But Molly will still be awake--and will be for about twenty-five thousand words more, all without punctuation--for throughout the whole day, till these last pages, we readers have essentially been in male company, have walked and rooted and rutted and belched and burped and relieved ourselves in a man's book, in a man's world, and now it is time for the woman to speak. Woman, who in the book is the underpinning for the world, the giver of life and repository of the true creative urge. Molly now has her say and her famous soliloquy closes this book of books, which seeks to encapsulate all of human experience, with a 'yes', as an affirmation of marriage, community, Man and life:

God of heavens there is nothing like nature the wild mountains then sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with field of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes...yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

It is Stephen Dedalus's and Leopold Bloom's wandering through the city's streets and pubs and shops and hospital and brothel--their separate, modern-day Homeric odysseys-- that the Bloomsday festival recreates. And in doing so, it celebrates Dublin and Joyce's life, for he put his life in the book: Martello watchtower, where the book begins, was actually a place where he stayed, and which is now the Joyce Museum, complete with his guitar and walking stick; June 16 was also the day when he fell in love with his future wife, Nora Barnacle; 7 Eccles Street, which is Bloom's home in the book, is an actual street, though now the original door has been taken off--since it is a doctor's office now--and put on display a few blocks away. And so on.

Over the years --the first Bloomsday was held in 1954--the festival, paralleling the growth of what has been called the Joyce industry, has evolved from the small pilgrimage made by avid Joyceans and academics into a huge, noisy cavalcade of tourists, a cultural jamboree, a festival held not only in Dublin but replicated, in lesser ways, globally, in places such as Shanghai and Costa Rica. Hordes of tourists, a huge mix of plain gawkers and tourists, amateur Joyceans, book lovers, literary and academic types start from George's Street in the morning and end up at O'Connell Street at late at night. And throughout the day, as befits this gargantuan, bawdy, rambunctious, roistering novel, there is plenty to eat and drink and see: barmaids and Edwardian boaters and yellow gloves and pints of Guinness and men in stilts and street theater and mimes and Joyce readings. And then there are seminars and discussions, the Joyce specialists and academics in cloistered rooms wrangling over commas in the Kidd versus the Habler editions. Entire doctoral theses have been generated from disputed passages in Ulysses. The Joyce industry keeps on getting fatter and sleeker.

And this year was the centenary Bloomsday, when the festival will last till the end of August. When this time the revelry is particularly high-octane, when Bloomsday began with a free breakfast for 10,000 people in Edwardian dress and went on from there.

Bloomsday is now officially, in the words of one journalist surveying the scene, "the world's biggest simultaneous celebration of a single piece of art."

All this because of one book!

Ulysses is about language. The English language. Which can make it inordinately difficult for the reader whose mother tongue is not English. Faced with the problem of writing a modern epic within the confines of a single day--the universe in a microcosm--Joyce ran into technical problems. For example, one concerned the interior monologue, the much-discussed 'stream of conciousness': how would readers differentiate the interior thoughts of the different characters. Who is who?

Joyce solved the problem by assigning a characteristic rhythm to the thought-stream of each of his three main characters. Stephen's, as befits the poet-Jesuit, is lyrical, subtle, somewhat clotted, much more conscious of words--not as signs for images but its more meditative aspects--than the other two. Bloom's own rhythm is quick, jaunty, darting, clipped--a fit vehicle for an intelligent, but not over-educated, ad salesman. Molly Bloom's is different, more like a prose poem, short words fitted into long phrases, where we have to grasp her mind all in one piece.

It was these aspects of the language that threw me, somebody whose native language was not English, off from Ulysses when I first opened it. Rhythm? I had no ear then for English rhythms. Rhythms are internalized as an infant within the culture--any Bengali will automatically respond to chol ray chol, urdo gogonay bajay madol, for example--or else it is acquired over a lifetime's involvement with the language. A paragraph like the one below, when Bloom is falling asleep beside his wife, defeated me then:

With?
Sindbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

What the hell was this, I thought?

The answer (the short answer, in fact, for in Joyce, one thing ineluctably leads to another): it is the language mimicking the rhythm of steady breathing. Bloom is falling asleep. This gradual fading of his waking self is itself reflected late in the passage when the phrase loses its previous consistency of similar sounds and instead of 'Dinbad the Dailer' becomes 'Dinbad the Kailer.’ Bloom’s conciousness is beginning to fragment.

I can hear it today. I couldn't hear it then. And this is just one tiny part of a weave so dense and bewildering that I left the book unread.

What got me back into Ulysses, this time for good, was Vladimir Nabokov's (the author of Lolita) Lectures on Literature, the collection of his classroom lectures at Cornell University. He was amazingly brisk about Ulysses, approaching the book with a no-nonsense, schoolmaster’s air. Nabokov disdained symbols, focused instead on the physical detail and the structure. So he took his students through the streets of Dublin, even made a map of Bloom's walk, made them see the waters of the Liffey river, smell the garbage, read the labels, feel the cloth of Bloom's pants. He laid bare, in Updike's words, 'the ticking watch.'

It galvanized me. For the first time in my life, I saw the pattern of Ulysses, looked at it from above, could feel Dublin, and therefore could feel Bloom. I no longer feared the book. Now I picked up the damn thing, read it from end to end. What I didn't understand, I ignored. I skipped parts. I bought guidebooks, and slowly, at leisure, feeling very much the gentleman-scholar, began to chase down all those allusions, the tics, Homeric organization, the Catholic theology, the classical references, the father-son theme, the subject of usurpation, exile, Irish history, Dublin accents, literary parodies. Et cetera, et cetera. Slowly, over time, sure as taxes, Ulysses came around.

Ulysses is everywhere. Wherever there exist writers and books. In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things, for example, that exact moment when a break in centuries-old taboos occurs, when Ammu looks at low-caste Velutha: ‘The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body...'

And which is a direct descendent of the line in Ulysses which goes:'...through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins...’

Its images and phrases have entered modern conciousness: the bat which is ‘like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands.' The dairywoman: 'Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on a toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle.' And of course, Ulysses's most famous sentence: 'The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’

But why read it? It is a question Martin Amis has asked: ‘Ulysses is thoroughly studied, it is exhaustively unzipped and unseamed, it is much deconstructed. But who reads (it) for the hell of it?' Practically nobody nowadays. Too much work. Which is a pity, really, because it is about you and me, about Everyman. Joyce's hero is a very ordinary man, and in that very ordinariness are found the qualities that make for epic stuff. It should be read, not shunned, for its language, for its complicated, intricate design. For its multiple layers of meaning, for its riot of colours and shifting textures.

It should be read simply because of Bloom, one of the great characters of fiction. Here he is about to feed milk to the cat:

The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
--Mkgnao!
--O, there you are, Mr. Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr. Bloom watched curiously, kindly, the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
---Milk for the pussens, he said.
---Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

And it should be read so that should you find yourself, through the mysterious patternings of fate, in Dublin on Bloomsday, you’d know exactly what was going on. And so that you can have the mostest fun. If the centenary shindig is such a blast, can you imagine the party they are going to throw on June 16, 2022, when it's going to be the centenary of the publication of Ulysses itself.

And all this because of a book! Mrkgnao!

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.