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Rating: 
Summary: A helpful "tour guide" through Finnegan's Wake
Review: Atherton's book helped me begin to understand Joyce's "copy/paste" style. His preface provides an excellent philosphical framework within which the Wake can be understood. His chapters that follow explain in great detail how Joyce used the works of Vico, Swift, and the world's sacred books to construct his masterpiece. Atherton goes on to cite and explain hundreds of Joyce's literary references in Finnegans Wake. This is a good book for any James Joyce fan.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Atherton's book is "absotively" wonderful. I would agree that APPRECIATING the Wake certainly requires this book. Numerous influences from various authors are catalogued. Particularly interesting is the relatively lengthy section on Lewis Carroll's influence on Joyce. *Carroll is presumably the undisputed inventor of the portmanteau word: a word with multiple meanings. Carroll was content to have dual meaning while Joyce packed as many meanings as possible into his words. *Carroll also worked with successive alterations of one letter in a word: meat, meet, mate, maze, etc.. Sections of the Wake which referenced Carroll would routinely incorporate this technique. *Alice also served as an alterego for ALP, where "Wonderlawn" = the Garden of Eden. In short, Joyce found lots in Carroll's work which, (in the case of the portmanteau word, to his surprise), neatly "dovetallied" with his own "work in progress". BATW is a fascinating and well-written collection of many more such analyses, (Shakespeare, Blake, Vico, etc...) and does not promote tooth decay.
Rating:
Summary: One of the 10 best books on the subject.
Review: I have been checking the first edition of this book out of my library for months, and am delighted to see a paperback edition in print. It's one of the indispensible guides to the Wake, and I'm glad to see it readily available.
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