Rating: 
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.
Rating: 
Summary: This isn't as bad as it seems
Review: OK, first of all, I can't help but notice that in many of the negative reviews of Finnegans Wake the reviewer admitted to "not getting past the first page" or some such thing. I think that anybody trying to read this book needs to realize that it's not nearly as difficult as it seems on first impression. You need to approach it with an open mind, though. Don't expect it to follow any familiar rules, and don't feel lost when it doesn't. People who couldn't get past the first few pages probably let their biases of what a novel "should be" interfere with their enjoyment of the book. Example: I just started reading FW for the first time, and I'm about halfway through it. So far I've enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm also a 17 year old senior in high school. I don't have the background to understand many of Joyce's allusions, I only speak two (English and Spanish) of the sixty languages he uses. But I still understand enough to know that I like what I'm reading. And even when I don't understand, it doesn't matter - simply the sound of the language is enjoyable. "As we there are where are we are we there from tomtittot to teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo." What the hell does that mean? Who knows! But it doesn't matter, it rocks! The point is that with an open mind and occasional extra research, I've gotten something out of Finnegans Wake. I know I haven't even scratched the surface, but it just goes to show that as inaccessible as this book may seem, there is something in it for everyone.
Rating:
Summary: art house intellectuals
Review: I could take in a dump in a fancy looking box and some of you people would probably label it as "The greatest singularization of Drama, Vision, Madness and Awe ever conceived of".
Rating:
Summary: It took me *five years*, but...
Review: Call me crazy, but I almost never stop reading a book I started. Sometimes I'm sorry I didn't give it up at first, but other times (e.g., "Moby Dick") I'm not. It took me five years to read finnegan's wake, on and off. It is probably the hardest book to read in the English language (I won't go into Joyce's use of German, French, Latin, Hebrew, etc.) But why is it worth it? What makes Finnegan's wake different from utter nonsense? A LOT. Many readers complain that they can only understand two or three points every page. True for me as well. But when I checked, the obscure points of the seemingly meaningless sentences *always* had some deeper meaning. For example, let us start with the title: "Finnegans wake" (the apostrophe that appears in many editions is a mistake.) There is at least a triple meaning: "Finnegan's wake", the wake of the mystical hero; "finnegans wake" - the Irish are waking up; and "fin-again wake" - showing the cyclical nature of the dream history of this book. Or take the year, 1132, that appears in the book quite a lot (sometimes in the guise of 566, which is 1132/2). It symbolizes the the circularity of history (11=10+1, starting to count again after reaching 10) and the fall of empires (bodies fall at 32 ft/sec^2). Or take the case of the dreamer's son, who falls from the sky as "a bare godkin". It is both a description of his condition (a naked son of God) and a pun on Hamlet's "a bare bodkin" (an unsheated dagger.) These are just three examples. But this is where Joyce's genius is - and the enjoyment of the book is. It's just plain fun to figure these things out - and when you *do* figure them out, the real meaning of the text, and the story, begins to show. It's hard work, but it's worth it.
Rating:
Summary: The Wrath of the Understanding
Review: 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?..."
Rating:
Summary: art house intellectuals
Review: I could take in a dump in a fancy looking box and some of you people would probably label it as "The greatest singularization of Drama, Vision, Madness and Awe ever conceived of".
Rating:
Summary: this is the book that never ends.
Review: "This is the book that never ends it goes on and on my friends. Some people started reading it not knowing what it was and they will continue reading it because this is the book that never ends..." (based on the song the never ends) If you are a person who like to read the ending first please do with this book. Read the ending or at least the last sentence. The book opens with the last half of the sentence that closes the book. Just as I jokingly changed the song lyrics from song to book, this book does not really end. It is a cycle that repeats and does not really have a begin point. Open the book any where at begin. Since it is a book that does not end, I have read the pages twice through, but truely I have never finished reading it. The book has a flow which as printed text stays the same but each reading through is different. It is a simple plot as given in the summeries, but also one of great complex. It is a book to be spoken, not one to read in silence. The way to read this work is to simply hear it. If you do not understand, simply keep listening. As a child I was told, if you do not know a word look it up. In this book, skip the looking up and keep the flow alive. At some point you will enter the flow of the words. The book remind me of the Lord of the Rings. Both authors create an multilayered and deep reality. Both authors like to play with language. LORTR is adventure styled after the sagas of spoken by the winter fires old and creates a myth saga in a dream like world. FW is styled to be spoken by a winter fire and interweaves myth with the conscious and the unconscious struggles of modern life in a dreamlike world. The LORTR is easy to follow, but the reminding ends for FW is not easy to follow. Yet how can flowing struggle of conscious and unconscious be easy to follow? It can be said half joking "that reading FW is like the withdrawl off Paxel or any of its class of drug. You risk part of your sanity as you struggle with the conscious and unconscious flow of life."
Rating:
Summary: The philological scourge of our language
Review: "Finnegans Wake" is a novel for people who are tired of reading novels. The chapter summaries in the table of contents, and not the body of the novel itself, give evidence of a plot, which concerns the dream-consciousness of a man whose initials H.C.E. recur as an acronym at various points in the text and whose wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, sons Shem (the Penman) and Shaun (the Postman), and daughter Issy figure prominently among many other exotic and unexpected characters. However, the presentation is so nebulous and abstract that the novel resembles nothing else in literature, although the style looks deceptively easy to imitate. Upon first looking at the pages of "Finnegans Wake," one inevitably must wonder what it's supposed to be. My explanation of it is an extension of my theory about "Ulysses," which is that "Ulysses" was Joyce's effort to write a novel that used every single existing word in the English language, or at least as many as he could. (Among its 400,000 words, "Ulysses" certainly has a much broader lexicon than any other novel of comparable length.) Having exhausted all the possibilities of English in "Ulysses," he had only one recourse for his next project, which was to create an entirely new language as a pastiche of all the existing ones; the result is "Finnegans Wake." The language in "Finnegans Wake" is a continuum of puns, portmanteaus, disfigured words, anagrams, and rare scraps of straightforward prose. What Joyce does is exploit the way words look and sound in order to associate them with remote, unrelated ideas. For example, his phrase "Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies" may sound familiar to those who happen to know that the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet are aleph, bet, gimel, daled. "Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphul of rhyme" recalls a nursery rhyme that may reside quietly in your most dormant memory cells, while "Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager's virtue" sounds like a drunk auditioning for the role of Hamlet. Imaginary adjectives that pertain to letters of the English alphabet are employed to describe Dublin as a city "with a deltic origin and a nuinous end." "Finnegans Wake" is the ultimate in esoterica, and what you get out of it depends largely on your store of knowledge, so that upon completion, with a mutual wink at Joyce, you congratulate yourself for being so clever. The text is supposed to reflect a dream or a dreamlike state, an imperfect rendering of hazily remembered pictures and thoughts, but it also evokes the multivocal babble one might hear in a crowded Irish pub, multiple rolling streams of lilting brogue-laden speech combining into a sort of rhythmic cacophony, a variegated procession of verbal images ranging from the mundane to the fantastical. It cannot be read in any conventional manner of reading prose; each sentence has a melody, and the words must be vocalized in the mind to hear the verbal music. It can be maddening if you try to make meaning of it all, but if you're familiar with Joyce's past work, you've already risked your sanity adequately to make it through "Finnegans Wake."
Rating:
Summary: Meaningless gibberish
Review: There is nothing worse than an illiterate writer.
Rating:
Summary: Circle within circles...
Review: What can actually be said about Finnegan's Wake that would be coherent? Well, not much unless one is willing to spend a great deal of time atempting to decipher speakers from observations. However, what I can say is that this is probably the greatest work ever written. Note that I do not say I love this book or that it is my favorite book. This book is not for enjoyment, this book is meant to be thought about and even cause confusion. While the beginning of the book discusses what appears to the start of time, and ends with the beginning of time. What more can I say about a book that has everything to say?
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