June 16, 1904 is the day James Joyce famously went on the first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Famously because that date later served as the setting for his novel Ulysses, that bastion of modern--and Modern--literature that has challenged, delighted, frustrated, alienated and inspired readers for going on 100 years now. The day itself has grown to the status of a cult holiday, celebrated by a very specific set of book nerds around the world.

 

The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang is, naturally, set on June 16, 2004, the celebration of 100 years since the story of Ulysses was set, but it is not strictly about Ulysses or Bloomsday to my great relief. For a difficult and smart book Ulysses has inspired a lot of kitsch in the Bloomsday celebrations in particular, but Lang avoids the rocks of a Bloomsday book, like Ulysses itself it is more in conversation with its source than mimicking it. The Sixteenth of June is heavily allusive in language and structure but it is also a distinct story. Lang uses the celebration and book as a launching point to explore the ways in which people interact with literature: as an academic exercise, as an escape as a way of understanding the world and ourselves, and sometimes just as a badge.

 

We follow three people in alternating chapters. Nora, a singer trained in opera but performing at a jazz lounge, is in an extended mourning over the death of her mother and dealing with the pressure of being engaged. Leopold is her fiancee and his brother Stephen is Nora's best friend.

 

The men reflect the personalities of their counterparts in Joyce. Leopold is domestic, workmanlike in his taste and outlook. Stephen is thoughtful and paralyzed by doubt. Nora escapes such caricature, which may be why she inherited the name of the real Nora instead of the invented Molly. Leo is ready for marriage. Stephen is not ready for anything and is worried about Nora's settling. Commitment, vocation, grief, all the keystones of a good quarter-life crisis.

 

It took me a few days to warm to the book. The first chapters are packed with allusions to Ulysses. It reminded me of online fan fictions where every popular trope and reference is crammed into the first paragraph, as if audiences will turn away if we don't see a crossed mirror and razor blade in the first 20 pages. The names might have pushed it over the top. I GET IT! Once I got over the names and things settled into a more reasonable pace the references were more clever and fit more naturally into the story and the story itself was able to stand on its own.

 

The friend who gave it to me never read Ulysses so you don't have to be a Joyce fan to enjoy The Sixteenth of June, but it helps. It is a clever novel, and much less intimidating than its inspiration. It is more enjoyable than groundbreaking. It is like fan fiction in its appeal but Lang has found a way to engage with her literary forebears without resorting to cheesy mimicry. If you don't get too pretentious about your fandom, and, yes, favorite books are a type of fandom, you should enjoy the way she brings Joyce's work into the 21st century. You may also want to go back and dive into Ulysses again and I am glad for any work encouraging that.

What a moody book! Not sure if I liked this. The whole time I was reading I felt like I was forcing myself to move forward. One more chapter, I'd tell myself. And not in that good way when one normally says, "just one more page. One more chapter."  It wasn't bad but I really didn't care about the characters one way or the other. The storyline was weak, in my opinion, and each of the three characters did so much thinking between the pages. It actually became tedious. Did I have to know each and every thought? And when a secret was revealed to be a secret I wondered why it was such a big deal. Really? Rich people and their perceived problems. Everyone in this book was boring and it all felt a bit ho hum. Too ying/yang for my taste. 

 

A young woman and two brothers in Philly. Nora is engaged to one and BFF's with the other. Nora was raised without money and the brothers family is wealthy. Nora has dreamed of a different lifestyle but finds it difficult to fit in. She's anxious to please. Her boyfriend,  Leopold, wants a good old fashioned life of normal. Stephen, the studious BFF, isn't sure what he wants. He doesn't believe that his brother is right for Nora and Stephen feels like he's going to lose her forever. Leo is doing his best to get Nora to commit to a wedding date but trauma in Nora's life is preventing her from happiness. Not one single person is saying what they mean. Everyone just seems to be coasting on neutral, quietly dealing with their own selfish thoughts. The book mostly takes place on one day, June Sixteenth, and what a busy day it is.  First, a funeral. Next, a party to celebrate the centennial of Ulysses. Stephen and Leopold Portman's parents throw a Bloomsday party every year. Lang never truly explains why the Portman's are so obsessed with Ulysses, other than it's pretentiousness. A funeral can't stop the party. The show must go on. Geez. How I wish it hadn't!

 

 

 

*Won a copy of this book  through a Goodreads giveaway. 

The Bloomsday Dead (Dead Trilogy #3) - A... The final book in the Michael Forsythe trilogy and just as good as the previous two. Totally engrossing from the first with excellent action/violence and a well described Belfast setting. Listened to the audio version narrated by Gerard Doyle who really brings Michael to life.

Nasrudin and the New Qur'an

Nasrudin was at the tea house one day when he heard some idle young students talking about the Qur'an.

"It sounds magnificent, of course," grumbled one, "but half the time you can't even understand it without a commentary."

"It's supposed to respect the Bible," said another, "but Allah often seems to have forgotten about His earlier revelations."

"I don't like its attitude to women," snapped a third.

When Nasrudin got home, he took out his pen and started writing. He returned to the tea house the following week with a thick manuscript and sat down next to the students.

"I have written a new and improved version of the Qur'an," he announced. "Let me read it to you." But before he had even completed the first surah, they begged him to stop.

"This is dreadful!" they shouted. "Horrible! Blasphemous! It's not like the Qur'an at all!"

"Isn't that what you wanted?" asked Nasrudin.

______________________________________

The author has complained to me that the above review is unfair. Let me be more explicit. The book is, both in form and content, an updated version of Ulysses, transposed to 1974 Boston. It is divided into chapters bearing the same names as the ones in Joyce's book, and the two main characters, called "Bloom" and "Dedalus", are in many respects like their Joycean homologues. The storyline is very similar, and the themes used are also taken pretty directly from the earlier book; thus, for example, "The Sirens" is concerned with music, "Oxen in the Sun" includes multiple pastiches of various authors presented in chronological order, and "Penelope" is a stream-of-consciousness monologue by Bloom's wife.

The great difference is in the style. The vatic poetry and near-impenetrable tangle of allusions in Joyce's original, which to me are what give the the book its unique charm, have been replaced by a sub-Wildean stream of wisecracks; the general impression is roughly that of an American sitcom. My first reaction was to read Bloomsday straightforwardly as a retelling of Joyce, and from this point of view I really did not like it. To be blunt, it seemed extremely disrespectful to one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Towards the end, though, I decided that there was another way to look at the text. No one can do a second Ulysses. If you think of Lentz's book as a comedy about an attempt to perform this impossible task, it is actually quite funny, and from this point of view I recommend it. I must admit that I couldn't put it down: I constantly had to read on to see how the next episode would be treated, and in fact I completed the second half more or less at one sitting.

Maybe the author will like the above even less than my first review. I'm sorry: I'm just calling it like I see it.

The Bloomsday Book : A Guide through Joy... You may also want to read my review of Ulysses

THE PROPHETS

The Prophets is a short chapter that appeared in the first draft of Ulysses, but was removed at an early stage. Evidently, Joyce was dissatisfied with it. The somewhat tenuous Homeric basis derives from a conversation between Odysseus and the Pantheon; Odysseus asks what posterity will think of him, and is sharply rebuked.

The structure is recognisable as a precursor to the one later used, substantially modified, in the Circe episode. Joyce abandons Dublin and moves the action to a futuristic Geneva, where the unnamed Reviewer walks through the city with his Girlfriend (tentatively identified by various critics with Athena, Oriane de Guermantes and Dante's Beatrice), arguing about different views of Ulysses.

The rest of this review is in my book If Research Were Romance and Other Implausible Conjectures