Characters like the Breens and Bob Doran are funny. "And, yes, Stephen is sad but the way he responds to anxiety and depression is humorous. "I mean, Bloom is an odd guy, but aren't we all?" he adds. It immediately clicked with me, and I found it a ton of fun. "By the time I got to reading the book itself, I remember thinking, I hope I actually enjoy it. "For the rest of the summer, I worked the night shift, slept on a cot beneath the bookshelves, and got a bead on the shop's history," Hastings says. He arrived at the start of the store's new literary festival, which included Joyce-related lectures and public readings of Ulysses.
Hastings, chair of the English Department at Baltimore's Gilman School, an all-boys private school located just a few miles from Homewood campus, first encountered the masterpiece-which traces the meanderings of its two main characters around Dublin during a single, long day-as a 21-year-old undergraduate in Paris on a grant researching the history of Shakespeare and Company, a legendary English-language bookstore. As Hastings notes in his new book, The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), Leo Knuth, a Dutch Joyce scholar, once published a six-page article dissecting the book's first word, "Stately." Joyce wanted his readers to respond that way, and slyly acknowledged that he hoped his magnum opus would "keep the professors busy for centuries." Mission accomplished. This year, the world celebrates the centenary of the book's first publication, and we can't stop talking about it. Joyce slyly acknowledged that he hoped his magnum opus would "keep the professors busy for centuries."
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