Rating: 
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: .... is definitely an understatement. I thought Nabokov was an intensely self-referential and thoroughly allusive writer. This knocks him out of the park(in those departments, at least). Although I'm sure that John Bishop's statement(in the edition that has the introduction written by him) that, for Arabic and Hungarian readers, there are Hungarian and Arabic puns on every page, is an hyperbole. Most likely Joyce learned about ten to twenty words in most of these languages(most scholars guess 60 to 70 are used at least once), wrote them out phonetically(if they were in a different alphabet) and began puzzling for various contexts to place them in to be the wittiest or most clever(or, some will say, the most profound). I also think that while Joyce said he wrote Ulysses to puzzle scholars, he wrote Finnegan's Wake to fool them. As other reviewers have said he was hardly concerned with the exact replication of words when dictated or transcribed from notes to another draft. His concern (presumably; he may have had none at all) was more on the overall arc of the story(the descent into darkness and the subsequent climbing out of it; that is, if there even is a story) Not that Finnegan's Wake is a genius's(or madman's; or charlatan's...) trifle; he spent 17 years of his life on it, so of course it had atristic and literary value to him. But examining it bit by bit will likely not get you as far to Joyce's intended themes as interpreting larger pieces and whole structural parallels. Of course, there are camps that say the point of Finnegan's Wake was that anything can be interpreted in any way. And I'm inclined to agree with them. But under that, I feel, is a more intentional story of family, history, and... well, other reviews have lists of them. So maybe Joyce's "Take it as you like it" device is a superficial example of what he really did intend for you to walk away with. Anyhow, the first time I read Finnegan's Wake I thought it was actually going to be about a wake... I had read it was about "one night", and that it was a comedy about a corpse that couldn't stay dead(<-- this actually isn't an interpretation many people walk away with), and so I pictured a Rules of the Game-esque chateau where a patriarch's family had gathered to fight over the will or estate or something. Also, my 7th grade teacher, who first told me about it, had said that she really enjoyed it, and she was (to me) a conservative old lady who devoured all of those "musty" classics like Gone With the Wind and Emma. So I was expecting some... plot. Especially after reading Dubliners, which barely had any run on sentences. Finnegan's Wake is just as easy to dismiss as to enjoy, and I've known people that to some degree do both. But you should really scan through it(or read said introduction by John Bishop, which gives you a very clear idea of how everything goes down) instead of going by what critics, fans, or teachers say, because the traditional reader (or even the most literate one) may loath it.
Rating:
Summary: You have never read anything like this before
Review: A way a lone a last a loved a long riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, bring us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. If you can not read for readings sake this book is not for you. When I first picked up this book I did not understand it, but it didn't annoy me either so I kept reading and found it to be an enjoyable book - now I treasure it. Much like Faulkner was to me this book was also, Can you tell me that The Sound and the Fury was easy to understand at first reading. and if you have read it aren't you glad you had? Like that book this book encourages me to read it again.
Rating: 
Summary: I am beginning to believe that Joyce was a mountebank after
Review: all. After just reading a small portion of Finnegans Wake here on Amazon - thank you for the excerpts because you saved me a bundle - and after flipping through a few pages of Ulysses - too bad I paid full price for the Modern Library Edition - I am now disposed to think that Joyce was the biggest humbug for a writer ever. When I read through the first page of Finnegans Wake, I was quite consternated at my limited vocabulary - I mean, after all, there were something like twenty words - I didn't count - that I didn't know! Which has never happened to me from reading any book, even Melville or Shakespeare! Then I looked some of them up and discovered that they weren't even in the dictionary. Even if some of the words are foreign and actually do exist, this doesn't prove that Joyce was a great writer in English. For a man who was so educated, he sure couldn't compose an original piece of literature with any sort of structural integrity and plot congruency. Scholars would have you believe that Joyce was a genius, whose mastery of the language was invidious. But I query which lingo he conquered, for it surely isn't English. Maybe it was because Melville wrote Moby Dick in one year, or maybe it was because he composed White-Jacket and Redburn in one summer, perhaps Joyce realized his limitations and provinciality of ingenuity, so that's maybe why he foisted Ulysses and Finnegans Wake at the public. In this way he could besot us with "enigmatic art." Some have called Joyce a writer's writer. I wonder if Melville, James, and Dickens would bethinkestit ( hey, I can invent pseudo-words too ) of him of such.
Rating:
Summary: I'm Baffled
Review: I've tried a couple of times to read this book, and honestly, I never got past the first page. I think it's the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible literary world, and if James Joyce was sane (as I seriously doubt) then he must have had a huge laugh at its expense. However, I think he must've been totally nuts to write such garbed nonsense.
I read the glowing reviews by other readers praising Joyce's "genius" and begin to doubt my own sanity. Is it possible I just can't read as well as I've always thought I can?
However, I truly think they're just afraid to express their real opinion, after so many have called this thing a work of genius.
Rating:
Summary: A mythology for the end of time
Review: Here Comes Everything. Not Everybody. In terms of quantum reality theory and cyborg anthropology, The Wake is structured around a recursive temporal spiral, overlaying an archetypally-driven consciousness matrix. While one could break the book down into a basic linear story, which weaves and meanders through the seven-stage structure, like a river, the reductionism or deconstruction approach is itself vulnerable. While there are many serious threads, FW is also a minefield of literary and linguistic-phonentic puns. I once read a review in which the writer dismissed the word "upfellbown" as one of Joyce's many nonsense words. Nope. Upfellbown is a phonetic portrayal of the German word apfelbaum, or apple tree, which Joyce had mentioned slightly earlier in the text. Where people often go off the deep end is in attributing undue significance to these individual words. If The Wake is about anything, it is about phenomenology or holism versus reductionism. The significance of the whole versus the sum of the parts. You don't understand The Wake, you experience it. On a vastly simpler level, the superb Bruce Willis movie 12 Monkeys brilliantly captures the beauty of the recursive temporal symmetry that underlies Joyce's re-entrant epic. For those who have never read FW, it is basically about an Irish bricklayer called Tim Finnegan (Finnegans Wake being a traditional song, of sorts) who falls, probably drunkenly, from a ladder. The 'story' that follows is either his Death Dream or Near Death Experience, in which the entireity of Earth's history cycles through his mind. (There has even been debate about the identity of the Dreamer.) Symbolically, Finnegan's fall from the ladder could be representative of the Fall of Lucifer or the Fall of man. The Wake means whatever it means to the individual reader at that point in his or her lifetime. For me, the many references to the Triple Goddess and Masonic ritual leaped out of the text. Yet had I not read so much about these things, the references would mean nothing. Yet, I have probably missed thousands of things that others will see. Quick example... The three main female characters, Kate, Issy (Isis) and ALP form the principle references to the presence of the Great Mother/The Triple Goddess. Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are about return. The return to the cosmic womb of the Great Mother. The beginning and the end of Time. Issy is Isis, who is in herself the Mother Goddess. Issy's room is blue with a ceiling of stars - "the twinkly way". A classic feature of the ceilings of Masonic lodges. Sirius, the Star of Isis is the Blazing Star of freemasonry, whose square and compass logo can be extended out to form a pentagram, depicting the four elements, plus the fifth element - the Creatrix. The third degree ceremony of freemasonry is a symbolic death and rebirth, symbolized by the skull and crossbones - the sign of Osiris risen. The Wake, which itself is about rebirth and resurrection - Finnegan = Finn Again, has many esoteric references, and even obvious ones, such as PHOENIX Park, and the fact that the book is set on March 21st, the Spring or Vernal Equinox - the beginning of the pagan New Year. Aw hell, I'm rambling. That's the trouble with The Wake. It sucks you in. Give it a shot, but don't try to understand it from the outset. Try to just read it all the way through first and then maybe do some dissection. Whereas Ulysses is 24 hours out of Bloom's life, allegorically interwoven with the Ulysses myth (instead of returning to Ithaca, he returns to Number Seven Eccles Street), FW is just too massive to see a linear series of exact correspondences. There's also a great deal of literary chaff. The man had a sense of humour, after all. The bottom line for me, is that The Wake is about the transforming power of the Feminine - like Mary Poppins, like Chocolat, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, like Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, like Cities Of The Red Night... Here Comes Everything...
Rating: 
Summary: A mind-boggling puzzle of a book
Review: I actually managed to read FW cover to cover. From what I gathered, Joyce was trying to intersperse life, death and rebirth into a mythical Irish epic. With it's obscure references, jabberwocky-like sentences and chaotic theme, he has a lot of fun keeping the reader guessing. His chief talent here is playing with words, puns, and puzzles all while trying to tell an obscure tale with no obvious plot. If you enjoy a seriously challenging read and are looking for a novel like no other give this one a try.
Rating:
Summary: How dare anyone admit they enjoy non-logic!
Review: How I would mourn being inside the brain of anyone who cannot simply ENJOY something and instead demands: 1) A plot. "Hey this is a book/movie, howcome there's no plot? All the other books/movies I've experienced have plots. How DARE anyone create something otherwise! The NERVE!" 2) Linearity and/or logic. "But without linearity or logic, you might as well publish a math book that says 2 + 2 = 1,364,772! Because abandoning these things means abandoning creativity also!! Everyone knows all creativity resides in the left hemisphere of the brain." Oh, of course! Go ahead and publish a string of random numbers to satisfy this belief and see if anyone "pretends to like it". 3) That no one get the funny idea of rejecting politics and intellectualism and "merely" ENJOY something. (Along with logic and linearity too?? But where's the bias in THAT??) "I enjoy my favorite foods for logical reasons!" 4) An objective translation. You poor thing! Who told me to like this book? Me. When I first started, my first thought was, "THIS got PRINTED???". I recovered from that in about five minutes and started laughing. Soon after, I felt as though I'd experienced a beautiful evolution. It CAN speak to you, but those who insist upon obstructing it with (fill in semantic here) have my condolences. As well as those who assume that anyone who likes something must be doing so because they're afraid not to. (Because everyone knows that DISLIKE is always more honest than LIKE, right?). The true courage lies in discarding these petty semantics and calling up Robert Anton Wilson to ask him if he's read it. "But I like my favorite foods for LOGICAL reasons!" Oh dear. Oh by the way, only OTHER PEOPLE'S beliefs are subjective. Not yours. Never. No way, Jose. Nuh-uh.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Read This Edition
Review: Okay, this edition of Finnegans Wake may not exactly be dishonest, but it is disingenuous enough to be seriously misleading. Up front they tell you that the text of the book is taken from the first edition published in May of 1939. This is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story, and most people have no idea what it really means. Finnegans Wake was originally published in 1939. The first edition was replete with errors and typos -- thousands of them. James Joyce spent the last two years of his life (he died in 1941) going through the text correcting the mistakes. An errata list comprising many single-spaced pages was printed in the back of the second edition, and the third edition had all of Joyce's corrections incorporated into the text. So the third edition is the definitive one. But Penguin is reprinting the first edition. Get it? The text you'll be reading will have all of the typos that Joyce spent two years correcting -- uncorrected. Viking does have the third edition of Finnegans Wake in print. It's smaller, with smaller type and not nearly as pretty a cover, but it's the text that Joyce approved. I would get that one (it has a white cover with a green stripe going across the middle of it), and leave this edition alone.
Rating:
Summary: In Defense
Review: this book is great for the very reasons it is hating. in response to the reviewer who noted that with a program he could write a sequel and that most Joyce scholars wouldn't tell the difference. Well, the important thing about this book is that Joyce sat down and actually did it. Art moves forward by a few souls cutting down what lie in front of them, and plant something new. Then others come, and hybrid that with the past, and so on. This work is important because he could down everything in front, and replaced it with something so different, hybrids are impossible. So what if its pure gibberish? In madness there is always an essence of genius, and in this madness, the stench of genius permiates throughout. i say that we can scorn it all we want, but if we do, it should be with a grain in awe in that someone had the audacity to go out, and hurl this challenge back at us.
Rating:
Summary: Ridiculously Bad
Review: I am a fan of Joyce's writing especially Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, but this is pure garbage. Thank goodness for the look inside features at amazon, so that people will be able to know what to expect when ordering Finnegans Wake. The novel has no plot and lacks the vivid descriptions of seemingly meaningless things that made Joyce's other novels so great. Here, he picks random foreign words and places them wherever he please just to make his book seem original and artistic. The result is an incomprehensible piece of garbage that is not only plotless but devoid of any writing ability and talent. Use the look inside features to see what I'm talking about.
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