In the Margins

Even if Dublin’s Bloomsday Festival, the annual celebration of James Joyce and Ulysses, is cancelled this year, there’s a good chance the modernist masterpiece may still find its way to new and returning readers. After all, many have responded to the pandemic by formulating ambitious plans: baking sourdough bread, perhaps, or training for a marathon. Why not tackle a famously long and complex book?

Published in 1922, Ulysses centres on two characters as they move about Dublin on one June day in 1904: Stephen Dedalus, a serious, cerebral young man unknowingly in search of a father figure; and Leopold Bloom, an older man, who has lost a son and his own father, and whose wife is about to commit adultery. The novel’s eighteen episodes are loosely based on events from Homer’s Odyssey, and even before the narrative style takes a distinct turn toward the experimental...