Friday, June 20, 2014

The Most Dangerous Book

From an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education about The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses:
For Joyce himself, the battle for Ulysses was neither light nor humorous. It was an excruciating ordeal. Moving from Dublin to Trieste to Zurich to Paris, he was utterly dependent on the kindness of strangers to pay his family’s bills. Those bills increased after his daughter, Lucia, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Joyce’s own debilities both impeded and impelled the writing of his book. He persevered despite the agonies of syphilis-induced iritis that left him on the verge of blindness and madness. "Joyce wrote an epic of the human body partly because it was so challenging for him to get beyond his own," notes Birmingham.