Prodgy

On June 16, New York celebrated the most unusual holiday of any calendar: Bloomsday, or-"Prodder", as one translator called him remarkably. The date that James Joyce chose for his one -day epic was only important for him. On June 16, 1904, he met with his future wife Nora Barnakl. For everyone else, this unremarkable day was the first and only holiday of everyday life. He is interesting with this.

I decided to read Ulysses only when a Russian translation appeared in "Foreign Literature". There was an euphoric 1989 in the yard, and every month I received a fresh issue along with other fruits of publicity. From the book came the same heat of freedom that from newspapers, but the circulation of the magazine rolled down sharply. In the midst of perestroika, the novel was considered not topical enough. Meanwhile, "Ulysses" is written just on the anger of the day - anyone and everyone. Joyce managed to return his importance and dignity. He again made a continuous fabric of being. With the courage of unprecedented pedantry, Joyce recreated the usual day, tearing it out of history for the sake of eternity. That is why for many years the readers of Ulysses in different cities of the Old and New World, including Moscow, are gathering on this day to honor the father of modern literature and his main character - the quiet Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom. In this prodigal, the New York residents, as always, listened to the reading of the novel on the radio. On Broadway, Ulysses was performed in parallel with Odysseus. In Brooklyn, he was celebrated by a trip to Irish pubs, on the Internet - the premiere of the comic book . I limited myself to the fact that I again opened the novel.

It was just as difficult to read it 20 years ago. Interrupted for the sake of commentary on each line, I learned everything I needed - and a lot of superfluous. In order to look around the romance whole, you need to rise above it, throw back the details, dodge the style, forget about historical hints and literary allusions and see as if from a satellite - the geography of the book.

Two people rave around the city. One is overwhelmed with vanity, the other is jealous. The first is not recognized, the second is cheated. Both are bad, but differently. Steven Daedal all ahead: he still has to write "Ulysses". Leopold Bloom was hopelessly stuck in time. He wanders around the city with a ticking bomb tuned for an hour of treason. The famous internal monologue of Bloom is an attempt to forget about it. True not to think “about a white bear”, he walks around the patient’s curve, and his thoughts, capturing the whole world around him, outline a black hole in which such a terrible fact is hidden that the whole novel serves as a shelter from him.

In fact, there is nothing more in Ulysses, and this makes a novel a book of the century, which Joyce discovered the fresh truth:

“About the unusual,” he said, “journalists write, writers talk about ordinary.”