Pic: Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses
Ulysses & Us, Amazon

Yesterday (June 16th), as lovers of Guinness and gorgonzola sandwiches no doubt know, was Bloomsday – the day that James Joyce set his vast, rambling, fiercely erudite and often hilariously funny novel Ulysses.

“I want,” he famously said, “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book”.

Only an exile who had absconded to Europe with a girl from Galway (Joyce’s first romantic liaison with Nora Barnacle took place on June 16th 1904) could conceive of such a wildly ambitious act of imaginative reconstruction.

So here, in celebration of the old artificer, we give you properties from Dublin, Galway, and Zurich.

Will you buy one? Yes, yes, I will …

Dalkey

Dalkey crops up in chapter 2 of Ulysses, and in recent years it’s become quite the celebrity haunt – Neil Jordan, Maeve Binchy, Enya, and Eddie Irvine have all lived here.

It’s not just the Joyce connection that brings them to Dalkey, it’s also the lovely seaside location and the impressively large properties with views over Dublin Bay. Even the presence of Bono has failed to put a dent in prices.

If you happen to have £9.7m handy, this rather wonderful castellated house is yours for the taking – rather more impressive than a Martello tower, though if towers are your thing, it does have a bedroom in the turret.

Feel free to emerge from the stairhead intoning ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’.

Galway

Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s great love, came from Connemara in Galway, though she certainly didn’t grow up in anything as grand as this five-bed lodge house in Costello (POA).

It sits in ten acres and overlooks the Fermoyle Lakes, the Twelve Pins and the Maamturk Mountains – and take it from me, these are worth looking over.

If you’re feeling especially morbid, head down the road to Oughterard – it’s here that Michael Furey, the doomed lover of Greta Conroy in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, is supposed to be buried (he’s not here, mind, because he’s a fictional character).

Zurich

Joyce and Nora lived in Zurich, and a good part of Ulysses was written here. Joyce’s daughter Lucia later ended up in an asylum in nearby Lausanne – “she started to show signs of mental illness in 1930, around the time she began casually dating Samuel Beckett,” as Wikipedia interestingly explains it.

Lausanne seems to have a bit of a track record with literary breakdowns – it was here that TS Eliot, laid up in a hospital following a nervous collapse, wrote the first draft of The Wasteland, a cheery little poem published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses.

Must have been something in the water.

In any case, if you have £11,300,000 to spare and need a spacious place in which to go mad, or compose a great literary masterpiece, or both, this might be the one for you: it has so many bedrooms the agent got tired counting them – 15-20! – and it’s surrounded by 75 acres.

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