If I imagine my attempts to read Joyce's monumental and monumentally-difficult-to-read masterpiece as my matches with it at Wimbledon then it, the novel, has just trounced me yet again.

I have never beaten it (i.e. finished reading it) in seven attempts. This week's defeat comes in the year that marks the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first publication of the novel.

In a recent impossible-to-forget column I discussed how Marilyn Monroe (of all people!) seems to have breezed through Ulysses with deep appreciation and readerly aplomb. Inspired by her and by the novel's 100th birthday I announced I was about to tackle it again.

Although often dismissed as in real life the same "dumb blonde" she was required to play in her movies, famous photographs of her engrossed in Ulysses (let Google show them unto you) and very close to finishing it suggest she was anything but "dumb".

Those of us who pride ourselves on our intellectual stamina but who have never been able to finish Ulysses have a choice here. We can choose either to admire Marilyn's Ulysses-capable mind or, cynically, to dismiss her 1955 poses with the mighty novel as staged and fraudulent things.

But as a feminist, and sure Marilyn is a totemic victim of male-gaze sexism at its worst, in that column I chose to believe that she really did read Ulysses and so had proved she wasn't "dumb" at all.

But then in the wake of my latest defeat, now becoming blokeishly reluctant to accept that a mere Sex Goddess could have a better mind than mine, I found my pro-Marilyn feminist principles wobbling.

But then just in time, just this week, there appears in my Paris Review a new, thought-triggering essay about Monroe and her mind.

We will come to that piece, Marilyn the Poet by Elisa Gonzalez, in just a moment.

But first to my latest Ulysses failure, a failure known to millions of folk the world o'er.

Everyone who is beaten by Ulysses is beaten by it in his or her own way. I'm not sure what it says about me that the novel always beats me, usually by about page 400 of its 730 pages, and always in straight sets.

This July's score, 7-5, 6-1, 6-0, reflects how the failing Ulysses reader begins well but then is ground down until by the last few games he is outclassed and humiliated, abusing his racquet, uttering audible obscenities, spitting at spectators and vowing never to play tennis (i.e. never to try to read Ulysses) again.

But did Marilyn Monroe succeed where so many of us have failed?

In her piece for the Paris Review Ms Gonzalez (though never referring to the Ulysses connection) makes Monroe's success with Ulysses eminently plausible. Gonzalez credits Monroe with a mind of high quality, finding finesse and sensitivity galore in Monroe's poetry.

"She was a committed if haphazard autodidact," Gonzalez says of Monroe, "going to a bookstore in Los Angeles to leaf through and buy whatever books interested her (Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, for instance)."

"She professed a love for [Dostoevsky's] The Brothers Karamazov and a wish to play its central female character, Grushenka. Her library contained more than 400 books, including verse collections by D. H. Lawrence and Emily Dickinson ..."

"Insecure about her lack of formal education," Gonzalez continues, "Marilyn nonetheless resented being seen as stupid."

"She complained that some of Miller's intellectual friends [she was married to Henry Miller the playwright] 'treated me like a dull little sex object with no brains ... like a backward student'."

Did she, Marilyn, in spite of all the insults to her intelligence and in spite of being just "a cobweb in the wind" (her description of herself in one of her poems) intellectually serve and volley her way to a successful reading of Ulysses?

Awed by the strong possibility and inspired by her example and conscious of it being the book's 100th birthday, I pick up my copy of Ulysses yet again, starting again at page one.

Here we go. Buoy me up, role model Marilyn! "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed..."