Wednesday, February the 18th, 2004

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In Re Joyce

The Irish writer Roddy Doyle recently turned his piercing critical pea-shooter upon Joyce's Ulysses, accusing it, among other things, of being overlong and in need of a good editor. Mr Doyle, if you are going to criticise a book, at least do the job properly! Here are two excerpts from contemporary reviews of the great work:

“An immense mass of clotted nonsense” — Teachers' World

“The maddest, muddiest, most loathsome book issued in our own or any other time… inartistic, incoherent, unquotably nasty … a book that one would have thought could only emanate from a criminal lunatic asylum” — The Sphere