Irish Examiner view: A Century of living in the Chaosmos

On the 100th anniversary of 'Ulysses', it is interesting to still recognise how relevant the epic tale has with everyday life in modern Ireland. 

'Ulysses', by author James Joyce, turns 100 today and has a familiarity that many in modern Ireland will still recognise.

Precisely 100 years ago today James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses was published for the first time, changing literature forever. Joyce was 40 on the same day and had escaped Dublin to Europe, where he lived in Zurich, the hugely fashionable city of Trieste, and then Paris, where he completed the 730-page hardback.

Joyce’s magnum opus, a highly innovative reworking of the Homeric epic The Odyssey, is without peer in the English language and he can be said, with the playwright Samuel Beckett, another Dubliner who moved to Paris to make his cultural mark, to have altered the way in which people think about the way they think, and established new forms of communication which have maintained to this day.