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Summary: The biggest challenge!
Review: Usually readers wants benefit from a book, especially from a novel. They want to learn some historical, ethical or philosophical.Or they just want to enjoy it; but this is also a benefit. The relation between a novel and a reader is an 'interested' relation. Whereas, Finnegans Wake is pure, abstract literature where you can 'get' nothing. You cannot buy or sell anything, when you read it. You get connected to pure literature that hurts you a bit. But it is a challange: a challange that teaches you if you are an egoist or not. Who are not egoists can taste Finnegans Wake. It is the best novel I have ever read. Sorry about it!
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Summary: The funniest book ever written, worth the trouble
Review: That's really the the whole point, a multi-dimensional romp through the universe of our understanding and experience. More than anything I know in all art, the Wake makes me happy, and glad to be alive. But you must be able to read it in Irish tone and rhythm before it works. It takes a while, but when you start laughing you may know you're on the right track.
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Summary: word salad as verbal Rorschach test
Review: let the high preists of deconstructionist post modernism interpret it for you. bow down before the wisdom of frustrated ineffectual professors of English, the preistly class who will interpret this message from the gods for you, (and actually get pay and respect for it). lets get real. this is a book by a sciziphrenic for the pompous and pedantic. a few puns aside dont waste your life trying to interpret this nonsense, just because you have an ego. (even Nobel laureates fell for it--hence the quark, but FASHIONABLE NONSENSE is the delayed reaction)the real dope: read: WHAT ART IS. MADNESS AND MODERNITY. and THE FOUNTAINHEAD. for some insight into why nonsense like this continues to propagate.
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Summary: My Exagmination of Work In Progress (Finnegans Wake)
Review: I've read some -especially in the James Joyce Quarterly- that FW isn't exactly supposed to make sense. And obviously it doesn't. Apparently, Joyce -nearly blind at the time- he wrote FW wrote out a lot of the text & had it typed up. Apparently, fairly often the typist couldn't read Joyce's handwriting, so she would guess what the word was. Joyce is reported to have been amused by these errors & let them stand. Also, Beckett took dictation for a lot of FW: enough said... I don't think Joyce was interested in referential sense. And I agree that FW works more like Modern art than a regular book. In his mixing up words at the morphological level, he exploits the gap between signification & meaning to such an extent that meaning is so exact that it abstracted -kind of like Andy Warhol's car crash pictures? A text definately more than a "book" FW is in my opinion one of the original self-referential ones & for that a lot cooler than most texts. I like to read it for the sounds of the language & I like criticism on it becuase that actually makes sense. An annotated book like the one for Ulysses would be awesome!
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Summary: Belongs in an anthology of abnormal psychiatry
Review: OK, so, yes, some sort of very sophisticated intelligence was involved in this work. No doubt the allusions, multi-lingual puns, and invented words that fill over 600 pages were carefully chosen. But as a whole, or even in small parts, it doesn't make any sense and doesn't yield even to careful analysis and background research. There is no plot, it explains nothing, and it describes nothing coherently. If the goal was to capture the confused, disorganized dream state of a polygot Irish writer then, yes, it's all there on paper. But was an entire book needed for this? The hubris of this undertaking -- and of the literary critics who saved it from obscurity -- can be seen in the condescending introduction to this Penguin edition, where the editor writes: "...any reader can enter Finnegans Wake and find something to absorb him -- as long as he or she doesn't expect to find it all in one place or, complementarily, understand everything else that appears around it. It is even possible to argue, with this same logic, that Finnegans Wake may be more accessible to the common reader that Ulysses -- or, for that matter, War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past -- since one doesn't have to comprehend it as a totality to profit from it or enjoy it." In other words, unlike those other books where we read about people, ideas, history, etc. here we can just enjoy the sound and look of random phrases and sentences, the way a baby enjoys pleasant sounding nonsense. The introduction goes on to say, "It can sometimes seem that one is doing well if one makes sense of only a sentence or two on a single page. If, however, one surrenders the need to be master of everything -- or even most things -- in this strange and magnificent book, it will pour forth lots of rewards." I humbly disagree -- one or two identfiable bits of prose per page is almost by definition an unsatisfactory reading experience. And the estimate of one to sentences per page is high -- after a paragraph or two of incomprehensible invented words, even a few straightforward words or sentences have no context or meaning. I wouldn't discourage people from buying this book, just to see for themselves how weird it is. But I wouldn't say its a good book, anymore than the scholarly yet demented ravings and ramblings of a schizophrenic former PhD student on a streetcorner constitute good oratory. Fascinating, but more worthy of medical and psychiatric scrutiny than literary study.
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Summary: Let me know if I can make it a little more obscure for you..
Review: One of the most supremely delicate and beautiful works of art to have been created. Ideas flit through the pages, run parallel, interconnect and cross-fertilise, giving birth to a language that resonates with numinal power. Perhaps the only book that to be understood (if such a thing is possible) must be contained within the mind, and not within clumsy ink. This is a book that refuses to prostitute itself, that forces the reader to interact and seduce it. Only then will anything be gained from it. If you want something that carries its justification and spirit within each word and individual letter then read this. And rejoyce. But a word of advice to all those who follow in its Wake. If you truly love it then it will inspire you to create for yourself. And if this is the case, then by all means echo Joyce but do not ever try to be him. For in taking up the pen you must acknowledge that, however beautiful the old artificer's book is, it is not THE book.
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Summary: Five Stars for Audacity
Review: I've read all of Joyce's novels and short stories and have taken graduate courses featuring hours of seminar and discussion, so don't consider myself unqualified to cast an opinion. I must say though, that Joyce was having a bit of fun with his readers here. This is his endgame in which he outmaneuvers all other authors. Remember this is the same writer who prophesied, shortly after its publication by Shakespeare & Co. that Ulysses would keep the academics guessing for 100 years (it will have them arguing a lot longer than that I'll wager). Well take Ulysses and multiply it to the tenth power and you will have some perspective of this Tower of Babel of a novel. Joyce wants to take you higher and higher up the tower steps until you become so disoriented you have no longer have any clue what speech or language signify (which is the primary reason it is one of the deconstructionists holy texts). If you will recall, Ulysses begins in a tower as well. Only here, the higher he takes you, the more you are overcome by vertigo as you peer down at the vestiges of culture and what you supposed was community below. Anyone who has seriously studied Joyce and has read his biographers (Edelman is my favorite, but Leon Edel also provides some sharp insights) is aware that few authors had a more colossal Ego than JJ. This work is the author's ego as edifice. Take the climb if you so desire. He will definitely not lead you by the hand, and the only thing you will see and hear when you get to the top are provided by your own inadequate sensory apparati. You might just get a whiff of your own sweat and mortality as well. If your eyes can still focus, you might also see JJ, bent over, laughing at you for having made the trip. I know, I thought he was a one-eyed SOB at that point too.
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Summary: A book not to be put down in any sense of the word
Review: How can a person use less than 1,000 words to describe a book that utilizes 65 different languages to deliver a tale of sin, betrayal and politics into a dream-like realm of reality? As Seamus Deane's introduction to the Wake states, this novel could have been written on the building sight of the Tower of Babel. What is it about? A father and his daughter uncover themselves in a Garden of Eden park setting. Their exploration is spied upon by four evangelists. Their names are Matthew Mark Luke and John. A hard novel to read? Finnegan's Wake is my brain's favorite jungle gym. Absolutely the hardest read there is, even when compared to Joyce's novel Ulysses. Joyce spent 22 years writing the two novels that have shaped today's literature. If I would be so bold, I would suggest to Oprah that she draw back from selecting current authors and go right to the source of that inspiration
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Summary: Understanding "Switters"
Review: In Tom Robbins "Fierce Invalids Home From Warm CLimates" the main character Switters is attempting to read this book and never gets though the first 5 pages. I now understand why.
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Summary: NOOOOOO
Review: NO! BOOK BAD BOOK BAD BIG BIG WORDS I DONT UNDERSTAND! MY BRAIN HURTSSSS! THIS MAKE NO SENCE. YAHOO CHAT MUCH EAZYIER TO UNDeRSTAND! I GO THERE NOW.
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