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Title: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce ISBN: 0-14-118126-5 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.77 (154 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Bizarre, confusing, enigmatic, overwhelming- but wonderful!
Comment: I just finished reading FW last night after almost six weeks of thorough plowing-ahead through it. I don't know where to begin in my review of it. I would start by summing it up in the word amazing. This book reinvents language. All through school, we're taught grammar, spelling, punctuation, the format for writing essays, letters, etc., but Joyce rejects that education, says the hell with it and does his own thing. What interpretation of a word is right? Is there a correct interpretation to be conceived? Is there any possible way to wrestle the magnitude of this book to the ground and pin it down to really understand what's going on?? Who knows. Joyce has the reader in the palm of his hand, and it's frightening what FW can do to one's mind. I'm sure that now everything else I read will make me think of Joyce in one way or another. I probably don't know 2% of the amount of foreign languages, literary, geographical, historical and mythological allusions and references which are crammed into the book, but the parts that I CAN decipher are very clever. It's not an interesting "story", but it's captivating simply because it's such an enigma of a book.
There is not so much a story here as there is a SERIES of stories or vignettes parodying various myths, historical events, etc. But several patterns occur and reoccur. Variations of the initials H C E and A L P (What does Joyce achieve with FW? Why, He Confuses Everyone! All Living Persons!), rearrangements of the name of Finn MacCool, the mythological Irish hero, and the predominant Vicoian theme of history repeating itself. H C E is born and reborn as Adam, as Humpty Dumpty, as Finn MacCool himself.. ad infinitum. Joyce deliberately left the whole thing open-ended so that every word can be interpreted in any way, depending on the individual readers personal knowledge. The more you learn, the more meanings will apply themselves to FW. Tip.
And those of you who call this book a piece of garbage have to admit one thing- at least it's original and unique. There's no other book quite like it. Joyce didn't write for other people to understand him. He didn't write to appeal to the literary elite. Joyce wrote for Joyce, and if the reader can be in on the joke, it can produce great results. If you don't get it and call it a pretentious collection of random phrases, then darn it, it's your loss. And don't criticize people for saying they like it. And no, I'm NOT "pretending" to like it- I LIKE IT! Certainly it has some dull spots, but it's 90% great!
It Awnly tuck me sicksweex to reed the hole booke, anned I enjoid it vary moch. Tip. To you extramely pretentious revousers who say that knowbody has ever red it all the weigh thru (whaat maycs you so dammed shore of it in the fursed plays?!), then increase the number of people of all time who have read it all the way through from "zero" to ONE. That one being me. Not only did I read every last word, but I ENJOYED it, and very much so. So stack that in yore piep und smoe kit!
On to bigger and better(?) things! I'm starting Ulysses tonight!
Rating: 5
Summary: To be savored like foie gras -- in small doses
Comment: I admit it. I never 'finished' Finnegans Wake. I did not sit down and read it from cover to cover like I did Ulysses. And yet I read Finnegans Wake. Those people who treat it as a hoax are missing the point. Finnegans Wake was meant to be read out loud in small sections. The richness and beauty of the language are unbelievable and the cohesive structure of the book is astonishing. The book begins with the passage of water, and ends with the sea. It is the journey down a river, the journey through life. During the past few years I have picked up Finnegans Wake on numerous occasions and read parts of it. It is beautiful. The sounds are so overwhelming that I always find myself repeating them over and over. Joyce was a master with language and this book was his 'masterpiece' of language play. It doesn't matter that you don't understand the words. Read it for long enough, and the words will begin to make sense. Maybe by the time I die I will know the full meaning of Finnegans Wake.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Wrath of the Understanding
Comment: The phrase that I've used to entitle this review is from Hegel, "Wut des Verstehens." It refers to the human drive to want to understand everything---and the irritation that human beings feel when something slips from their intellectual grasp.
FINNEGANS WAKE is a ceaseless flow of language... It has neither beginning nor end... It is without sentences... Perhaps it doesn't even enfold words...
Give up the attempt to understand FINNEGANS WAKE. Glide along its multitudinous surfaces. Bask in its language. Read it silently. Read it aloud.
Read without trying to understand any of it.
The reviews that surround this one may be used by a future scholar who would like to track down the misreception of FINNEGANS WAKE in the United States in the early twenty-first century. Again and again, Joyce is lambasted for not common-parlying. The apostles of commonsense want to hear only what they think that they already know. When a writer comes along and says something in a new way, they balk and coil.
This is not a book to be understood. It is a book of darkness, of ciphers, of dreams.
I will leave you with a brief excerpt from FINNEGANS WAKE, Part III. It is a description of hellos:
"...after their howareyous at all with those of their dollybegs (and where's Agatha's lamb? and how are Bernadetta's columbillas? and Juliennaw's tubberbunnies?..."
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Title: Ulysses by James Joyce ISBN: 0679722769 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 June, 1990 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake by William York Tindall ISBN: 0815603851 Publisher: Syracuse University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Dubliners by James Joyce ISBN: 0486268705 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 August, 1991 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce ISBN: 0142437344 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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Title: Annotations to Finnegans Wake by Roland McHugh ISBN: 0801841909 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1991 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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