Customer Reviews:
 An Extraordinary Experience March 21, 2008
Like many, I have tried reading the book and found it quite tough.Jim Norton makes the text come to life and team with unforgettable characters. His voice is an extraordinary instrument capable of conveying every emotional nuance and moments of great humour. His reading is an amazing tour de force.He has an inexhaustible range of voices in all registers from velvety bass to falsetto. He conveys the multilayered prose with complete ease deploying many voices to convey a sense of place, inner thoughts and an astonishing cast of characters, each with a unique and distinctive timbre, register and accent.Bloom emerges as a deeply sympathetic and vulnerable human being.
Marcella Riordan is also marvellous as Molly. She is vividly realised and her soliloquy becomes a fascinating and erotic experience. Despite their considerable length, I have already enjoyed these discs several times and find each repetition more illuminating.I now understand why this book has achieved its legendary status. This reading is, perhaps, the most remarkable piece of storytelling I have ever heard.
Re-Joyce! December 10, 2006
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is an astounding tour de force. Ulysses is a notoriously difficult read but, when listening to this, one is simply swept along, unconcerned about such difficulties as foreign-language quotations, obscure allusions, opaque puns, crazy word-games etc. On the printed page, such things are frustrating for the reader, who feels ill-inclined to continue with a book which he or she doesn't fully undertand. But this brilliant reading places such difficulites in their proper perspective.
For me, this reading revealed the humour of the book for the first time. The Aeolus episode had me in stitches; the Cyclops episode and the end of Circe made me literally cry with laughter. And, in this reading, the very ending of the novel, with its great surge of warmth and love, is almost overwhelming.
One could quibble about the occasional pronunciation. And maybe Marcella Riordan, who reads Molly Bloom, could somehow have suggested the total lack of punctuation in the final Penelope episode. (Yes, I appreciate that the poor woman has got to breathe...!) But these are minor quibbles. The reading(s), production and presentation are all absolutely first rate. I hope this splendid recording will win new admirers for this great masterpiece.
Norton and Riordan have also recorded a very abridged Finnegans Wake. Let us hope that someday they - and Naxos - will give us the whole thing.
Very tart lemmingaid March 20, 2005
42 out of 53 found this review helpful
The only real reason to tackle the massive burden of Ulysses is to become aware of the stark reality that it expresses regarding the "spirit of the age", essentially a rampant nihilism. Then one can possibly adjust one's outlook on the current world society and proceed accordingly, perhaps avoiding being a lemming going over the cliff.Before entering the cavern of this work, one has to decide the "why" as above, then the "how". For me, after much diddling, false starts and self deceptions, this excellent CD set became the obvious answer. I had heard the comments of people far more intelligent than I on how difficult the work was to plow through. Therefore, I would have even more difficulty than they if I chose to continue reading it (a false start at reading the 735 page tome got almost nowhere). Also, I would be displaying a gracious nature in accepting the much-touted idea that "Joyce's prose must be HEARD to be truly appreciated". The production here is an excellent way to expose oneself in a leisurely manner to the book's wily trap without becoming totally enmeshed. The trap is simply that one thinks the work is "going to say something", but the fact remains that it really says nothing, albeit in a brilliant way. One can be tired but still listen to part of a CD, repeat passages at will, turn it off, reflect, then continue. It is MUCH harder to read this work than to listen to it. The CD set also contains very valuable and detailed notes about each section as well as overall enlightening critical information, and relevant musical selections are also present throughout. If one is truly serious about attacking this work, I would recommend the sort of "Joyce for Dummies" approach that I followed: purchase the DVD of the film version of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (although the film doesn't boast a very good screenplay and is unrestored, the performances are excellent), as well as the CD audio book of the same title (abridged, but all the important parts are there). Absorbing these will give you a central clue about Ulysses, mostly in the Stephen Dedalus character that appears in both (hint: Stephen is a boring, cold, emotionless prig). Then purchase the DVD of the 1967 film version of Ulysses (excellent photography in a pristine black and white print). Although set in 1967, it will give you a reasonably OK overview of the "story" of Ulysses which is set in 1904. Having taken in these, you are almost ready to proceed to the CD set of Ulysses, and you can already rightly claim to have listened to the prose of Joyce, definitely a feather in your cap at certain parties (where you may also want to rhyme off a few memorized lines in the appropriate accent). Avoid the millions of words contained in endless musings about the book, and read only one essay, that of Carl Jung entitled Ulysses in the book The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. If read carefully and more than once before listening to the Ulysses CD set, you'll find that it does indeed contain the golden key to truly understanding the nature of this massively influential book.
Bloom's Odyssey on disc. October 19, 2004
31 out of 58 found this review helpful
Yes.
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