I am delighted by Declan Kiberd’s new book Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece, because it puts into words better than I could why I’ve always loved Ulysses: It’s a poetic celebration of ordinary life as it is lived. Writes Kiberd: “For all their radical newness, Joyce’s methods were a return to the aims of the romantic poets in the aftermath of the French revolution: as Coleridge said of Wordsworth, the hope was to awaken the mind from the lethargy of custom to deal with persons from common walks of life and ‘to give the charm of novelty to the things of every day.’” Ulysses, he says, is “an epic of the bourgeoisie. . . . One of the most attractive features of [the book’s protagonist Leopold] Bloom is his blend of imagination and practicality. . . . He sees no contradiction whatever between bohemian and bourgeois. . . . [The book] may be unique in the history of modernism because it suggests concord rather than eternal enmity between poet and citizen.”

Kiberd portrays Joyce as a worthy successor of Dante and Shakespeare. I would fault Joyce for, after Ulysses, descending into the massive literary inside joke of Finnegans Wake. (I sometimes joke – but, for all I know, it may be literally true — that I am one of only six people in the world who have read Finnegans Wake in its entirety without understanding it. The typical person will read to the end of, say, page 5, and then stop; the genius or the Joyce scholar will read all the way to the end, with comprehension; I slogged all the way through, and none the wiser for it. I can probably still tell you what the commentaries say, but have yet to make sense of the book itself.) On the other hand, anybody who gives the world Ulysses doesn’t really owe us anything; Rossini stopped composing operas almost four full decades before he died, and he’d said what he had to say.