In defiance of its reputation for being hard to finish – Philip Roth and Jorge Luis Borges did not manage it, and there is a question mark over Virginia Woolf – James Joyce’s Ulysses has emerged as a favourite of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, former vice president Joe Biden has been joined by his fellow 2020 Democrat presidential hopefuls Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke in praising the book. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn revealed in a 2016 Mumsnet Q&A that it has long been his favourite novel too.

When I spoke to Corbyn in advance of this year’s Bloomsday – 16 June, the day in 1904 on which the events of Joyce’s Dublin mock epic are set – he recalled first reading it in the early 80s while travelling round Europe and north Africa by train. “A very great Irish friend of mine told me 15 years or so before the journey that I had to read Ulysses. It was the perfect company on the train journey, which was endless.”

He says, like many people, at first he found the book “incomprehensible”. But then “you stop trying to focus on the narrative and start just enjoying the vignettes”. Back then he didn’t tackle it from start to finish, and that is not the way he has read it since, instead regularly just dipping into passages. It is an approach he recommends to first time readers today: “Read a little bit at a time and think about it and then move on, but don’t beat yourself up if you don’t understand it.”

You almost feel sorry for the censors who had to read and try and understand it, until they found something they deemed offensive

As much as its literary achievements, Corbyn is attracted by the politics in the book, around its creation and its reception. As for its being banned for sexual content, he points out: “I’m sure the upper classes wrote in private to each other about these matters. You almost feel sorry for the censors who had to read and try and understand it, until they found something they deemed offensive.”

Ulysses is set during the year Joyce left Dublin, and Corbyn believes being away sharpened his vision: “The mirror of exile can be very powerful and very intense. When you’re in exile you remember with almost photographic detail what you went through.” In his political career he has had a long association with refugees around the world, as well as with the large Irish community in his Islington constituency. He remembers meeting older Irish men who had come over to London as builders. They talked in minute detail about the villages they were from and where they intended to return. “And they never went back. They kept saying, ‘When I go home’,” he recalls, “both of us knowing full well they’re never going to go home.”

After he left Ireland, Joyce retained a keen interest in the politics of his homeland. Ulysses is set at a time when political tension was rising in Dublin. It was first published as a single volume in 1922, the year civil war broke out and not long after the Easter Rising of 1916. Joyce was an active socialist during the first decade of the 20th century. Corbyn notes that many of those who fought in the Easter Rising were first and foremost socialists rather than nationalists: “James Connolly represented that socialist tradition in Ireland.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest After he left Ireland, Joyce retained a keen interest in the politics of his homeland. Photograph: Alamy

Corbyn’s love of the novel is part of his broader interest in Irish literature and history. As far back as school he was influenced by Cecil Woodham-Smith’s classic account of the famine, The Great Hunger. Later he read James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, centred around the Dublin lock-out of 1913-14 and the horrifying poverty of the times.

“Ireland has had a huge impact on British political life for a very long time,” Corbyn reflects. He draws a line from the Irish uprisings in the 17th century to the defeat of Gladstone’s second home rule bill in 1893, which set the scene for the uneasy stasis Joyce threaded into Ulysses. And then that line moves on from the civil war and through the strife of the 20th century to reach, finally, what he hails as “the great achievement of the peace process.”

After Ulysses, Corbyn says Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the book he returns to most. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is another favourite. But as Bloomsday approaches he urges more people to read the novel that, among many other things, captures a society going about its business in uneasy times.

“Joyce references and richly describes what’s happening in the street,” he says. “So somebody is holding forth about a big political issue and then the refuse cart goes by. Whenever there is a big political issue on, I walk around the streets in my area. We might be totally obsessed with Brexit or some other issue but many people are not. Their daily lives are more important. Politicians should never forget that people have lives to lead and they often have dreams they don’t talk about.”