ULYSSES with illustrations by Remi Rousseau

Yes. This book is disconcerting. It disorientates the reader over the course of a single day in the always-crowded Dublin city, in its blackened houses and streets of brick and cobble-stones, and in its cemeteries where you can come alone to finish sleeping off the tumultuous events of yesterday. Maybe you have to find your way by following the town’s canal-locks, where dark peat has tinted the waters that will become the Liffey. Go to the brothel, to the pub or to the nursery, go to school, to the print-shop, the library or the church. Yes. All you need to do to find your way is to follow the canal-locks, then the Liffey where it meets the sea and write at a distance in time, with the memory of a coastal tower that nails the town down to the ocean’s shore, and finally sign off with a cross – a James the right way up and an upside-down Joyce – like a Christ crucified in the peat-bog, in the black marshland, in majesty. Dublin on the horizon. One day in June 1904. In the hope of encouraging to read this book to people other than those who already believe in the Joycean shooting-star, here are some 100 illustrations following the chronological order of the text.