He brings his wife breakfast in bed, meanders across Dublin to attend a funeral, tries to sell some newspaper ads, has an ugly argument in a bar, runs into the son of a friend, drunk and dissolute, and follows him to the red light district, intervening there to offer him a bed for the night.

The son is Stephen Dedalus, familiar from "A Portrait of the Artist", Joyce's caricature of his own dissolute youth, and the encounter with Bloom was built upon Joyce's encounter, under similar circumstances, with one Alfred Hunter. But in "Ulysses", despite the real bond that grows up as Bloom and Stephen talk, Stephen finally rejects his offer. And the book's last chapter offers only the stream of consciousness of Mrs Molly Bloom, lying awake as Bloom sleeps.

This ending - entirely outside Bloom's consciousness - mirrors the beginning of the book, where for the first three chapters we see nothing of Bloom. Instead, Joyce opens with Stephen's morning hours: teaching a half day of school in a village south of Dublin, then meandering north, where we continue to catch glimpses of him as his path crosses Bloom's throughout the day.

To maintain the parallel, Joyce gives Molly a suitor, too - a rake called Blazes Boylan - and Bloom is preoccupied throughout the day with his knowledge of Molly's date with Boylan that afternoon (she's a singer, and he's organising her concert tour).

Joyce handled these Homeric parallels poetically, rather than strictly, beginning with an Odysseus who's not really Telemachus's father. (Stephen's father is the incorrigible Simon Dedalus, one of the most entertaining characters in the book.) But Joyce considered that each of Homer's episodes had its own deep esthetic unity, and he tried to honour this by building elaborate, subtle parallels into each chapter. Eventually, he extended this notion to imply that each chapter should have a style of its own, and a distinct set of themes including its own representative colour and body-organ and art and science, etc, forming in sum an exhaustive encyclopedia of the human condition. Or so Joyce claimed.

The result is the most evocative prose ever written. One can't help but smell the scents, and hear the sounds, and see the sights, and feel the emotions of the characters.

But increasingly as the book proceeds, one finds the stylistic experiments threatening to overwhelm the meaning. It takes an enormous effort to get to the bottom of some passages, and the literature of Joyce criticism is littered with the bodies of authorities who got things wrong.