The Dublin Helix

Reading James Joyce's Ulysses through the lens of puzzles and language play

Embracing improbable and wildly anachronistic connections, Sebastian Knowles has devised an approach to reading Ulysses that makes its author less of a modernist and more of a prophet of contemporary science, literature, and critical thought.

The Dublin Helix is a puzzle book, taking as its method James Joyce's own playful manipulations of language and matching them with entertaining word searches, acrostics, and other enigmas. Knowles finds ways into Ulysses that have never before been imagined, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the structure for genetic material. Each chapter presents a puzzle, and each solution completes a little more of the picture of the vital language of the modern classic. By the end, the strange and wonderful text that is Joyce’s Ulysses may be finally pieced together.

Both entertainment and scholarship, the book presents Joyce scholars with much that is new, a great deal that is controversial, and an unusual willingness to allow for misreadings and bogus statements. With appendixes that can make inviting handouts (originally developed for Knowles’s own students), the book also offers an excellent introduction to a Ulysses course.