Bloomsday

T

oday is Bloomsday. You know what that means. No, not that we’re going to have a special guest—that’s more like Talent Round-Up day anyway. No, it means that people are going to celebrate a novel (I guess you can call it a novel) that most of them have never read about a handful of characters who wander around aimlessly on 16 June 1904 and accomplish very little in a massive outpouring of words that chronicle their inner lives and (especially) the pre-war Irish world they lived in. It’s a hell of a book, and there’s nothing else out there quite like it. Like Pale Fire and Tristam Shandy it sits in a genre of its own—and like them it is all too often unread.