12/18/2023 0 Comments Jumpcut academy commercial![]() Leaving aside Ulysses’s deep immersion in what we’re now familiar with as the ‘stream of consciousness’ of characters - which in Joyce’s hands is less the gentle streams of our contemporary writers and more like the torrent of a river in flood - the single day (16 June 1904) on which the novel is set is packed with what for many 2022 readers (and a fair few in 1922) will be impossibly recondite references, not least to Homer’s classical Greek epic poem the Odyssey. (That’s about NZ$11,500 in today’s money.) ‘There’s nobody in any of my books who’s worth more than a hundred pounds,’ he once said. Joyce wasn’t interested in the decorous deceits of the middle classes and the literary establishment. And not in such genteel language, either. It was banned on first publication, accused of obscenity - the ‘obscenity’ of its unglossed depiction of everything from sex to defecation to corpses in a graveyard. Ulysses is the 700-page peak of early twentieth-century literary high modernism - a peak many a reader, despite many an attempt, has failed to ascend. But what about dark and difficult? Not really - although you could be forgiven for thinking it would be. And there are more layers to be uncovered from both him and Elvy in their introductions, as well as from the University of Melbourne’s Catherine Kovesi in her foreword.īreach of All Size is definitely literary, then. A multilayered nod, as we’ve come to expect from Sonzogni. The book’s title is a nod to Joyce’s punning play on Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. The pieces were to be short - mere glimpses - no more than (of course) 421 words. The 36 contributors were asked to write love stories or poems inspired by Ulysses and set in Venice. ![]() For good measure, it replaces Joyce’s Dublin setting with Venice, which last year celebrated the 1,600th year of its founding in 421. Now it’s James Joyce’s turn - a writer who’d approve of Sonzogni’s tricksterdom, being himself a master of formal tomfoolery and experimentation, puns and pastiche, erudite allusion, and alliteration aplenty.īreach of All Size marks the centenary of Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. Those books were for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Who could have anticipated such an antic? ![]() Witness his Dante double last year: More Favourable Waters, in which 33 New Zealand poets reflected on Dante’s Purgatory but moreover the translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy in which he collaborated with illustrator Ant Sang to replace every instance of ‘ant’ in a word with a drawing of an ant. Or if they did, they crunched it into a tiny ball and tossed it in the bin with a defiantly muttered ‘Whatever’.Įlvy is a prominent presence in New Zealand flash fiction, including as founder of National Flash Fiction Day Sonzogni is a cultural dynamo at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, who is fast becoming New Zealand’s leading literary conceptualist and trickster. I think we can safely say Breach of All Size editors Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni didn’t get the memo. The solution? Once again, ramp up the number of commercial fiction titles and afford them more respect, including at book awards. The problem cited is as ever New Zealand fiction’s reputation for being ‘dark, literary and difficult’ (as one novelist put it). The figures quoted are much as always: 5% of total book sales in New Zealand each book lucky to sell 2,000 copies. Recently, as it is inclined to do every few years, Aotearoa New Zealand’s ‘book world’ has been bemoaning the poor sales of New Zealand fiction. Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and VeniceĮdited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni
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