EXACTLY 100 years ago, on a February day in 1922, Leopold Bloom was born. In a novel. And since then, he has become an important sign for literature all over the world.

He is a fictional character, the created creature in the Irish novelist James Joyce’s Ulysses. The 730-page novel is about a day (yes, a single day, June 16, 1904) in the life of two middle class men and one adulterous woman: Stephen Dedalus, the young unsuccessfu