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When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

In 'Dublinesque', Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas inverts the terms of Joyce's 'Ulysses' and tells the story of a man who, after living a hyperkinetic life like those of Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, resolves to never leave his room again and to reduce his mental activity to a minimum.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.

Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'

Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

The well-known inspiration for 'Ulysses' is made clear by the title itself: Joyce's novel is based on Homer's 'Odyssey', under the ever-fascinating premise that all of Odysseus' extraordinary adventures can be experienced by a modern man in a single day, provided that the writing consists of his mental activity.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.