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Summary: this book rocks!!!
Review: True, Joyce's many masterpieced work of profound interjectional superiority has at last brought the final jigsaw piece to this unChristianly magnifique port-en-tois ouevre...But that's why it's sooooooo good?! Hello, my name is Rajish. I am an 8th rank student from The Calcutta Institute of Fine Literary Works. Tonight, we will take a journey of unprecedented backwardness and desolution. When I was 4 years old, my friend and I went to the local book shop to buy our first copies of Finnegan's Wake (FW as we affectionately called it). When we came home we read our copy of FW with the greatest of zeal and devoured the conduit imagery and allusion in this densely conceived and lightly told work. The effect, of one who studies it as my friend and I do, is of entrancement and utmost vermisiltude. By the end, we feel so lost and alone, so dissapointed by literature and its pseudo-world of false authoritarianism, we vow to never read again. Except for Eddy Said that is. Please read this book and join us postcolonially. Peace.
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Summary: This book is intended to be read for a lifetime.
Review: Finnegan's Wake is a beautiful, profound work. It succeeds as an interpretation of the dream of everyman (history). The reader becomes an active part of the novel because, even if two or three meanings escape notice, the meanings that have relevance to one's own life stand out and are easily interpreble as having signifigance to the entire work. Secondary sources are unnecessary. Understanding the entire work is not the point of reading the Wake- the book is meant to help one understand one's role in history, but not to allow a holistic vision of history itself.
As an expression of the state of sleep from the sleeper's perspective, Finnegan's Wake is intentionally garbled and thrown together as a rubbish heap of information from the dreamer's life. Because the sleeper is meant to represent Everyman, however, the dreams and thoughts of this particular night are applicable to everyone's life in some way or another. As in Ulysses,although to a greater extent, the words are often obtuse while the scenes depicted are commonplace. This gives an air of mystery and insolubility to everyday life. You may say that this is disingenuous pompous posturing- but I would respond that life in itself is a great mystery and that I am sorry you think you have it figured out.
The language is decipherable, but don't read the book just to decipher the words. As with any novel, the innate joy in reading it is just that- reading it. Take what you find therein- if you do, upon reading it again, you will find more. The humor and power of the work shows itself again and again if you allow it to do so, and the many meanings and perspectives of Joyce's universalism are often subconciously understood and not realized as such until later thought.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with a great amount of time on their hands. "Phall if you but will, rise you must." Dive in; Finnegan's Wake does not disappoint.
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Summary: Whoa, dude!
Review: My tenth grade English teacher made us read this book and I think it was way too hard! How is tenth grade students supposed to make any sense out of a mixed up book like this? I couldn't get any of it. What's the plot and whose the hero? I'm just really frustrated and I'm not alone. Only the class bookworm got past page 10 and I bet that weenie didn't understand much either, even if she says she did. Too hard, dude!
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Summary: the jokes on you
Review: If you've wasted your time with this piece of garbage, I feel sorry for you. If you havn't, save yourself, go read something by Calvino or Vonnegut....just be kind to yourself. This book is not only torture, but an assault on your intelligence....Joyce wanted you to be puzzled and confused for over 600 pages, why? So you would read his other works that actually means something? The natural question one asks upon completing this rant of a novel is: "Are all his books like this?" then you are compelled to find out the answer...which is no. There are people who say he is genious and this novel proves it. Brian Wilson could be called a musical genius (I certainly agree), but most often the album Pet Sounds is cited as his crowning musical achievment...Brian also spent several years in bed and poured sand all over his living room to invoke the vibes of the beach. My point- check this out at a library before you decide to buy it...and don't believe the hype.
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Summary: Finnegans Wake: Not Just a Book, and Experience
Review: I'm 13 years old, however, I started The Wake when I was 12, and I must say, it is possibly the best book I've ever read. I think that Joyce's use of language, puns, allusions, and references other pieces of work,completely unlike the Wake, was amazing and better than Lolita, Pale Fire, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His main theme is renewal and the fact that history is cyclilic. This is represented by an abundant number of things, such as the fact that he has exactly 1001 characters, and that he has the first and last sentences combine. GET THIS BOOK NOW!
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Summary: A silly little monstrosity
Review: When you get past all the strange words and polyglot puns, Finnegans Wake just isn't that interesting of a book. The ideas expressed are contrived and uninteresting, and many have been already been treated, better, in Ulysses. "But how do you get past the language?" is the rejoinder I'm expecting to hear. It's true that very few people understand every word in the book. However I refuse to suscribe to the school of thought that states that FW is a great book just because its hard to understand and nobody will ever "get" all of it. Some people have come pretty close- MacHugh's "Annotations" goes a long way with individual words, and Campbell's "Skeleton Key" well give you the overarching meaning (yes, there is meaning) if you read it with a critical eye. These two books pretty much have FW cracked, end of story.
Now many people will also argue that one shouldn't read FW for the meanings or ideas, like other books, but rather that simply the sweet sounds of the language are enough to give it value as a literary object- essentially, even if we don't understand a word, it sounds nice. This is just silly. If you want an auditory experience listen to music or the sounds of nature. If euphonious words is your thing, read some poetry. But for heavens' sakes don't spend the time required to read 680 pages of garbled words simply because they sound cool. My point is that there are already artistic and, in my view, far more enjoyable ways to go about getting a cathartic auditory experience. FW has neither the mellifluosity of The Raven or a Spenserian sonnet, nor obviously can it provide the sonic intensity of a symphony. Books, ultimately, are read for the quality of the ideas they express, and the quality of the style used to express them.
The style of FW is idiotic. It was a nice idea at the time, sure, and probably it had to be done when considering the progress of literature as a whole, but these points don't mean that the style is of any aesthetic worth. Most of the words are incomprehensible without some guide, like the "Annotations." Because the difficulty is at the level of words, rather than ideas, one doesn't read FW, one translates it. Joyce uses foreign words (from 60 languages!) and perversions of English as the basis for the vocabulary of the text, and combines and arranges these as he pleases. Now I don't mind foreign language quotes in my books, and I'm as big of a fan of witty word-play as anyone, but when you're essentially inventing a language arbitrarily as you go along you've made a huge and pointless mistake. Why stop at the level of words? Why not write using a whole new alphabet? And the kicker is that the many of the puns are incredibly POINTLESS! A "bad of winds," for example- "bad" is Persian for "wind," apparently. So this means what, a "wind of winds"? Come on, this is lame! and a far cry from true wit. In another "celebrated" passage, Joyce weaves the names of a bunch of rivers into a conversation between two washerwomen. I.e., "kennet," meaning "ken it" or "know it", and the Kennet river in England. But what's the point? That rivers are cool? That Joyce is cool because he looked up a bunch of river names? That we're cool for figuring them out? Such puerile and mechanical displays of erudition are a waste of time for everyone involved.
The common response to attacks on FW's style is that Joyce was attempting to convey the nebulous and polysemous state of dreams. If so he failed miserably. I don't know about the rest of you but I don't dream in portmanteau words- when people talk I know exactly what they're saying. We may not understand why particular things happen in dreams, but at least we know, at a literal level, what is happening (eg. I may not know WHY, in a dream, I'm being chased by a herd of mustachioed ducks wielding blunderbusses, but I can at least describe it as such). FW lacks even that- because of the near-incomprehensibility of the language, it lacks a literal level to start out from.
Now all of this could feasibly be tolerable- the translating, the wading through secondary sources, the silliness of a contrived "dream-language"- if the payoff was worth it- ie if Joyce was saying something really profound and insightful. If the ideas validated the words. Well, they don't. Underneath it all you just have a cliched quasi-biblical myth with aspirations to allegory. It deals with how one man is Everyman and the whole is contained within its parts and history repeats and cycles are cool and male is destructive and female is fertile. Blah blah blah. Its the world according to Joyce. If you want obsolete notions about the "nature of man" and such nonsense, read the Bible or any other religious text. If you would argue that the "meaning" isn't the point, please see paragraph two above.
FW, depending on who you ask, attempts to do a lot of different things. The problem is that it fails at all of them. As music it is necessarily inadequate, as poetry it is far surpassed by real poetry, as a novel it is incomprehensible, and as a myth or an allegory it is highly derivative and essentially boring. And don't try to sell me those poststructuralist lines about "foregrounding language" or "de-stabilizing the signifier" either- you know as well as I do that FW doesn't do either of those particularly effectively, and furthermore that those are silly and pretentious concepts to begin with. I love Joyce's earlier works, but Finnegans Wake is just a monstrous waste of time and effort.
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Summary: This book changed my life
Review: I love this book so much, and think I understand all of it. It means more to me than anything I have ever read. I'm just blown away by it, because it is beautiful. I've never actually read the book, but hey, why does it matter? Those who've read it, haven't read it either. This book cannot be read, because it is not a book or even literature, it's antiliterature. So the only way to read it, is to anti-read it, meaning to NOT read it at all. That's why I love it. It's the only book made to be unread. Those who try to read it are wasting their time, like treating pregnant women as broken lightbulbs. I recommend you definitely buy this book, it's critically worth having. Just don't open the covers or look inside. Make sure you tell others how great Finnegans Wake is, and urge them to buy it too. But not read it.
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Summary: THE BEST THING WRITTEN IN THE HISTORY OF HISTORY!!!
Review: I'm 20 years old, and in eighth grade, and, after picking up the Wake, i'm a totally different person. REading the book is similar to some (i'm guessing here) mind-altereing, drug-induced experience which forever alters your mind, and its inner workings. The Wake is the best book ever. It completely eschews all the typical "norms" for a novel: plot, characterizatoin, tradtional symbolism (although this book is weighted with it), grammar, and even language!
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Summary: Don't read this book
Review: I've just reached the end ... or is it the beginning? It's taken me six months, with Anthony Burgess' 'Here Comes Everybody' providing a basic and unsatisfactory commentary on this nightmare of a book. I can't really recommend anybody to read this unless you know exactly what you're letting yourself in for ... unlike Ulysses, which I believe everybody should attempt at some point in their lives. So why have I given it 5 stars? Because it simply had to be written. Without the Wake, twentieth century fiction would have been simply an extension of the nineteenth century. This book is what sets us apart. Don't believe the people who tell you it's a joke - a genius like Joyce doesn't spend 15 years, resign himself to penury when a "Ulysses Lite" could have made him a rich man, and ultimately ruin his eyesight all for nothing more than the literary equivalent of a whoopee cushion. There are deep things here, it's just that they're buried so deep that it's mostly not worth the effort of mining them. But again, I've given it 5 stars because this book is like a nail bomb in a library (shhhhh!) - it destroyed everyone's perception of what could ever constitute literature. If the Wake can be created, anything is possible. The Wake gave the green light to everyone's wildest imaginings and bizarre method of telling it - after all, whatever you write it won't be as difficult or as slow or as mad or as painful as this work. Don't let anybody tell you that there is an easy way into this book. Whichever way you approach it, however many primers and explanations you read, nothing will prepare you for 650 pages of dense dream-imagery written in polyglottal puns through which you grasp at anything that makes the slightest sense (and I mean slightest). The basic story of a publican dreaming over the repercussions of being caught urinating in a public park by two soldiers and then being accused of indecent exposure is by the by and of little import, because it is so thoroughly buried beneath hundreds of layers of Irish, oedipal and religious history, myth and gossip and the minutiae of everyday life transfigured by dream, that it would be easy to miss (and if you did, it wouldn't be a problem anyway - this is hardly narrative-driven). There are moments of comedy, but they're few and far between. The publican becomes the man-myth-mountain Finnegan, who represents Ireland, his forgiving and defending wife becomes Anna Livia Plurabella, the river Liffy and mother nature herself - reading the book is a battle that's impossible to win and you ultimately simply surrender yourself to the flow, the cycle of life which, like water taken from the sea to clouds to rain to rivers to sea to clouds .... takes you from the end to flow back to the beginning without even a full stop to halt things. I wondered whether it would make more sense the second time round, then decided that I didn't really care to find out. So, be glad that you don't have to read this book, but you should all definitely celebrate that it was written.
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Summary: It helps if you drink
Review: Imagine you're in a pub in Dublin, and a regular has started talking to you. The combined amount of beer in both of you makes it difficult to understand much of what he's saying, but every once in a while there's a moment of clarity where you get it. You laugh not only at what's said but at yourself for the situation you're in. In the meantime you can only stare gape-mouthed at the beauty of the sounds he makes and in hopes that another moment of clarity is near.
It is easy to get frustrated with this book if you can't get comfortable with its style.
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