ALL ACROSS Paris yesterday, James Joyce enthusiasts were flocking to Irish pubs, auditoriums and street corners to celebrate their beloved author and the city that had housed him, inspired him and, when all hope seemed lost, taken a chance and printed what would be his most famous work.
Readers were gathered outside the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in a display of appreciation for the only place that would publish Ulysses after it had been internationally rejected.
At the centre of the group were four college friends who had come from Barcelona, Bordeaux and Princeton to celebrate their first Bloomsday together in four years. They started narrating the novel at 11am and by mid-afternoon had acquired other participants.
“It’s the comedy and the joyful playing with genre in Ulysses that makes it worth travelling from so far to be here. The mix of poetry and prose and the comedy of being are amazing,” said American student Mary Orwig as she awaited her turn to read.
An 80-strong crowd was packed into the Centre Culturel Irlandais to listen to Terence Killeen, a former Irish Times journalist and author of Ulysses Unbound: a Reader’s Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, giving a lecture entitled “The Joyce of Music”.
“Music is very important to the novel because Molly Bloom is a singer herself and part of what is going on is that she is having an affair with a concert promoter,” Killeen explained.
In the centre of Paris, a group of staunch Joyce fans were gathered at the Highlander pub to listen to readings from Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners. John Kliphan, an American poet and retired lawyer, has been organising this night for 20 years.
“In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that locale was Celtic and his season spring,” recited Kliphan as the crowd hooted in approval.
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