in 1904, which also happens to be when James Joyce first stepped out with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle. This is one reason why the book should be read during the most joyous of months, June, which always feels so marvellously full of potential. A silly, absurd, hilarious outpouring of all that is miraculous about the English language, the key is not to take it seriously, ever, in any way, at all. Ulysses is one of the funniest books you will ever read, as well as the very definition of ‘un-boring’. But what else was I going to do? Re-read the rakia menu?Īnd this is what became clear to me over a series of seafood spaghetti dishes. The book in question was not only one of the longest in the English language (which was lucky, because it easily lasted me the whole trip), but is also often perceived as one of the most difficult. Night after night, I ate supper alone in a taverna with just my book for company. I was trying to heal a broken heart, having been unexpectedly dumped by a boyfriend. When I was 22, I spent the month of June travelling around the Balkans by myself. “ The question is not ‘what is a novel?’, but what can a novel be? Ulysses is the answer.” Patrick McGuinness
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