In defiance of its reputation for being hard to finish – Philip Roth and Jorge Luis Borges did not manage it, and there is a question mark over Virginia Woolf – James Joyce's Ulysses has emerged as a favourite of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, former vice president Joe Biden has been joined by his fellow 2020 Democrat presidential hopefuls Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke in praising the book. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn revealed in a 2016 Mumsnet Q&A that it has long been his favourite novel too.
When I spoke to Corbyn in advance of this year's Bloomsday – 16 June, the day in 1904 on which the events of Joyce's Dublin mock epic are set – he recalled first reading it in the early 80s while travelling round Europe and north Africa by train. “A very great Irish friend of mine told me 15 years or so before the journey that I had to read Ulysses. It was the perfect company on the train journey, which was endless.”
He says, like many people, at first he found the book “incomprehensible”. But then “you stop trying to focus on the narrative and start just enjoying the vignettes”. Back then he didn't tackle it from start to finish, and that is not the way he has read it since, instead regularly just dipping into passages. It is an approach he recommends to first time readers today: “Read a little bit at a time and think about it and then move on, but don't beat yourself up if you don't understand it.”
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