This great modernist masterpiece, which for many readers seems so intimidating, is one of the great books that can teach us how to live better lives. Declan Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people, rooted in their experience and offering a democratic and humane vision of a tolerant, decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book’s hero, shows the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the streets of Dublin. In his apparently banal way he sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante and the Bible – all sources that Joyce drew on in the writing of his book. Ulysses and Us can also be read as a guide to Joyce, his novel and its context in the history of Ireland, and of Dublin, where the action of Ulysses takes place over a single day. Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it, designed to remove it from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Joyce industry and restore it to its shocking, democratic origins.

Kiberd has written a moving and controversial book, free of literary-critical jargon and specialist concerns. With it he confirms his position as one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals.