This has got to be the best, most fantastic, wonderful book ever written that has absolutely freaking defeated me.

Not only is the wordplay and freakishly brilliant alliteration such that I want to roll around in it like a dog in autumn leaves, but the language is also so dense and impenetrable that I can BARELY get a sense of what the F*** is going on.

Is it brilliant? Yeah, I can see that much. I can also see that it was specifically written to break modern literature scholars from their dependence on LSD and Heroin, both used at the same time. And this is the "lite" version of the drug, which is much more insidious because it is even MORE addictive and it happens to kill you in about thirty days after reading. It's a socially-transmitted Irish cancer. It's also a mudkiss written by a psychotic who throws readers into the abyss without a parachute. It was written by the Joker, you know, the one that just wanted to watch the world burn.

It's murdercock English. It's being peed on by pearlypets. It's joking around like a hearse on fire. It's a nappywink.

Honestly, I would NOT have DNF'd this at the midpoint if it wasn't so freaking dense. Or if I were completely drunk in a room full of other Irish foks shouting out random lines from this monstrosity. Or if I joined a cult, bringing this book with me to counteract the crazy by a more potent kind of crazy.

But I did none of these things. I was DEFEATED.

However, I do it gracefully. I admit I was beaten by this madman.

I picked this up during my Irish literature phase.

It's not the worst book I've read, but it's definitely a little too long to hold my attention throughout.

The story seems to drag on in some parts, making it a bit of a struggle to get through.

However, I do think there are some interesting elements and themes that I want to explore further.

Once I've had more time to think about this book and analyze its various aspects, I'll be able to provide a more in-depth and detailed review.

For now, I'll just say that it's an okay read, but it could have been better if it was more concise and engaging.

**Title: The Significance and Beauty of Finnegans Wake**

Finnegans Wake is Joyce's magnum opus, representing the pinnacle of his life's work and the apex of his art. It is the remarkable final achievement of the 20th century's greatest prose stylist. Ignoring this masterpiece means missing out on one of the most significant events in literary history. Joyce's works, when placed side by side, form a momentous trajectory, with each one anticipating the next. From Dubliners to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to Ulysses, and finally to Finnegans Wake, we can clearly trace the transfiguration of his craft.

At first glance, Finnegans Wake might seem like the most uninviting literary relic. It begins in the middle of a sentence and immediately immerses the reader in a flood of its unique language, without any guideposts. However, this is a difficult book that requires patience and effort to understand. It is not gibberish or the product of a diseased mind. Instead, it is a carefully, minutely, and complexly composed work of art. Joyce spent a third of his life perfecting this work, and as readers, we should be willing to invest some of our time to try to understand what he was attempting.

So, what is Finnegans Wake? Firstly, it is music. Secondly, it is an experimental prose work where form and content are one. Thirdly, it is an occurrence of language, a vast palimpsest of etyms. It is the realization and perfection of the work of static art that Joyce was approaching throughout his career. It is a book about nothing, yet it is filled with density and obscurity, like night rendered into language. It is a great riddle, a maze, an amalgamation of gods, and a polyvocal defense of the great shame and guilt of man.

Finally, Finnegans Wake is the least pessimistic book I know. Once one becomes accustomed to its night language and acquainted with Joyce's modes and methods, this book is pure joy. It is like listening to a beloved symphony or opera, with recurring themes, characters, rhythms, and word and sound groupings. The music of the Wake is a rejoicing at the deathbed, a celebration of life and the cycle of existence. Joyce's interpretation of Vico's historical cycles is optimistic, suggesting that as we approach non-being, the clock resets and time ticks ahead again. This affirmation is a mainstay throughout all of Joyce's work, that the universal erupts through the banal and the commonplace is the point where the cosmos enacts its drama.

In conclusion, Finnegans Wake is a remarkable work of art that requires effort to understand but is well worth the investment. It is a celebration of language, life, and the creative process. I encourage you to visit Nathan's review for more information and to join the Wake Grappa if you are interested in discussing this great work with others.

“Fabulous Pub Fare”

Australians, it's high time we delved into the works of Joyce! While we may consider ourselves literary, the thought of the effort and toil often deters us. He might not be everyone's favorite, but his works, like "Finnegan's Wake," "Dubliners," and "Ulysses," lie unread on the shelves of bookstores across the land. Let's embrace these masterpieces in a joyous way and consume this fabulous pub fare!


(Extract from “Proposal for a Chair in Joycean Studies”
By Professor Bruce Bloomsday,
Poet Lorikeet and Larrikin,
Department of English, Scottish and Irish Studies,
Finnegan’s Tavern Campus, University of Woolloomooloo)


Review

My review of the restored version of the novel can be found here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


SOUNDTRACK:

“Fabulous Pub Fare”
[aka "Advance Australia Fair"]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VuC3...

"Advance Australia Fair" (Official Lyrics)

http://www.imagesaustralia.com/austra...

I read 100 pages of the book and I truly feel that I deserve a badge just for accomplishing that feat.

It wasn't a terrible experience, it was kind of like reading in Spanish. And to be honest, I don't actually read Spanish. However, perhaps it would be interesting to try reading this in another language to see if I could notice any differences. I'm quite certain that I would enjoy the poetry and alliteration just as much, but I would still need an interpretation to have any understanding of what was happening in the story.

Either way, at this point, I don't have the urge to read another 500 pages.

I think I'm finished with James Joyce for now. Except for Ulysses, which will always be worthy of being reread. It's a masterpiece that continues to captivate and intrigue me with each reading.

Update:

So, I just asked a GR celebrity if Finnegans Wake is a good book and he said that's a question that can't be answered. My family's antiquarian book business is closing down in a few days. I notice that we have a lovely copy of this Joyce book, first edition, dust-jacket in great condition. It was originally priced at a fair $5000 AUD and is now reduced to $2500 AUD, which as far as I can tell is a steal. However, nobody wants it. This has led to the question: is it a good book? All I can say is that it's not good enough. At this rate, I'm going to end up having to read it. :(

--------------------------------------

From much earlier:

Note that I have a 'better written than Harry Potter shelf'. Praise the lord for Michael Chabon. Not only don't I have to read Joyce, I don't even have to not read him and review him. Check out this interesting article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

Wow! What can one learn from this book? Is it that Joyce is the self-indulgent, self-mythologizing king of all pretentious literary bullshitters? Well, that's likely the most crucial thing.

Other possible inferences could be: (1) The canonical status of this book reveals the insanity of the canon and of contemporary literary studies. It makes one question the criteria by which certain works are elevated to such a status.

(2) It is possible to publish a completely unreadable book that will end up as assigned reading for graduate students if one manages to craft their public image adeptly. This shows the power of perception and marketing in the literary world.

Way to go, Mr Joyce! You've managed to create a work that has sparked such intense debate and analysis, whether it's for its supposed literary merit or for the questions it raises about the literary establishment.

Many people find this book perplexing, but I have a different perspective. I see it as a unique combination, something like a magic hat crossed with a hall of mirrors. It's truly a remarkable creation. You can reach into it and seemingly pull out almost anything, yet what you often get is a distorted reflection of your own ideas, obsessions, or hidden fantasies. This might be the very reason for the confusion others experience, but I believe it's beneficial to explore and uncover all that lies within.

I have a deep love for this book due to its intricate and tangled etymologies. The way these word fragments delve so profoundly into a common mystical and lingual history that transcends nations and cultures is truly captivating. When Joyce embarked on the arduous decade-long journey to write this monstrous masterpiece, he was both blessed and burdened by an abundance of coincidences that emerged from the language and myths he was integrating. He aimed to pen an epic using 'dream language', taking the modernist 'stream of consciousness' concept to a whole new level with this artistic expression of the consciousness of dreams. The book thrives on paradox, being the waking stream of consciousness of sleep.

The story, at its core, is simply one man's dream. However, this dream seeps into the consciousness, language, and archetypes of all humanity and countless mystical traditions. These ideas bear a resemblance to Jungian concepts, and in fact, Jung was a contemporary of Joyce's. Interestingly, Jung initially thought Joyce was insane. This relationship, as I mentioned earlier, becomes one of the coincidences that manifest within the text. Jung believed Joyce was arrogant and ridiculous. Nevertheless, Joyce respected Jung and was desperate for him to treat his daughter Lucia, who suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia. Jung did treat Lucia, and through their common concern for Joyce's daughter, they became friends. There is a famous quote where Jung compares Joyce to his daughter, saying, "They are two people going to the bottom of a river--one falling, the other diving."

Jung, Joyce, and Lucia all become characters intricately woven into the dream language of Finnegans Wake. You can discover this story hidden within fragmented phrases such as the one provided. As you can see, I have a profound affection for this book and would highly recommend it to a diverse range of people. The magic hall of mirrors that it represents becomes truly fascinating, as long as you can find the right entry point.

Let me explain the five-star rating.

When I was a teenager, I was ludicrously shy. I was the son and heir of a shyness that was criminally vulgar. My all-conquering shyness kept Morrissey in gold-plated ormolu swans for eight years. Any contact with human beings made me mumble in horror and scuttle off to lurk in dark corners.

But I developed this automatic writing technique in school to ease my mounting stress whenever teachers were poaching victims to answer questions, perform presentations or generally humiliate. I would start out composing a piece of surrealist free-association prose, usually violently satirical. As the teachers (or pupils or other humans) closed in around me, my prose would lapse into soothing gibberish.

Sometimes I wrote a stream of pretty sounding words (I was a rabid sesquipedalian in my teens)—zeugmatic, antediluvian, milquetoast, mugwump. Luscious lovely words! Sometimes language broke down into neologisms or gibberish—boobleplop, artycary, frumpalerp, etc. Nervy, throbbing syllables.

I came to associate collapsed language with an inner space where I went to hide from the imagined humiliations of interacting with others. Once I escaped the imprisonment of my inner conscious (over a four-year period known as The Torture Years), I always used nonsense writing as a means of getting through difficult situations—where others might doodle, for example, I would write Joycean Jabberwocky. Still do, usually on the phone.

So this book, to me, is The Little Book of Calm. Except it isn’t little, and it makes people shit themselves. Me? I love this magnificent beast. Unless you suffer from similar deep-seated psychological wounds that threaten to gradually consume your entire adult life, don’t read this.

I feel that there is a widespread contempt for Finnegans Wake. It seems as if Joyce was deliberately making it difficult or being pretentious. However, this is not entirely just. As Joyce stated in his letters, he could have written another straightforward or relatively uncomplicated novel, but he simply chose not to.

The best way to approach Finnegans Wake is to think of it as reading a book where you have to look up the meanings of numerous new words, something you don't usually have to do after the age of 16 or so. But in this case, you have to do it for all the words. So it's like learning a new language, yet arguably worthwhile in the end. Reading this book is truly an experience like no other.

Also, anyone who reads this book without constantly referring to https://finwake.com/ is missing the vast majority of the references. I have read a great deal of theology, philosophy, literature, poetry, etc., and I know Latin, Greek, German, French, etc., well enough to know most root words. I thought I was catching most of the references in FW until I read through the full annotations, which are well over a million words.

For example, a single word in the Anna Livia Plurabelle section ("Avelaval") is simultaneously:

(1) The French word "avaler" (to swallow)

(2) The French word "l'aval" (downstream)

(3) The Latin phrase "ave et vale" (hail and farewell)

(4) The Hebrew phrase "havel havalim" (vanity of vanities)

... all of which make sense in the context of the passage, in some way.

With all that said, and with all due respect to Joyce and the technical achievement that is Finnegans Wake, I happen to agree with Ezra Pound and virtually all of Joyce's social circle in the 1920s/1930s that this book is, in some sense, a waste of his genius. I realistically can't give fewer than five stars to something this impressive, but I love FW less than any other five-star book.

Truly, reading at night is a great exercise in readerly humility. Although the "impenetrability" of the text serves as an excellent deterrent, it turns out that, yes, it can be enjoyed like music, and, in general, a lot is understandable even without crutches. Reading aloud is very helpful - even without a devilish Irish accent.

Again, it turns out what hinders reading: a) reading during the day - not to mention the times when I was irritated both with the author and was already ready to give up this business; b) the activation of the brain, that is, the cerebral one - very much hinders; c) the highly idiosyncratic intonations and writing style of Joyce himself. But we, it seems, coped: the book written at night and according to the logic of the night, in an inhuman language, was read mostly at night and was intertwined with dreams. Probably, it is worth repeating the experiment after some time, already taking into account the acquired knowledge (it was acquired along the way, but, as you can see, it is not very easy to share it).

Although I have to admit that I was cheating - I was reading alternately with Cormac McCarthy and looking into Macbeth. But it should be warned: no retellings, even the most detailed ones, will replace reading the novel itself. In them, the retellers lie and impoverish, so that, apparently, those who reason about the novel can be recognized by whose retellings they got acquainted with it.

Not sure I can claim to have read this through, though I have read parts many times.

(I have said the same for a very different book, Thoreau's Walden, another dipper's book.) When I T.A.'d for a couple of Joyce courses in grad school, I read vast swathes of this book--and swathes they are, rather like the fields one sees irrigated with 200-yard-long pipes on wheels as one traverses the Midwest on Amtrak.

I would claim that it is a transforming work, changes one's mind into compulsive punning--a healthy attribute for English-speaking minds since Shakespeare at least. That's no cow, it's a bull. The Joyceism I always quote is on psychology: "He was jung and easily freudianed." Well, it's full of bon mots like this, but is it readable? Hmmm. I have not found it so, except as mineral deposits are walkable. Yes, you can walk/read, but that is not its/their principal use.

Perhaps the real value of this book lies not in the traditional sense of being easily readable from cover to cover. Instead, it offers a rich tapestry of language and ideas that require careful exploration and reflection. It challenges the reader to think in new ways and to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the English language.

While it may not be a book that one can simply pick up and breeze through, it rewards those who are willing to invest the time and effort. It is a work that can be revisited again and again, with new insights and understandings emerging each time.

In conclusion, this book is a unique and valuable contribution to the literary canon, and while it may not be for everyone, it has the potential to have a profound impact on those who engage with it.