Rating: 
Summary: He's challenging us to doodle...
Review: I give this book two stars because it's the first, and last, book to tell us what we already should know...that we think gibberish in that ethereal state between waking and sleep. Finningan's Wake reminds me of the canvas I've seen at countless art shows with a jumble of random splatterings of paint. Any one of us could create the same thing. Why don't we? Joyce is challenging us to get off our duffs and splatter some paint on the canvass. If you think it's worthwhile (personally, I don't) do it. You could be the next James Joyce.
Rating: 
Summary: I wish I knew all the world languages to be able to read it!
Review: No, I haven't read it i have many times tried to but i simply can't. I have read and admired many other books by Joyce. However the words that I scarcely understand, sound to me like music. Riverum riverum...
Rating: 
Summary: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Review: Reading somewhere that Finnegans Wake was one of the greatest novels of this century, I decided to give it a try. When I was taking it out of the library the librarian told me that she had never known anyone to check it out before. This should have told me something right off. Eagerly I turned to the first page and was hit with "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle..." Then I came on to "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" I quickly scanned the rest of the book "Surely it can't go on like this for the whole thing!" I thought in despair. It did. I tried to read two pages of it then gave up in disgust. "Whats the use of reading it? It doesn't make any sense or mean anything at all." It was like I was just reading a string of words that had nothing to do with each other, I saw no use to waste my time with it. I'm not saying that just because I couldn't read it doesn't mean its not readable. I'm sure a lot of intellctuals have (fun?) reading it and also have fun telling other people they are stupid oprah reading TV obssessed coach potatos if they don't like it also. Some of these reviews have shown the people that like this book to be in this frame of mind. Anyway, if you like it then fine, but I can't see the point in trying to decode it, it wasn't like Joyce was the messenger of god, why should decoding nonsense passages like the above be so important?
Rating: 
Summary: Totally obscure, bizarre, maddening.
Review: No, Finnegan's Wake isn't written in a drab, unambiguous way, and that's a darn good thing. Unthinking directness is great for cafeteria lunch menus, but fortunately great works like FW allow us to explore ideas and language in a new way. Imagine how dull life would be if everything were always written in a way to satisfy a high school English department's style book. But I suppose some people won't be satisfied until we drop the balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet" and instead Romeo just walks in and says "I know our families hate one another, but I've really got the hots for you." Of course, that doesn't even begin to cover what goes on in that scene, but maybe that's because some ideas are so hard to grasp that the only way to explain them is to use obscure, incomprensible, and elusive words and phrases. Like FW. (On the other hand, don't throw your TV out after reading FW, because TV is totally awesome, no matter what self-righteous, emaciated, turleneck-wearing pointyheaded longhairs think.)
Rating:
Summary: I do not like Finnegans Wake
Review: I think it's rather dumb to write a book for the purpose of making it difficult to read. If you want to be allusive, that's fine, but express yourself coherantly and in an unambiguous fashion. Ulysses and A Portrait managed to be both timelessly powerful and legible; it's a pity Joyce didn't make better use of his seventeen years.
Rating:
Summary: Leaves me speechless
Review: Im a first time reader of Finnegans Wake (a simple title you can interpret in at least four different ways). Along with FW Im reading Campbell's book "A Skeleton Key to FW" and while its not the optimal resource to totally understand Joyce's masterpiece, its been a big help so far. I recommend. There are too many levels to discuss here, so here's my advice- do not read FW if you want a quick read. Read it if you enjoy wordplay, like in ee cummings' poetry, or allegory, like in Dante's. Read it if you like comedy- many fail to mention FW is FUNNY. Read it if you like a mental challenge. Read it if you are Irish. Read it if you are not Irish. After FW you will chuck your TV out the window and never look back. Read it if you are sick of John Grisham and Stephen King and Oprah's Wet Noodle Book Club for The Grammatically Harmless.
Rating:
Summary: The book to end all books. Full stop.
Review: "Finnegans Wake" (no apostrophe, kids) is the logical conclusion ("It's Phoenix, dear!") to Joyce's creative life, the last work of the greatest master of words in any language since Shakespeare. (Admit it!) If you think "Ulysses" is "incomprehensible," then head for the Mystery section at your bookstore. I'd recommend reading a page, tho', to see what all the shouting is about. For me, I knew I couldn't look back, and Joyce has been a blessed thorn in my side for 20 years. Good gosh, what would I do without this man James Joyce, the last heavyweight in the pantheon of godlike writers.
Rating:
Summary: Oyes! Oyeses! Oyesesyeses!
Review: ...the story, of recourso, is a lovely ellipse, Vico. Great rivers inspire great minds. For the life of Joyce that river was the Liffey. Anna Livia. Finn, again. Up the wall. Falling down dead. Thud! I am, I do, and I suffer. I yam as I yam. A touch of Irish whisky to wake him. Eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch-can. Mounds of fun in the wordplay. Obscure as Kells. Shocking as the lightningmotifs. Thunderation! Characters drawn like Remembrandt. Good ole Shem the Pen Man. A brilliant work of heart to a degree excelsius. Life, he himself once said, kills himself very soon, is a wake. Tip! But what I love most is...
Rating:
Summary: Trekies = Wakies@~
Review: This book was obviously written by a man with a patch over his eye. You see, it's a book comprised solely of footnotes to footnotes. The great thing about it is you don't really have to read it to have an opinion about it! I've read far more words about the book than I've read in the book! My girlfriend worked in the Fredonia (SUNY) Library where they had 30 feet worth of shelf space for the James Joyce Quarterly. More amazing than the book itself is the serious time and effort others have dedicated to it. I'd spend hours reading 10,000 word essays on a new interpretation of the meaning of a three word sentence in the Wake! A former girlfriend once said he wrote it to make scholars talk baby talk for 1,000 years...another friend joked that, to receive his BA at Utica College, he was going to write THE DEFINITIVE ESSAY on Finnegans Wake. Of course this can't be done. Approach the book the way you would a dream, with suspended disbelief. You know how in a dream nothing is questioned, no matter how surreal? (I have a friend who dreams 'ordinary' dreams, which seems odd to me.) - Read the book aloud, and with an Irish accent. Don't strain to "get" what it is you're reading (think in terms of Jazz/John Coltrane/sheetsofmusic), and Most importantly have a bellyfull of beer. The best time to read it is for an audience at an afterhours party (4AM) when everyone is pretty zonked out and there are a few people there whom you've never met before and will in all likelyhood never meet again. Open the book randomly and read aloud for a page or two (if possible), then continue with the party as if you've done nothing out of the ordinary. (Interestingly, the usual reaction to this is complete indifference, as if it never happened!- but I suspect years later it'll occure to them that something odd happened for a moment during those parties. A delayed response? Or was it just a dream? How much can you trust your memory?)...Finally, a reviewer somewhere below got it right when he said Joyce shows promise. Indeed, He shows the promise of a man who was once attacked by a dog on the beaches of Holland (circa. 1926)- :) <----primative symbols in a postmodern age!+media overload =Finnegans Wake...XOXOXO
Rating:
Summary: Drivel? Or not? Only you can decide!
Review: James Joyce's last novel, and incidentally the one his wife considered his best, is, as they say, unreadable, in that if you sit down and go through the book from cover to cover (as I have done) you'll only get the vaguest idea of what was going on. So if that's your idea of the all-time downer reading experience then spend your money on something else, because this is one of those books that is liable not only to change the way you look at life, but the way you read and think. Joyce called it a night book - the "action", such as there is any (and the action comprises pretty much all of human history and civilisation) takes place while the characters (a Dublin pub owner, his wife and family and sundry other unsavoury types) are asleep. But you'd never know that if I hadn't told you, because the language is a punster's dream (literally), a braided and twisted weave of most of the various tongues in the world, based on an idea by the English language, all to be spoken with a fairly strong Irish accent. (Non-Irish people often don't notice this, but the rest of us can hear it.) It's not a book to while away a plane trip. It's a book to spend a few dollars on and then spend the rest of your life dipping in and out of it for profit and pleasure. Some of it is pretty straightforward, such as the visit to the Willingdone museyroom or the episode about the chicken scratching around in the rubbish heap (a lot more gripping than it sounds), while other bits are maddeningly opaque. But if they read novels in heaven they probably read this one. The best way to get the most out of it is to have read every book ever written, but failing that, an open mind, an active imagination, and a sensitivity to the buried layers of meaning in words will get you through. Frank Zappa fans ought to love it; this is conceptual continuity with a vengeance. (Wow. I never thought the day would come when I'd get to review a novel by James Joyce.)
|
