Books that Push Limits

Today I'm going to talk about two books which are equally transgressive, but each in its own way:

• Ulysses by James Joyce, originally published in 1922
• Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, originally published in 2010 in Arabic; English translation published in 2019.

My History with Ulysses

In college I started working on my first novel, which was based on a section of The Odyssey by Homer. A friend told me I absolutely had to sign up for an independent study with a professor who guided students through their first novels. We'll call him Professor Boylan.

One of the first things Professor Boylan told me was, "You know, a modern re-telling of the Odyssey has already been done."

"It has?" I blinked. You see, I thought I was a creative genius and no one had ever had this idea before.

"Yes," Boylan replied, "James Joyce. It's called Ulysses. You should get a copy and read it."

Long story short: I eventually got a copy. I couldn't get past Page 100 before I threw it against the wall in disgust. It was i-n-c-o-m-p-r-e-h-e-n-s-i-b-l-e. The Vintage/Random House version I read, published in 1961, was 783 pages. So I didn't get very far.

A few years later I was part of a group of writers working on novels. They let me be a part of the group when I told them my novel was an attempt to shed light on the seven years that Odysseus spent on an island with the immortal sea nymph Calypso. Those years are left out of The Odyssey. 

Genius that I thought I was, I set my novel on an island in the Caribbean and learned as much about calypso music as I could. Wikipedia has a nice article on calypso music. My favorite Calypso song, by the way, is "The Creature from the Black Lagoon."

One of these writers encouraged me to give Ulysses another try. I did. Sure enough, at Page 100, against the wall the now bruised and battered book went.

Later in life I heard that James Joyce had to get some friends to "leak" his structural scaffolding for the novel, which is quite intricate and -- dare I repeat myself? Incomprehensible.

Now, whenever I say his name out loud, there is an adjective in front of it -- beginning with an "f" and ending with "-ing...." The adjective is as obscene as many censors thought Joyce's book was -- it wasn't printed in his native Ireland until the 1960s, and was the subject of a lengthy obscenity trial in the United States that kept it off the shelves for 14 years. 

Recently, I was perusing audiobooks and came across Ulysses. "What the heck!" I said to myself, "It's been at least 30 years." I'm happy to say that, so far, I've made it past Page 300. The reader, whose name is John Lee, IS a genius. He's got a great Irish accent, and while I still don't understand much, I'm enjoying the flow of Joyce's language. 

My biggest takeaway from the book, so far, is that it does a brilliant job at capturing a particular man's internal monologue -- good bad and ugly. What goes on in this man's mind is, in fact, obscene at times.

Celestial Bodies

I'll admit that I had to take a break from Ulysses, and so I chose to listen to Celestial Bodies because it had won the very prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2019. The author, Jokha Alharthi, is the first Omani woman to have a book translated into English, and Celestial Bodies is the first book translated from the Arabic to win the Booker prize.

My biggest takeaway is that Alharthi does a brilliant job of letting the reader into the private lives and thoughts of Muslim women -- in Oman, at least. And in that sense, half the Arab world must want to censor the bejesus out of it, just as half the English-speaking world censored Ulysses.