Bloomsday bonus for the night owl

By PETER CALDER

If you've wrestled with James Joyce's Ulysses and lost, you can make amends by hearing the book read aloud tonight - but you'll need to be a night owl or insomniac to take up the chance.

Joyce's comic tale, consistently voted the greatest 20th-century novel in English, is a microscopically detailed narrative of a single day - June 16, 1904 - in the life of Dubliners Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.

To mark the occasion known as "Bloomsday," Auckland's Access Radio (810AM) is broadcasting a five-hour reading of the novel by Irish actors Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan, beginning at midnight tonight. The broadcast will be the first of Bloomsday celebrations in a dozen cities worldwide, including three in Ireland.

The 1922 novel is noted for its stylistic eccentricities and an often breathtaking frankness. It culminates in a long, highly erotic stream of consciousness by Leopold's wayward wife, Molly.

Auckland writer Dean Parker, who runs the station's regular Irish news programme, which has organised the broadcast, admits that he never finished the massive and often impenetrable novel but says the "skilfully edited" version broadcast will make up for that omission.

"Most people never got past page seven," he says. "That's one of the reasons I'm doing it. I can sit down in a studio and listen to it."

Listeners are warned - or advised - that the brothel sequence will play around 2.30 am and Molly's stream of consciousness will begin about 4 am.