Yes I could see most of what its fans point out as great strengths - the multiple structures as well as the plot echoing the Odyssey, the characterizations, even most (sure I missed some though) of the allusions from my Greek and Classical Studies days, but I just can't shake the impression that that's all it is - some Comp.Lit grad student's intellectually masturbarory idea of form over function. I'm far from anti-intellectual in taste, but with, say, Eco or Rushdie, I see the erudition as the tool not the whole damned point. I think there's too much of a self-conscious attempt to validate the ideas of The Nation and Young Ireland. And if I wanted that, Yeats does it with more aesthetic refinement.
But, enough genuinely clever buggers keep telling me I'm missing something and that it makes more sense as a genuine novel not just a look-at-me party trick if I read POTA and The Dubliners first, so I'm trying that out. The same clever buggers tell me I'm missing soething in Moby Dick though too, and my (even more) negative assessment there still stands. I hope Joyce does better, because eventually I'll get up to Finnegan's Wake someday soon.
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