Penguin), 20th-Century, Finnegans Wake (Classic

Joyce, man of Letters, fluent in Languages, Traveler in circles high and low and places near and far, Scholar of knowledge, Prophet to Mankind.

Joyce's Ulysses (is the story of a young man) whose framework is Homer's Odyssey: a tale of Modern-day Odysseus' personal existential/sexual quest overcoming his psychological internal travails (not Odysseus' external travails) affirming humanity (the fundamental family unit: the father, mother, son, and daughter). Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE (is the story of a mature man) whose framework is Giambattista Vico's "La Scienza Nuova's" 4 stages of history (cyclic): theocratic to aristocratic to democratic to chaos (followed by Joyce's God "thunderclap") which ends chaos and restarts the world again with theocracy.

Both FINNEGANS WAKE (FW) and Ulysses are situated in Dublin (Ireland) and though both books were written on the European continent, Joyce memorializes his birth home. FW is Joyce's continuation of Ulysses on a grander scale: Bloom becomes all-men (HCE) and Dublin becomes the World. Joyce's Ulysses (Bloom) is an energetic man hopping out of bed, plunging into the Dublin day, waging battles real and unreal, exhausted by controversy and rejuvenated by love (Molly). Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE (HCE) is man ever-living, man of all wisdom, man of all compassion, man of all understanding, man of all time - Joyce's FW protagonist is Finnegan, who (re)incarnates to HCE, who will (re)incarnate to Shem and Shaun.

Reading FW is entering the "mind of James Joyce", who for two decades labored on his masterwork - the mind of Joyce is the "library of mankind" he has reordered dictionaries, encyclopedias, and volumes of knowledge to reveal Mankind's thoughts, conscious and unconscious, in his masterwork. FW is a volume to be Read and Read again for 10,000 years.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with a half sentence "A away a lone a last a loved a long the" - the first words of FW is the second half of the sentence "riverrun,...".

1) The first chapter of FW's "book I" (Vico's theocratic) describes 1) Finnegan's fall, Joyce's God "thunderclap" restarting "book I" from ending "book IV" and 2) the transition from Finnegan (as protagonist) to HCE. The first 4 chapters of "book I" introduces readers to the protagonist HCE (and his many "names" and "attitudes") and the second 4 chapters of "book I" are devoted to HCE's wife ALP (and her many "names" and "attitudes"). Finnegan represents the "past", the place held by forefathers - forefathers with the wisdom of the history of all men and times. Finnegan passes his baton (his place in the fabric of the universe) to HCE now present in time with his particular past. The parents (HCE & ALP) are the "present anchored by their particular pasts" in FW.

- A Dublin wake for Finnegan (who falls, the past) and introduction of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE, the present). HCE's past and his shameful voyeuristic encounter in Phoenix Park (that may or may not have happened) and its memorialized retelling "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly". HCE is arrested (for late night disturbances at his tavern/home, unable to enter his front door just like Bloom in Ulysses), tried and jailed (for his own innocent protection from the public). HCE is resurrected from a metaphorical coffin (just like Bloom's underworld excursion in Ulysses ch Hades) and a revealing letter is introduced. Letter revealed from his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP, HCE's Muse), written by his son Shem (Joyce), appropriated by his twin brother Shaun is discussed. Analysis of the ALP letter and the informing parable of "The Mookse and The Gripes"(Shaun, Shem). Shem's nature, who shares ALP's attitudes. Two washerwoman gossip over ALP & HCE, and ALP's quashing of rumors of HCE.

2) FW's "book II" (Vico's aristocratic) devotes itself to HCE & ALP's children: Shaun (extrovert, man of the world - like Sartre's BEING in "Being and Nothingness"), Shem (introvert, artist - Sartre's NOTHINGNESS) and Iseult (daughter). The children are the "present future" of FW.

- Shaun (Chuff), Shem (Glugg) and Iseult play (children's world) in front of the family tavern/home games parodying their parents. Shaun (Kev), Shem (Dolph) and Iseult study their lessons (the past, adult world), Dolph antagonizes Kev who blackens Dolph's eye. HCE & ALP's children grow up (the present) in a raucous Feast of eating, drinking, storytelling, and a "free and open discussion of ideas" in the family (HCE) tavern, HCE's defends himself with a self-deprecating speech and latter his drunken collapse after the close. HCE asleep on the floor dreams of (his children's future) love, the tale of King Mark, Tristram and Iseult.

3) FW's "book III" (Vico's democratic) devotes itself to "what will be of" HCE & ALP's children's - the baton will be passed on (again) from HCE & ALP to: Shaun, Shem and Iseult (daughter). The children's "influences upon the world" is the "future generation" (presently unknowable) of FW.

- HCE rises from the tavern floor to go upstairs to bed with ALP, he dreams of (his desired) children's future and a prophetic Aesop's fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper" (Shaun, Shem). HCE dreams (of a more realistic future) of Shaun (Juan) sermonizing before his daughter Iseult and her 28 playmates and designates Shem (Dave) as Shaun's paraclete. HCE dreams (of his life's impact on his children's future) of Shaun's (Yawn) inherited "sins of the father" prosecuted by Four Old Inquisitors (MaMaLuJo). HCE's dreamtime breaks at the nightmare cry of Shem (Jerry, who is not forgotten by his father in "book III"), once Shem is comforted, HCE & ALP return to bed for late-night lovemaking (unsuccessful spiritually) and a nap.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with HCE & ALP's dissolution - awaiting Joyce's God "thunderclap" at the beginning of FW's "book I". A supposition may be made that Joycean Nirvana is attained by HCE (via Dzogchen Trekchö) and ALP (via Dzogchen Tögal) - realizing the heart of enlightenment in the present moment, transcending all defilements and fixations (beyond all dualistic polarities) so that their rainbow bodies are realized, unification with the Unmanifest (creation, incarnate conception) and Reincarnation (the baton has been passed on again).

- The night has passed, the morning arises, and all dissolves to restart again...

The shameful voyeuristic encounter in Phoenix Park ("book I ch 2", "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly") is Bloom’s major transgressions against his marriage bed (Ulysses ch Nausicaa) with Gerty McDowell who revealed herself to Bloom "she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent . . . she leaned back ever so far...she let him and she saw that he saw...because he couldn’t resists the sight of the wondrous revealment...looking and he kept on looking, looking...a sigh of o! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures..."(366-67), Bloom acknowledges “Still it was a kind of language between us.”(372) and "look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you’re a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming; legs...Wonder how is she feeling in that region... (373-4). Joyce acknowledges that the "revealment" has activated Bloom. That which cannot be "recorded" (physical occurrences: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch... in time and space) are Mankind's "unrecorded human thoughts and dreams". Joyce established in Ulysses "his revelations" of mankind's hitherto unrecorded conscious and unconscious "thoughts and dreams".

The Letter is all-letters, the "writings of all mankind", as well as, Joyce's body of work (Ulysses, FINNEGANS WAKE) - the "thoughts and dreams" of all Mankind. Joyce has a "historically traditional revelation" of the relationship between the sexes: "women activate men" (Gerty McDowell, Molly, ALP, etc.), men provide content, and women are the Muses (and repositories) of Mankind's "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip". Consequently, "the letter" is within ALP's repository and she is the Muse of the letter(s) - just as Picasso' women were his Muses. (Men) Joyce (and Shem) don't create letters they "reveal letters" from Mankind's collective consciousness (and unconsciousness).

Evolution of Everyman: every man will aspire to godhood during their lifetime, as Icarus flew too close to the sun, every man will aspire to dominate their profession (Joyce in writing FW) or dominate the world of men (Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, Russian tsars, etc.) yet they will fall, taken down by someone, "how Buckley shot the Russian General". The children: Shaun, Shem and Iseult will evolve (in book II) from children's games parodying their parents; to youngsters studying their forefather's past lessons; to adults participating in the "rustle bustle" of present life, aspiring to their own godhood (as HCE has), yet they too will experience the fall (dismembered by those around them); after the fall (but before the end/restart) they will dream of what might have been (not their current life) but when they were young, and when love was young.

Dreams: HCE dreams of how he may influence his children's loves (book II ch 4); HCE dreams of how his children's future may be an extension of his life (book III ch 1); HCE dreams of how his children's future may be influenced by his parenting (book III ch 2); HCE dreams of how he has prepared his children to defend themselves from their family inheritances (book III ch 3); HCE (& ALP) dream of the past dissolving and the new day arising (book IV).

Possible Timeline, if Joyce intended "HCE day" similar to "Bloomsday" (roughly 24 hrs)': HCE arrested in front of his tavern/home (unable to enter his front door, like Bloom in Ulysses) for disturbances in hours before dawn (I:3); HCE's conscious/awake or unconscious/dream psychological travails of past guilts (underworld coffin, Ulysses ch Hades) while incarcerated in the early hours of morning (I:4); HCE walks home through Phoenix Park accosted for the time of day (12 noon) which threatens (real/unreal memories, Ulysses ch Nausicaa) his innocent well-being (I:2). Finnegan's afternoon wake at HCE's tavern (1:1); inside HCE's tavern his patrons talk about his family, truthful (letters) and fabricated stories (I:5-8 and II:3); while the children (Shaun, Shem and Iseult) are in and out of the family tavern/home all day taking their lessons (II:2) and playing about with their friends (II:1); HCE, as proprietor, defends himself with a self-deprecating speech before his drunken late night collapse (II:3). HCE dreams on his tavern floor (II:4); then dreams in his bed (III:1-3); before lovemaking with his wife ALP (III:4); and HCE & ALP's dissolution dream (IV) to awaken to a new day.

Joycean Nirvana lies on the surface of FW's text (mandala, available to all) - excavating below the surface of the text reveals the arguments that support the Nirvana (present mindfulness) and refutes all institutional dogma and authoritarian oppression. Joyce reveals what may be Dzogchen "Father Tantras" or "Maha Yoga" (in book I, ch 1-4); Dzogchen "Mother Tantras" or "Anu Yoga" (in book I, ch 5-8); while identifying Shem as receptive to "Ati Yoga" or Non-Dual Tantras (Tiberiast Duplex, in book I, ch 6); the answer to the Riddle(s) the "Tiberiast Duplex" is Shem (Joyce) who is the Enlightened One. A supposition may be made that: the Children learn in "book II" Dzogchen Semde (Mind Series) self-knowledge (awareness) and Dzogchen Longde (Space Series) evolution-knowledge (primordial wisdom, rigpa); and that HCE intends (dreams) in "book III" to impart Dzogchen Mannagde (Secret Instruction Series) Self-Liberation-knowledge to his Children.

What does it all Mean: Joyce's gift to Mankind is that Life recirculates. Unlike Joyce's Ulysses (based on Homer's Odyssey) life does not end with woman (in Molly's bed): night passes, the morning arises, and all dissolves to recirculate and restart again - some actors leave the stage and are replaced / (re)incarnated by a "younger version of their former self". Joyce changes from Ulysses by using Giambattista Vico's framework of recirculation for FINNEGANS WAKE - Finnegan (re)incarnates to HCE, as Shaun (most like HCE) will largely be a (re)incarnation of HCE, Shem (most like ALP) will (re)incarnate some of HCE but also some of ALP, and Iseult will largely be a (re)incarnation of ALP - however, Iseult will choose a man much like HCE (who is (re)incarnated through his daughter) as Shaun will choose a woman much like ALP - while Shem may become the next Joyce. FW is the "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip" of all Mankind.

FW is aural (oral) history like Homer's Odessey and Celtic folktales - when one pronounces (phonology) FW's words (aloud) there are more languages than just English; also, when one reads (morphology) FW's words almost all the words are "portmanteaus / neologisms" which gives each of FW's "polysynthetic words" many meanings (impermanence, Heisenberg uncertainty), each FW sentence dozens of possible messages, each FW paragraph hundreds of possible readings, Joyce's rendering of a more expansive English language and multiplicating universal book with coalescing syncretic themes/stories (that responds to each reader's inquiries). Joyce schooled in Christian Jesuit metaphysics (pushed down into the mindfulness of human consciousness) breathes in the spirit of expansive Celtic (Irish) community tavern life where man's stories of life are told. Tavern life teaches the evolution of Joyce's ten God "thunderclaps" (one hundred lettered words) pushing man's evolution forward from cave man's tales to modern tv media tales. Inside the tavern man learns of the purely human (animal) fall, taken down by another human(s) - like animal taken down on the African savanna. A granular reading of FW can render FW as an updated John Milton's Paradise Lost (regurgitated knowledge from the tree, to affirm man's damnation); however, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859 and Joyce in FW book II clearly walks Shaun, Shem and Iseult through their earthly evolutionary lifetime travails. Every page of FW speaks to man's evolution and to Life recirculating (West meets Dzogchen East a "meeting of metaphysical minds") that binds humanity together into the future. Dzogchen (beyond all dualistic polarities) the heart of human consciousness - Joyce's underlying (subcutaneous) arguments refute the "Western curse of metaphysical/mythological damnation", the curse does not exist in the Eastern mind. Like "counting the number of angels on the head of a pin" (Aquinas 1270) Joyce provides a granular reading of FW as a "defense against all Western adversity" for our conscious and unconscious Western travails. HCE's angst is caused by his community that imposes a Western curse (damnation) upon him that man is not guilty of. To experience Joycean Nirvana, a defense against this man-made guilt is required - for as Zoroaster revealed cosmogonic dualism, evil is mixed with good in man's everyday (universal) travails (even the Dalai Lama must defend Nirvana rigorously from the most populous authoritarian state in human history).

Joyce's FW celebrates the (Joys of) Christian (Krishna, Shem) diversity of humanity (expansiveness of human consciousness, Gnostic Norwegian Captain, Archdruid), Brahma (Finnegan, HCE, Shaun, etc...), Divine Women (ALP, Iseult, etc...), his family - (and the Sufferings of) the inescapable "evil" of Shiva (Buckley), the debilitating harmful sterile authoritarian institutionalizing damnation (MaMaLuJo, St. Patrick) by Augustine, the manufactured clerical corruption identified by Luther (since 367 AD) and the burdens of "survival of the fittest" anxiety (modern commerce) met with a Dzogchen Buddhist stance. The (innocent infant) Norwegian Captain (Krishna, HCE), occasionally defensive (Shiva, HCE), though concretized (Brahma, HCE) by community family life (MaMaLuJo) - through spirits (drink) HCE can access his spirituality (dreams) and through spiritual (cutting through) love-making with ALP (direct approach) can access (their Krishnas) unification with the Unmanifest. Joyce was a Prophet who consumed Man's conscious and unconscious "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip", efforts and failings - to reveal the joys and sufferings of Mankind.

JCB

How are you going to have a copy of Finnegans Wake with only 284 pages? That makes no sense. Good copies of Finnegans Wake are 628 pages --- so they match up with the popular supplementary text Annotations to Finnegans Wake.

5 stars for Finnegans Wake, 1 star for this shady edition.

Nirvanic FINNEGANS WAKE: James Joyce's West/East RevelationJoyce, man of Letters, fluent in Languages, Traveler in circles high and low and places near and far, Scholar of knowledge, Prophet to Mankind. Aspirationally Joyce has thrown all Mankind's manifest gods/deities/idols into FW, reading FW is like circumambulating the Kaaba's 360 idols, each reader/critic will find their own manifest god and if enlightened (a Bodhisattva's perspective) move on to the Unmanifest. Joyce rewrites 3 chapters of Ulysses: When He is denied Her front door, He is in Hell (on earth), when released (from Hell) His odyssey to Her begins again (with His ever-present accompanying internal travails) for She always knows when He is worthy of Her acceptance (their Paradise).

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with a half sentence 'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the' FW's first words 'riverrun,...', Ganga's river of Unmanifest spiritual life/consciousness.

1) FW's "book I:1" Finnegan passes his baton his place in the fabric/river of manifest consciousness (loves/attachments and wars/engagements) to his successor HCE/Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (fallen Russian General's void is filled by his battlefield promoted daytime successor) now present in manifest time with his particular past; while ALP/Anna Livia Plurabelle emerges from Dublin's local museum/history as the Muse to gather from the past for her future/family. The parents (HCE & ALP) are the new "present anchored by their particular pasts" in FW.

After 4 billion years of biological evolution, Here we are!, well, Where are we?, and, How did we come about? Our individual particular consciousness has been inherited from the past (a temporal space in an expanding consciousness), and, Biological evolution has divided us by sex (which induces Social evolution) to procreate offspring to fill our temporal consciousness when we expire/"exhausted consciousness":

I:1 A Dublin wake for Finnegan, Irish archaeological history: museum of manifest-violence/self-interest (all's fair in [the dualities of] love/attachments and war/engagements) from the smoldering battlefield: hailing music enters our eternal cast, and aeonic battle of Mutt (native) and Jute (invader, Augustine's MaMaLuJo/verjuice), an evolutionary tale of Radha's/ALP's & Krishna's/HCE's joyful love dance: enter the spurned wanting Prankquean/ALP and presaged children and disembarking male/HCE; I:2 HCE walks home through Phoenix Park accosted for the time of day by a recidivist Cad/curse, which is understood by HCE as an attack on his existentiality; I:3 The memorialized attack 'The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly' is sung through time mocking HCE/man's mortality/curse and man's failings with the "opposite sex" (women's scorns/curse can drive men to ruin); HCE (the previous evening) played hooky at a Fair, got into a scuffle/curse with *Rajas/Tamas over *Maya/Thaya, consequentially drunken HCE/*Sattvas was unable to open his front gate and was arrested for disturbances, in jail an American from behind bars hurls insults at him; I:4 HCE ponders returning to ALP (or alternatives), ALP visits HCE in the guardroom which lifts his spirits before he testifies in front of a judge and jury that he is innocent, he is released to ALP to tell his story to his children, as their community has a story to tell about him.
*sexuality of Two Girls (M/T, o/o): Maya (Thaya's reflection, observed/observer) and Three Soldiers (T/R/S - C/d/eE): Tamas/Creations (Caseous/Brahma), Rajas/destructions (Burrus/Shiva), Sattvas/evolving Equilibrium (Antonius/Visnu)

I:5 ALP's letter (Brown/masculine Nolan/feminine, the thoughts we live by, define us, ultimately our undoing), ALP is HCE's harbor/elixir, she is the world from which his life evolves, her dharma is the FW letter: ALP's/HCE's philosophical/spiritual shared understandings of West/East Christianity/Tibetian Dzogchen; I:6 ALP's letter/dharma informs their family, a parable: a hubric Mookse confined to a manifest-perspective of life would extinguish mankind's spirituality, while the spiritual Gripes' Unmanifest-devotions cannot exist but in the duality of manifestation, consequentially stasis: the Mookse's existential angst of manifestation, the Gripes' material poverty of spiritual karma, and Nuvoletta's inability to attract either man (though preferring/searching for one with both qualities); I:7 Shem his mother's son will aspire to ALP's artistic nature as a revealer (Mercy not Justice) of the prophesies that inform dharma/letters; I:8 Two gossiping washerwomen tell of how ALP captured her soulmate HCE and prepared her family nest.

2) FW's "book II" (Vico's aristocratic) devotes itself to HCE & ALP's children: Shaun (extrovert, man of the world, stasis/space - Sartre's Being, loved) carrier of the FW letter (cleric of "church"), Shem (introvert, artist, change/time - Sartre's Nothingness, loves) revealer of the FW letter (prophet), and Issy/Iseult (nature's direction) gatherer and composer of letters. The children are the evolving "present future" of FW.

Biological and Social evolution engenders parental responsibilities, to successful offspring (brother's battle: Shaun in accord and Shem in conflict with local Dharma) who will inherit and evolve their Own individual particular temporal consciousness within their local deity's dharma/community (atmosphere, fog mist and dew of MaMaLuJo/Augustine's dharmapala); MaMaLuJo's donkey (relic/men's vestige) like Bloom's 'shrivelled potato' (Ulysses ch Circes); the children aspiring to their own godhood will experience their falls (as HCE/ALP have); after their dismemberment (but before the end/restart) they will dream of what might have been (not their current life) but when they were young, when love was young:

II:1 Shem, Shaun and Issy play along the vico in front of the family tavern over 3 time periods (trials: young children, pre-college and young adults): each trial to chose/attach/accept a mate, Shaun (Being) is always successful while Shem (Nothingness) fails/curse each time, Shem will live is his community as a celibate buddha; II:2 Shem, Shaun and Issy's school lessons: which they intuitively understand (their parent's West/East Christianity/Tibetian Dzogchen/dharma) while rejecting the Western constructs of an imposed Mosaic damnation/curse: there is no purgatory ("personal differentiated" coercive/social Metempsychosis) only the dualities of the manifest evolutionary battles of War (Shaun's battle pictures) & Love (Issy's mirror) and the Unmanifest (Shem's prophecies), with this foundational understanding: the children's remaining lessons comprise explanations/elucidations of the dualities learned from the history of knowledge, Kev/Patrick/Shaun blackens/curse Dolph's/Buckley's/Shem's eye, Issy writes letters, Nightletter: the children's Unmanifest-informed karmic individual/interdependent intellectual lives will move forward into the future.

II:3 Shaun, Shem and Issy grow up in HCE's Patagoreyan tavern/ship, a dithyrambic Establishment of eating, drinking, and storytelling, a "free and open discussion of ideas": from morality to death, back to life marriage and fruition, a life summarized in a wake, constrained by dharma, HCE's & ALP's courtship: Ana/tailor's daughter and her beau Kersse/curse are introduced, NC/Norweeger's capstan/HCE arrives by sea/ship to meet his mate/tailor's daughter/ALP, throw off the curse of Persse O'Reilly (bachelorhood), and seek public judgment for his life lived: the story/retelling of the NC's/Norweeger's capstan's/HCE captured by Ana/ALP takes place over 3 rounds: 1) for a “suit of clothes”/match (the vacancy of Finnegan, who's deadly scaffolding fall has opened "consciousness space" for HCE to take Ana), NC/HCE meets Kersse/curse (whom he will displace) and absconds with the suit of clothes (Ana's favors), 2) HCE/Burniface to have his "tastes satisfied" with food and refreshments, NC/HCE converses with 3 tailors: Swift's 3 interpretations of Augustine's dharma, 3) "to marry" while Ashe Junior (Kerrse/curse) sinks into delinquent recidivism, NC's/HCE's cursed/bachelorhood broken by Ana/ALP, HCE married into ALP's Dzogchen/dharma and honeymooned, ALP/Kate asks HCE to bed and to see their children tucked in, ALP's nightly toilet, HCE downstairs is asked by his customers to recite his 'tale of a tublin': Christ's/HCE's message lived (curse of Persse thrown off, "innocents reborn") NC/HCE's disentangled Western manifestations of Dharma (Swift's documentation of the misinterpretations by the churches of Rome, England & Puritanism of Christ's spiritual message), the second/spiritual-rebirth: Radha's/ALP's & Krishna's/HCE's joyful "love dance/Rasa lila"; a vaudeville radio pair of commentating observers Butt & Taff are telling the story of 'how Buckley shot the Russian General' during the Crimean War, fought over for the key/"Christian interpretations" of West (England) vs East (Russia), the Russian General defiling the "sacred battle field", consequently shot by Buckley while defecating, summarily: the spiritual Unmanifest pure (imbued Buckley) shot the corrupted feckless manifest defecator (ossified/concretized irredeemable/authoritarian) Russian General/curse (Tunc, He is redeemed of demiurgic dogma Who is sick of manifest dogma), customers life-affirming popular disruptive/justice joy, to restart an new aeon tock-tick; Christ-like now HCE sympathetically asks his patrons for compassion in understanding the imperfect Russian General who "knows not what he does", his customers now turning on him (curse) for defending/identifying with the Russian General looking for faults in HCE's life, HCE responds with a defensive self-deprecating apologia, HCE attempts to empty his tavern/ship, his patrons: an angry Shellian mob of townsfolks singing HCE's demise and reviewing all sorts of potential actions to erase him (and his memory) from existence, HCE's renascence/manifestations escape their jeremiad: He maintains "holds onto" His key to Her front door: each day he opens and "pours forth" his soul in serving/enlightening his guests/patrons (while being commercially compensated), he is intoxicated by their daily intercourse, now that they have left he moves about his tavern consuming that which they have left behind, drinking up until collapsing into dream sleep; II:4 HCE asleep on the floor dreams/meditates of his (children's collegiate future/their self-enlightenment) transferred familial/romantic love, the tale of the interrelationships between King Mark/HCE, Tristram/Shaun (and Shem/Morholt) and the two Iseults (Queen ALP wife/mother and Princess daughter).

3) FW's "book III" (Vico's democratic) devotes itself to "what will be of" HCE & ALP's children, the baton will be passed on (again) from HCE & ALP to: Shaun, Shem and Issy. The children's "influences upon the world" is the "future generation" (presently unknowable) of FW.

Instructing parents can guide their children beyond their local deity's dharma (MaMaLuJo/Augustine's dharmapala, manifest mandala) to the spiritual Unmanifest - evolving from Gautama to Buddha to Bodhisattva:

III:1 HCE rises from the tavern floor to go upstairs to bed with ALP, he dreams of (his desired children's future adulthood): Shaun's unfolding career carrying the family dharma/letter forward and a familiar children's fable: The Ant, the Grasshopper, and the girls, HCE's first gifted epiphany: could Shaun create a better world (Voltaire: the best of all possible worlds), FW letter carried by Shaun from his child's ship (a barrel, Hinayana), Shaun's initial apostasy (curse): his notions/thoughts of a better world collapse/vanish; III:2 HCE (Vajrayana-life lived) dreams of gifting Shaun of a more hopeful future: "one cannot change the reality of manifest duality", compassionate mature Shaun restarts (second coming) his road/path as Juan with (little boat, Hinayana) knowledge, before his sister Issy and her 28 playmates, Shaun's path/fate lies within Issy's childhood song/dharma/letter, Shaun travels his postman's rounds (proselytizing); Issy/Iseult's enlightened response (womanhood) to Shaun's manifest teachings: her sexual/men relationships are her transferences (Maya/Thaya, of her relationship with her reflection in a mirror) onto men, she will be open/accept her husband's manifest karma (departing Shaun's Shem-imbued manifestations) yet remain true to the Unmanifest (accepting Shem's/Dave's Eastern enlightened paraclete/Bhikkhu guidance beyond manifestation) through marriage and family life; III:3 HCE dreams of his life's enduring "sins of the father" on his children's future of his FW gifted, Shaun/HCE evolves from 'Tir na nOg' through his life to a mortal ego terrified of participations/judgment (fear of Tamas/destructions), transcendent Yawn (his karmic duality choices, Unmanifest imbued), HCE's/Shaun's guilty secret is that he is a mortal/animal (our lot a karmic journey), Shaun's reflective triptych historic evolutionary hindsight: Christian Ireland (temple/mind), Celtic history (lips/love), primitive man; ALP's relationship with HCE is as an elixir/medicine, she raises his spirit, she blows up his existential angst, ALP defends his karmic choices and defends HCE from judgment and public scandal, ALP is mirrored by her daughter Issy whose evolving dharma: romantic storytelling of HCE/NC traversing the seas, releasing birds to find a safe harbor to marry and start their family, HCE's/NC's traveled to non-Mosaic countries/peoples interacting with spiritual peoples who were as interested in his manifestations as HCE was interested in their spirituality; a sage/observer at the 'masked ball' at 'Tailors' Hall' (preceding the consummation of marriage) witnesses HCE's introduction into ALP's community: a grooms' qualms and their union/nuisances assuaged, HCE's defensive/apologia, HCE is innocent/defended, his life virtuous; III:4 HCE's dreamtime breaks with a nightmare cry of Shem/Jerry, who interrupts his parent's sexuality (wetting his bed) ALP comforts Shem's manifest fears while HCE assuages his spiritual angst, ALP and HCE converse (transactional foreplay, trials and tribulations of familial loves and wars), ALP & HCE return to bed for late-night intercourse (unsuccessful spiritually, condom male orgasm), witnesses: maids/laundresses observers of bed sheets (sex gossip, Tree of Life) washed in the river (of Ganga consciousness) and 'Patrolman Seekersenn' observes local happenings (Stone of Law), d) ALP's female orgasm (4) and a nap.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with ALP's & HCE's lovemaking dissolution dream/meditation. Joycean Nirvana is attained by ALP (via Dzogchen Togal: cosmic-awareness, dissolving manifest bodies, a "meditation on union", dissolving observer/selves) becoming "all that is" and HCE (via Dzogchen Trekcho: transcending all defilements and fixations, beyond karma, existence and thoughts) beyond selves (all dualistic polarities) realizing Non-duality/enlightenment, unification (Yab-Yum) so that their rainbow bodies are realized with the Unmanifest (Creation, Incarnate conception and Reincarnation) the baton has been passed on again.

Eternal Tree of sentient life (time/consciousness-compassion) and Immutable stone (matter-space/law), 'Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat!', Should we Aspire? Aspire to what? To that which manifested consciousness, Unmanifest mandala:

IV:a Expectant manifestation: ALP's & HCE's converging Togal & Trekcho divine union/acceptance: the night has passed (all dissolves), calling all spirits (of the Unmanifest) to manifestation, rain mist and dew of our Dublin's manifest world, morning light (from the darkness of night), observer of Dublin's morning (light rays), our couple HCE and ALP, between unconsciousness and consciousness (past and present), the Lotus blooms (sunrise), transcendent joy (bliss) expectant conception, Garden with stone and water pool a Christ/Krishna (Saint Kevin, Brahma) the first fruit expectant (womb of night/day) expectant conception/birth, transmigration of "funeral space"/rites expectant conception illuminated by light (Lotus blooms, a new aeon begins), baptism of Grace (expectant spiritual/birth), expectant conception/growth in ALP's expectant womb. IV:b Duality: Battle of Bulkily/Archdruid (druidical sage/night, Unmanifest spiritual) vs St. Patrick (saint/day, manifest deities/idols) tick-tock, commenting Muta (native didicism) and Juva (invading docetism) observe Mankind's existential struggle, Finn (Exuber High Ober King Leary) overseeing the tick-tock of time, Balkelly argues that the “manifestation of Life is informed by the Unmanifest” while Patrick replies that “reality is manifestation severed from spirituality”: 'Thud [manifestation]', waking daily (consciousness) to an evolving reordered world (actors slightly changed/ing), a precarious manifest tower of babel. IV:c Non-Dual guide: "Revered Letter" (FW, Joyce's West/East Tibetan Buddhist bardos), a road/path/vico to our eternal compassionate wisdom consciousness/spiritual (manifest/Unmanifest) 'fuitfiat', FW Letter: manifestation in Dublin, HCE's baptism of Grace (spiritual/second-birth), HCE's unavoidable oppositions (kleshas), and HCE's battles (karma/history, evolution), ALP/Muse of the FW letter (Joycean Dzogchen), ALP's ability to free (heal/medicine) HCE of existential angst, her history, family and children (Shem, Shaun & Issy), Funeral rites (transmigration of consciousness space), scandal of Mosaic damned mortality; the FW letter exists for each individual to realize the dualities of the manifest and the spiritual. IV:d Moksha revelation: ALP's & HCE's conceiving "Anandamaya kosha/Yab-Yum" (Creation, Incarnate conception and Reincarnation), to end/restart again, Shiva's trident ending an aeonic world: 'Save me from those therrble prongs! [curse]' in Ganga's river of Unmanifest undifferentiated spiritual/sentient life/consciousness (excluded "Book of dead/Purgatory": absent Dharma's "personal differentiated" coercive/social Metempsychosis) transcending all Demiurges of good [Gods] and evil [Devils]).

Joyce schooled in Christian Jesuit metaphysics (pushed down into the "mindfulness" of human consciousness) breathes in the "spirit" of expansive Celtic (Irish) democratic community tavern life where man's stories of life are told. HCE's evolving karma momentum/inertia (whirling dervish/ecstasy, enlightening like an evolving manifest Bodhisattva) cycling daily *(T/R/S - C/d/eE) through manifest travails (unlike Bloom's terminus, Ulysses ch Penelope) to guide his family to revelations of Joys (Nirvana) and mitigations of Sufferings (Samsara) while ALP's enlightenments/karma evolves similarly through daily circulations *(M/T - o/o) from drudge travails to Divine inspirations (unlike Molly's terminus from whore to Goddess). The innocent infant (Krishna/HCE, "all infants are blessings") who evolves/becomes the Norwegian Captain (Krishna, HCE) who is occasionally defensively lethal (defender's-perspective, Buckley/Shiva, HCE), who is concretized (Brahma/portly HCE, wholesome middle-class/bourgeois civic-minded Porters, HCE & ALP) by community family life (dharma/MaMaLuJo, ainsoph/verjuice, sour grapes) - through spirits/drink HCE accesses his spirituality/dreams and through spiritual (cutting through) love-making with ALP (direct approach) they access their Krishnas (Radha & Krishna), unification with the Unmanifest.

Joyce's FW message: Christian/Buddhist "Omniscient Compassion" (Christ/Krishna) is eternally joyful and recirculating. Unmanifest "spiritual" God (Visnu) is "Omniscient Compassionate Eternal". Manifest universes consist of an evolving Equilibrium (Visnu), Creations (more Brahma) and Destructions (less Shiva) - Shiva is a temporal manifestation of "Visnu / Brahma oppositions'' whose destructions are manifest and cannot interact with the Unmanifest/Visnu. Affirmative family existentiality: life's biological evolution (sex), modern survival (money), constraining community (dharma, social evolution) are constantly assaulted by inescapable (recidivists and local dharmapalas, "know not what they do" / kleshas/Avidya) "aggressive insidious vile" corrupt soul(less/sucking) heinous/duplicitous ossified demonic antipathetic attacks. Joycean Nirvana is attained via the Christian/Buddhist affirmative middle way, karmic wisdom journey (not: temporal ends justifies reactive means, repeating defeatist lose-lose vortex) our individual/personally informed life of a Christ/Buddha. All Manifest gods are deities/idols (man's creations/symbols): only the Unmanifest (untouched by man) is affirmative by definition (our universe's reality: its matter, its laws & consciousness manifest). Manifest local ephemeral "a posteriori" astronomic (dispassionate violent) physics vs Unmanifest universal eternal inflating quantum (Maya/Thaya & Tamas/Rajas/Sattvas - observed/observer & Creations/destructions/evolving Equilibrium) physics. Evolving Brahma manifestations (creations) not imbued by the eternal Unmanifest are met with opposing force (destructions). Joyce returns Mankind to the evolving karmic path to the Unmanifest.

Joyce adheres to the belief that God is spiritual unmanifest Omniscient Compassionate and Eternal. Temporal sentient life is not damned but mortal as a consequence of Life's evolutions (of unconscious biological survival, conscious "racing competitive" social, contemplative aspirational personal) through time. Our enlightened existential angst as mortal sentient beings living in a manifest reality of dualities (of loves/attachments and wars/engagements, *C/d/eE) with the capacity of self-reflection (observed/observer) gives us the freedom to choose or create our personal dharma (HCE's tavern, community and partner) and our individual interdependent karmic path within (our universe's) Tree of Life while subject to the Stone of (our universe's) Law. Joyce affirmatively honor's sexual relationships and procreation as an expression of love (Transcendence & Immanence) via Sophology and Altruism and existential duty. Our existential balance (for ourselves and our chosen partners) of: material/manifest pursuits (possible riches) and spiritual/unmanifest pursuits (possible Nirvanas) can follow either extreme; though Joyce prefers the sexually balanced/oscillating HCE/Antonius (evolves through Tamas/Rajas interactions) and ALP/observed/observer (evolving self-knowledge).

Joyce like all seers/artists/creators/prophets built FW "letter by letter", as a painter lays down "layer upon layer of paint" building a work/mandala. As a reader, one must recognize what one is looking at and what the work/mandala reveals, because even the creator relinquishes control of their creation as a mother relinquishes a child. FW is an archaeological site, Joyce came back to each page hundreds or thousands of times over two decades: looking down upon a page is looking through dozens or hundreds of layers of strata, or like looking to see the center of an onion through its dozens of layers. How can one read such a complex work with its metaphors covering the expanse of historical time, human languages and marks/sounds? Two methods are common: 1) forensically dissecting each word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, passage, etc., or 2) one can reread a passage, chapter, or the book many times each time uncovering new personal insights/revelations; I am sure Joyce intended both. Like a fabric (or a mirror) FW has thousands of threads/reflections, some treads/thoughts last just one word or one phrase; however, there is a thread/thought that runs through each chapter, and there is one thread that runs through the entire book.

JCB

Nirvanic FINNEGANS WAKE: James Joyce's West/East RevelationJoyce, man of Letters, fluent in Languages, Traveler in circles high and low and places near and far, Scholar of knowledge, Prophet to Mankind. Aspirationally Joyce has thrown all Mankind's manifest gods/deities/idols into FW, reading FW is like circumambulating the Kaaba's 360 idols, each reader/critic will find their own manifest god and if enlightened (a Bodhisattva's perspective) move on to the Unmanifest. Joyce rewrites 3 chapters of Ulysses: When He is denied Her front door, He is in Hell (on earth), when released (from Hell) His odyssey to Her begins again (with His ever-present accompanying internal travails) for She always knows when He is worthy of Her acceptance (their Paradise).

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with a half sentence 'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the' FW's first words 'riverrun,...', Ganga's river of Unmanifest spiritual life/consciousness.

1) FW's "book I:1" Finnegan passes his baton his place in the fabric/river of manifest consciousness (loves/attachments and wars/engagements) to his successor HCE/Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (fallen Russian General's void is filled by his battlefield promoted daytime successor) now present in manifest time with his particular past; while ALP/Anna Livia Plurabelle emerges from Dublin's local museum/history as the Muse to gather from the past for her future/family. The parents (HCE & ALP) are the new "present anchored by their particular pasts" in FW.

After 4 billion years of biological evolution, Here we are!, well, Where are we?, and, How did we come about? Our individual particular consciousness has been inherited from the past (a temporal space in an expanding consciousness), and, Biological evolution has divided us by sex (which induces Social evolution) to procreate offspring to fill our temporal consciousness when we expire/"exhausted consciousness":

I:1 A Dublin wake for Finnegan, Irish archaeological history: museum of manifest-violence/self-interest (all's fair in [the dualities of] love/attachments and war/engagements) from the smoldering battlefield: hailing music enters our eternal cast, and aeonic battle of Mutt (native) and Jute (invader, Augustine's MaMaLuJo/verjuice), an evolutionary tale of Radha's/ALP's & Krishna's/HCE's joyful love dance: enter the spurned wanting Prankquean/ALP and presaged children and disembarking male/HCE; I:2 HCE walks home through Phoenix Park accosted for the time of day by a recidivist Cad/curse, which is understood by HCE as an attack on his existentiality; I:3 The memorialized attack 'The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly' is sung through time mocking HCE/man's mortality/curse and man's failings with the "opposite sex" (women's scorns/curse can drive men to ruin); HCE (the previous evening) played hooky at a Fair, got into a scuffle/curse with *Rajas/Tamas over *Maya/Thaya, consequentially drunken HCE/*Sattvas was unable to open his front gate and was arrested for disturbances, in jail an American from behind bars hurls insults at him; I:4 HCE ponders returning to ALP (or alternatives), ALP visits HCE in the guardroom which lifts his spirits before he testifies in front of a judge and jury that he is innocent, he is released to ALP to tell his story to his children, as their community has a story to tell about him.
*sexuality of Two Girls (M/T, o/o): Maya (Thaya's reflection, observed/observer) and Three Soldiers (T/R/S - C/d/eE): Tamas/Creations (Caseous/Brahma), Rajas/destructions (Burrus/Shiva), Sattvas/evolving Equilibrium (Antonius/Visnu)

I:5 ALP's letter (Brown/masculine Nolan/feminine, the thoughts we live by, define us, ultimately our undoing), ALP is HCE's harbor/elixir, she is the world from which his life evolves, her dharma is the FW letter: ALP's/HCE's philosophical/spiritual shared understandings of West/East Christianity/Tibetian Dzogchen; I:6 ALP's letter/dharma informs their family, a parable: a hubric Mookse confined to a manifest-perspective of life would extinguish mankind's spirituality, while the spiritual Gripes' Unmanifest-devotions cannot exist but in the duality of manifestation, consequentially stasis: the Mookse's existential angst of manifestation, the Gripes' material poverty of spiritual karma, and Nuvoletta's inability to attract either man (though preferring/searching for one with both qualities); I:7 Shem his mother's son will aspire to ALP's artistic nature as a revealer (Mercy not Justice) of the prophesies that inform dharma/letters; I:8 Two gossiping washerwomen tell of how ALP captured her soulmate HCE and prepared her family nest.

2) FW's "book II" (Vico's aristocratic) devotes itself to HCE & ALP's children: Shaun (extrovert, man of the world, stasis/space - Sartre's Being, loved) carrier of the FW letter (cleric of "church"), Shem (introvert, artist, change/time - Sartre's Nothingness, loves) revealer of the FW letter (prophet), and Issy/Iseult (nature's direction) gatherer and composer of letters. The children are the evolving "present future" of FW.

Biological and Social evolution engenders parental responsibilities, to successful offspring (brother's battle: Shaun in accord and Shem in conflict with local Dharma) who will inherit and evolve their Own individual particular temporal consciousness within their local deity's dharma/community (atmosphere, fog mist and dew of MaMaLuJo/Augustine's dharmapala); MaMaLuJo's donkey (relic/men's vestige) like Bloom's 'shrivelled potato' (Ulysses ch Circes); the children aspiring to their own godhood will experience their falls (as HCE/ALP have); after their dismemberment (but before the end/restart) they will dream of what might have been (not their current life) but when they were young, when love was young:

II:1 Shem, Shaun and Issy play along the vico in front of the family tavern over 3 time periods (trials: young children, pre-college and young adults): each trial to chose/attach/accept a mate, Shaun (Being) is always successful while Shem (Nothingness) fails/curse each time, Shem will live is his community as a celibate buddha; II:2 Shem, Shaun and Issy's school lessons: which they intuitively understand (their parent's West/East Christianity/Tibetian Dzogchen/dharma) while rejecting the Western constructs of an imposed Mosaic damnation/curse: there is no purgatory ("personal differentiated" coercive/social Metempsychosis) only the dualities of the manifest evolutionary battles of War (Shaun's battle pictures) & Love (Issy's mirror) and the Unmanifest (Shem's prophecies), with this foundational understanding: the children's remaining lessons comprise explanations/elucidations of the dualities learned from the history of knowledge, Kev/Patrick/Shaun blackens/curse Dolph's/Buckley's/Shem's eye, Issy writes letters, Nightletter: the children's Unmanifest-informed karmic individual/interdependent intellectual lives will move forward into the future.

II:3 Shaun, Shem and Issy grow up in HCE's Patagoreyan tavern/ship, a dithyrambic Establishment of eating, drinking, and storytelling, a "free and open discussion of ideas": from morality to death, back to life marriage and fruition, a life summarized in a wake, constrained by dharma, HCE's & ALP's courtship: Ana/tailor's daughter and her beau Kersse/curse are introduced, NC/Norweeger's capstan/HCE arrives by sea/ship to meet his mate/tailor's daughter/ALP, throw off the curse of Persse O'Reilly (bachelorhood), and seek public judgment for his life lived: the story/retelling of the NC's/Norweeger's capstan's/HCE captured by Ana/ALP takes place over 3 rounds: 1) for a “suit of clothes”/match (the vacancy of Finnegan, who's deadly scaffolding fall has opened "consciousness space" for HCE to take Ana), NC/HCE meets Kersse/curse (whom he will displace) and absconds with the suit of clothes (Ana's favors), 2) HCE/Burniface to have his "tastes satisfied" with food and refreshments, NC/HCE converses with 3 tailors: Swift's 3 interpretations of Augustine's dharma, 3) "to marry" while Ashe Junior (Kerrse/curse) sinks into delinquent recidivism, NC's/HCE's cursed/bachelorhood broken by Ana/ALP, HCE married into ALP's Dzogchen/dharma and honeymooned, ALP/Kate asks HCE to bed and to see their children tucked in, ALP's nightly toilet, HCE downstairs is asked by his customers to recite his 'tale of a tublin': Christ's/HCE's message lived (curse of Persse thrown off, "innocents reborn") NC/HCE's disentangled Western manifestations of Dharma (Swift's documentation of the misinterpretations by the churches of Rome, England & Puritanism of Christ's spiritual message), the second/spiritual-rebirth: Radha's/ALP's & Krishna's/HCE's joyful "love dance/Rasa lila"; a vaudeville radio pair of commentating observers Butt & Taff are telling the story of 'how Buckley shot the Russian General' during the Crimean War, fought over for the key/"Christian interpretations" of West (England) vs East (Russia), the Russian General defiling the "sacred battle field", consequently shot by Buckley while defecating, summarily: the spiritual Unmanifest pure (imbued Buckley) shot the corrupted feckless manifest defecator (ossified/concretized irredeemable/authoritarian) Russian General/curse (Tunc, He is redeemed of demiurgic dogma Who is sick of manifest dogma), customers life-affirming popular disruptive/justice joy, to restart an new aeon tock-tick; Christ-like now HCE sympathetically asks his patrons for compassion in understanding the imperfect Russian General who "knows not what he does", his customers now turning on him (curse) for defending/identifying with the Russian General looking for faults in HCE's life, HCE responds with a defensive self-deprecating apologia, HCE attempts to empty his tavern/ship, his patrons: an angry Shellian mob of townsfolks singing HCE's demise and reviewing all sorts of potential actions to erase him (and his memory) from existence, HCE's renascence/manifestations escape their jeremiad: He maintains "holds onto" His key to Her front door: each day he opens and "pours forth" his soul in serving/enlightening his guests/patrons (while being commercially compensated), he is intoxicated by their daily intercourse, now that they have left he moves about his tavern consuming that which they have left behind, drinking up until collapsing into dream sleep; II:4 HCE asleep on the floor dreams/meditates of his (children's collegiate future/their self-enlightenment) transferred familial/romantic love, the tale of the interrelationships between King Mark/HCE, Tristram/Shaun (and Shem/Morholt) and the two Iseults (Queen ALP wife/mother and Princess daughter).

3) FW's "book III" (Vico's democratic) devotes itself to "what will be of" HCE & ALP's children, the baton will be passed on (again) from HCE & ALP to: Shaun, Shem and Issy. The children's "influences upon the world" is the "future generation" (presently unknowable) of FW.

Instructing parents can guide their children beyond their local deity's dharma (MaMaLuJo/Augustine's dharmapala, manifest mandala) to the spiritual Unmanifest - evolving from Gautama to Buddha to Bodhisattva:

III:1 HCE rises from the tavern floor to go upstairs to bed with ALP, he dreams of (his desired children's future adulthood): Shaun's unfolding career carrying the family dharma/letter forward and a familiar children's fable: The Ant, the Grasshopper, and the girls, HCE's first gifted epiphany: could Shaun create a better world (Voltaire: the best of all possible worlds), FW letter carried by Shaun from his child's ship (a barrel, Hinayana), Shaun's initial apostasy (curse): his notions/thoughts of a better world collapse/vanish; III:2 HCE (Vajrayana-life lived) dreams of gifting Shaun of a more hopeful future: "one cannot change the reality of manifest duality", compassionate mature Shaun restarts (second coming) his road/path as Juan with (little boat, Hinayana) knowledge, before his sister Issy and her 28 playmates, Shaun's path/fate lies within Issy's childhood song/dharma/letter, Shaun travels his postman's rounds (proselytizing); Issy/Iseult's enlightened response (womanhood) to Shaun's manifest teachings: her sexual/men relationships are her transferences (Maya/Thaya, of her relationship with her reflection in a mirror) onto men, she will be open/accept her husband's manifest karma (departing Shaun's Shem-imbued manifestations) yet remain true to the Unmanifest (accepting Shem's/Dave's Eastern enlightened paraclete/Bhikkhu guidance beyond manifestation) through marriage and family life; III:3 HCE dreams of his life's enduring "sins of the father" on his children's future of his FW gifted, Shaun/HCE evolves from 'Tir na nOg' through his life to a mortal ego terrified of participations/judgment (fear of Tamas/destructions), transcendent Yawn (his karmic duality choices, Unmanifest imbued), HCE's/Shaun's guilty secret is that he is a mortal/animal (our lot a karmic journey), Shaun's reflective triptych historic evolutionary hindsight: Christian Ireland (temple/mind), Celtic history (lips/love), primitive man; ALP's relationship with HCE is as an elixir/medicine, she raises his spirit, she blows up his existential angst, ALP defends his karmic choices and defends HCE from judgment and public scandal, ALP is mirrored by her daughter Issy whose evolving dharma: romantic storytelling of HCE/NC traversing the seas, releasing birds to find a safe harbor to marry and start their family, HCE's/NC's traveled to non-Mosaic countries/peoples interacting with spiritual peoples who were as interested in his manifestations as HCE was interested in their spirituality; a sage/observer at the 'masked ball' at 'Tailors' Hall' (preceding the consummation of marriage) witnesses HCE's introduction into ALP's community: a grooms' qualms and their union/nuisances assuaged, HCE's defensive/apologia, HCE is innocent/defended, his life virtuous; III:4 HCE's dreamtime breaks with a nightmare cry of Shem/Jerry, who interrupts his parent's sexuality (wetting his bed) ALP comforts Shem's manifest fears while HCE assuages his spiritual angst, ALP and HCE converse (transactional foreplay, trials and tribulations of familial loves and wars), ALP & HCE return to bed for late-night intercourse (unsuccessful spiritually, condom male orgasm), witnesses: maids/laundresses observers of bed sheets (sex gossip, Tree of Life) washed in the river (of Ganga consciousness) and 'Patrolman Seekersenn' observes local happenings (Stone of Law), d) ALP's female orgasm (4) and a nap.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with ALP's & HCE's lovemaking dissolution dream/meditation. Joycean Nirvana is attained by ALP (via Dzogchen Togal: cosmic-awareness, dissolving manifest bodies, a "meditation on union", dissolving observer/selves) becoming "all that is" and HCE (via Dzogchen Trekcho: transcending all defilements and fixations, beyond karma, existence and thoughts) beyond selves (all dualistic polarities) realizing Non-duality/enlightenment, unification (Yab-Yum) so that their rainbow bodies are realized with the Unmanifest (Creation, Incarnate conception and Reincarnation) the baton has been passed on again.

Eternal Tree of sentient life (time/consciousness-compassion) and Immutable stone (matter-space/law), 'Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat!', Should we Aspire? Aspire to what? To that which manifested consciousness, Unmanifest mandala:

IV:a Expectant manifestation: ALP's & HCE's converging Togal & Trekcho divine union/acceptance: the night has passed (all dissolves), calling all spirits (of the Unmanifest) to manifestation, rain mist and dew of our Dublin's manifest world, morning light (from the darkness of night), observer of Dublin's morning (light rays), our couple HCE and ALP, between unconsciousness and consciousness (past and present), the Lotus blooms (sunrise), transcendent joy (bliss) expectant conception, Garden with stone and water pool a Christ/Krishna (Saint Kevin, Brahma) the first fruit expectant (womb of night/day) expectant conception/birth, transmigration of "funeral space"/rites expectant conception illuminated by light (Lotus blooms, a new aeon begins), baptism of Grace (expectant spiritual/birth), expectant conception/growth in ALP's expectant womb. IV:b Duality: Battle of Bulkily/Archdruid (druidical sage/night, Unmanifest spiritual) vs St. Patrick (saint/day, manifest deities/idols) tick-tock, commenting Muta (native didicism) and Juva (invading docetism) observe Mankind's existential struggle, Finn (Exuber High Ober King Leary) overseeing the tick-tock of time, Balkelly argues that the “manifestation of Life is informed by the Unmanifest” while Patrick replies that “reality is manifestation severed from spirituality”: 'Thud [manifestation]', waking daily (consciousness) to an evolving reordered world (actors slightly changed/ing), a precarious manifest tower of babel. IV:c Non-Dual guide: "Revered Letter" (FW, Joyce's West/East Tibetan Buddhist bardos), a road/path/vico to our eternal compassionate wisdom consciousness/spiritual (manifest/Unmanifest) 'fuitfiat', FW Letter: manifestation in Dublin, HCE's baptism of Grace (spiritual/second-birth), HCE's unavoidable oppositions (kleshas), and HCE's battles (karma/history, evolution), ALP/Muse of the FW letter (Joycean Dzogchen), ALP's ability to free (heal/medicine) HCE of existential angst, her history, family and children (Shem, Shaun & Issy), Funeral rites (transmigration of consciousness space), scandal of Mosaic damned mortality; the FW letter exists for each individual to realize the dualities of the manifest and the spiritual. IV:d Moksha revelation: ALP's & HCE's conceiving "Anandamaya kosha/Yab-Yum" (Creation, Incarnate conception and Reincarnation), to end/restart again, Shiva's trident ending an aeonic world: 'Save me from those therrble prongs! [curse]' in Ganga's river of Unmanifest undifferentiated spiritual/sentient life/consciousness (excluded "Book of dead/Purgatory": absent Dharma's "personal differentiated" coercive/social Metempsychosis) transcending all Demiurges of good [Gods] and evil [Devils]).

Joyce schooled in Christian Jesuit metaphysics (pushed down into the "mindfulness" of human consciousness) breathes in the "spirit" of expansive Celtic (Irish) democratic community tavern life where man's stories of life are told. HCE's evolving karma momentum/inertia (whirling dervish/ecstasy, enlightening like an evolving manifest Bodhisattva) cycling daily *(T/R/S - C/d/eE) through manifest travails (unlike Bloom's terminus, Ulysses ch Penelope) to guide his family to revelations of Joys (Nirvana) and mitigations of Sufferings (Samsara) while ALP's enlightenments/karma evolves similarly through daily circulations *(M/T - o/o) from drudge travails to Divine inspirations (unlike Molly's terminus from whore to Goddess). The innocent infant (Krishna/HCE, "all infants are blessings") who evolves/becomes the Norwegian Captain (Krishna, HCE) who is occasionally defensively lethal (defender's-perspective, Buckley/Shiva, HCE), who is concretized (Brahma/portly HCE, wholesome middle-class/bourgeois civic-minded Porters, HCE & ALP) by community family life (dharma/MaMaLuJo, ainsoph/verjuice, sour grapes) - through spirits/drink HCE accesses his spirituality/dreams and through spiritual (cutting through) love-making with ALP (direct approach) they access their Krishnas (Radha & Krishna), unification with the Unmanifest.

Joyce's FW message: Christian/Buddhist "Omniscient Compassion" (Christ/Krishna) is eternally joyful and recirculating. Unmanifest "spiritual" God (Visnu) is "Omniscient Compassionate Eternal". Manifest universes consist of an evolving Equilibrium (Visnu), Creations (more Brahma) and Destructions (less Shiva) - Shiva is a temporal manifestation of "Visnu / Brahma oppositions'' whose destructions are manifest and cannot interact with the Unmanifest/Visnu. Affirmative family existentiality: life's biological evolution (sex), modern survival (money), constraining community (dharma, social evolution) are constantly assaulted by inescapable (recidivists and local dharmapalas, "know not what they do" / kleshas/Avidya) "aggressive insidious vile" corrupt soul(less/sucking) heinous/duplicitous ossified demonic antipathetic attacks. Joycean Nirvana is attained via the Christian/Buddhist affirmative middle way, karmic wisdom journey (not: temporal ends justifies reactive means, repeating defeatist lose-lose vortex) our individual/personally informed life of a Christ/Buddha. All Manifest gods are deities/idols (man's creations/symbols): only the Unmanifest (untouched by man) is affirmative by definition (our universe's reality: its matter, its laws & consciousness manifest). Manifest local ephemeral "a posteriori" astronomic (dispassionate violent) physics vs Unmanifest universal eternal inflating quantum (Maya/Thaya & Tamas/Rajas/Sattvas - observed/observer & Creations/destructions/evolving Equilibrium) physics. Evolving Brahma manifestations (creations) not imbued by the eternal Unmanifest are met with opposing force (destructions). Joyce returns Mankind to the evolving karmic path to the Unmanifest.

Joyce adheres to the belief that God is spiritual unmanifest Omniscient Compassionate and Eternal. Temporal sentient life is not damned but mortal as a consequence of Life's evolutions (of unconscious biological survival, conscious "racing competitive" social, contemplative aspirational personal) through time. Our enlightened existential angst as mortal sentient beings living in a manifest reality of dualities (of loves/attachments and wars/engagements, *C/d/eE) with the capacity of self-reflection (observed/observer) gives us the freedom to choose or create our personal dharma (HCE's tavern, community and partner) and our individual interdependent karmic path within (our universe's) Tree of Life while subject to the Stone of (our universe's) Law. Joyce affirmatively honor's sexual relationships and procreation as an expression of love (Transcendence & Immanence) via Sophology and Altruism and existential duty. Our existential balance (for ourselves and our chosen partners) of: material/manifest pursuits (possible riches) and spiritual/unmanifest pursuits (possible Nirvanas) can follow either extreme; though Joyce prefers the sexually balanced/oscillating HCE/Antonius (evolves through Tamas/Rajas interactions) and ALP/observed/observer (evolving self-knowledge).

Joyce like all seers/artists/creators/prophets built FW "letter by letter", as a painter lays down "layer upon layer of paint" building a work/mandala. As a reader, one must recognize what one is looking at and what the work/mandala reveals, because even the creator relinquishes control of their creation as a mother relinquishes a child. FW is an archaeological site, Joyce came back to each page hundreds or thousands of times over two decades: looking down upon a page is looking through dozens or hundreds of layers of strata, or like looking to see the center of an onion through its dozens of layers. How can one read such a complex work with its metaphors covering the expanse of historical time, human languages and marks/sounds? Two methods are common: 1) forensically dissecting each word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, passage, etc., or 2) one can reread a passage, chapter, or the book many times each time uncovering new personal insights/revelations; I am sure Joyce intended both. Like a fabric (or a mirror) FW has thousands of threads/reflections, some treads/thoughts last just one word or one phrase; however, there is a thread/thought that runs through each chapter, and there is one thread that runs through the entire book.

JCB

Strongly recommend getting the Kindle edition. Joyce's works are meant to be read and heard, and so with the Kindle you can have the reader (or an Echo) read the text to you. Like some of the reviews have mentioned, this is Joyce's attempt at putting the dreamworld into words, so I recommend listening every night before bed, as you drift off to sleep, at low volume. There was a passage today that woke me out of a nap (a string of the same word, I think it was job job job job ....). You won't understand this book in any way resembling how you understand and appreciate some of your other favorite books. Let the words just pass through your mind, try to enter that dreamstate that Joyce was in himself, and enjoy

Having been born in Dublin, ages ago, and enjoyed his 'Portrait of the Artist' and 'Ulysses', I did not appreciate this work of his. It suggests the momentous exercise of intellectual effort to convey SOMETHIG, but to WHOM.?
After reading some 10-12% I am not inclined to continue, even with Tindall's ' Readers' Guide'. Having actually lived in Dublin as long as Joyce himself did, but with a quite different background, it is hard for me to read anymore, except to tell myself, 'Never give up'.

the first translation of FW in the World, Philippe Lavergne was very young when he made it and told that he fell in love with that book and decided to translate it, I don’t know how many years this took him to achieve but he done a fabulous work even more hard being the first one to do it, the pioneer, sure FW is legendarily impossible to translate (even Joyce in his partial own translation in French had difficulties) but chapeau to Lavergne
coming back at the original text if you want to know about what really FW talks about here is the book Jack the Ripper James Joyce Stanley Kubrick: the real story and his identities

...Joyce oddiously was under urdress when he wrought this apict pome. She war a barmaid floodsea at a Dublin tub. Le francaise percie o'really gave Joyce a belt on the gob, said right me a story bout meself to show the boys back hoe, will ye, or you'z the bottomest blarney in Eire. Tip! Tip! Tippytoes! Thonder struck! You Big Bud Bugmaster Vinfindlander! Then numpty tim had a bawdy fall, all gang to Funagain's wack, whirl there'll be ye old earwigs on the greene, ear wags on the green! No toller man than he, that furagrain balcon climber. Indeed this be Joyce's mammaknowbesta, but "this is not language at any sinse of the world". Joyce sange a song of six pennies "the king was in his cornwall melking mark so murry, the queen was steep in armbour feeling fain and furry", fable of the "Ondt and the Gracehopper", cited Shakespeare "Rose Lankester and Blanche Yorke" "heigh hohse, our kindom from an orse!" and Nietzsche "Also Spuke Zerothrustor", so inretch yourself with this Ale of Man, like a loki afternoon in the bar, overbearing con versailleshunals of real men drinking "the wine that wakes the barley" og "cupturing the last dropes of summour down through their grooves of blarneying", sans doubte...

Joyce, man of Letters, fluent in Languages, Traveler in circles high and low and places near and far, Scholar of knowledge, Prophet to Mankind.

Joyce's Ulysses (is the story of a young man) whose framework is Homer's Odyssey: a tale of Modern-day Odysseus' personal existential/sexual quest overcoming his psychological internal travails (not Odysseus' external travails) affirming humanity (the fundamental family unit: the father, mother, son, and daughter). Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE (is the story of a mature man) whose framework is Giambattista Vico's "La Scienza Nuova's" 4 stages of history (cyclic): theocratic to aristocratic to democratic to chaos (followed by Joyce's God "thunderclap") which ends chaos and restarts the world again with theocracy.

Both FINNEGANS WAKE (FW) and Ulysses are situated in Dublin (Ireland) and though both books were written on the European continent, Joyce memorializes his birth home. FW is Joyce's continuation of Ulysses on a grander scale: Bloom becomes all-men (HCE) and Dublin becomes the World. Joyce's Ulysses (Bloom) is an energetic man hopping out of bed, plunging into the Dublin day, waging battles real and unreal, exhausted by controversy and rejuvenated by love (Molly). Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE (HCE) is man ever-living, man of all wisdom, man of all compassion, man of all understanding, man of all time - Joyce's FW protagonist is Finnegan, who (re)incarnates to HCE, who will (re)incarnate to Shem and Shaun.

Reading FW is entering the "mind of James Joyce", who for two decades labored on his masterwork - the mind of Joyce is the "library of mankind" he has reordered dictionaries, encyclopedias, and volumes of knowledge to reveal Mankind's thoughts, conscious and unconscious, in his masterwork. FW is a volume to be Read and Read again for 10,000 years.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with a half sentence "A away a lone a last a loved a long the" - the first words of FW is the second half of the sentence "riverrun,...".

1) The first chapter of FW's "book I" (Vico's theocratic) describes 1) Finnegan's fall, Joyce's God "thunderclap" restarting "book I" from ending "book IV" and 2) the transition from Finnegan (as protagonist) to HCE. The first 4 chapters of "book I" introduces readers to the protagonist HCE (and his many "names" and "attitudes") and the second 4 chapters of "book I" are devoted to HCE's wife ALP (and her many "names" and "attitudes"). Finnegan represents the "past", the place held by forefathers - forefathers with the wisdom of the history of all men and times. Finnegan passes his baton (his place in the fabric of the universe) to HCE now present in time with his particular past. The parents (HCE & ALP) are the "present anchored by their particular pasts" in FW.

- A Dublin wake for Finnegan (who falls, the past) and introduction of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE, the present). HCE's past and his shameful voyeuristic encounter in Phoenix Park (that may or may not have happened) and its memorialized retelling "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly". HCE is arrested (for late night disturbances at his tavern/home, unable to enter his front door just like Bloom in Ulysses), tried and jailed (for his own innocent protection from the public). HCE is resurrected from a metaphorical coffin (just like Bloom's underworld excursion in Ulysses ch Hades) and a revealing letter is introduced. Letter revealed from his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP, HCE's Muse), written by his son Shem (Joyce), appropriated by his twin brother Shaun is discussed. Analysis of the ALP letter and the informing parable of "The Mookse and The Gripes"(Shaun, Shem). Shem's nature, who shares ALP's attitudes. Two washerwoman gossip over ALP & HCE, and ALP's quashing of rumors of HCE.

2) FW's "book II" (Vico's aristocratic) devotes itself to HCE & ALP's children: Shaun (extrovert, man of the world - like Sartre's BEING in "Being and Nothingness"), Shem (introvert, artist - Sartre's NOTHINGNESS) and Iseult (daughter). The children are the "present future" of FW.

- Shaun (Chuff), Shem (Glugg) and Iseult play (children's world) in front of the family tavern/home games parodying their parents. Shaun (Kev), Shem (Dolph) and Iseult study their lessons (the past, adult world), Dolph antagonizes Kev who blackens Dolph's eye. HCE & ALP's children grow up (the present) in a raucous Feast of eating, drinking, storytelling, and a "free and open discussion of ideas" in the family (HCE) tavern, HCE's defends himself with a self-deprecating speech and latter his drunken collapse after the close. HCE asleep on the floor dreams of (his children's future) love, the tale of King Mark, Tristram and Iseult.

3) FW's "book III" (Vico's democratic) devotes itself to "what will be of" HCE & ALP's children's - the baton will be passed on (again) from HCE & ALP to: Shaun, Shem and Iseult (daughter). The children's "influences upon the world" is the "future generation" (presently unknowable) of FW.

- HCE rises from the tavern floor to go upstairs to bed with ALP, he dreams of (his desired) children's future and a prophetic Aesop's fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper" (Shaun, Shem). HCE dreams (of a more realistic future) of Shaun (Juan) sermonizing before his daughter Iseult and her 28 playmates and designates Shem (Dave) as Shaun's paraclete. HCE dreams (of his life's impact on his children's future) of Shaun's (Yawn) inherited "sins of the father" prosecuted by Four Old Inquisitors (MaMaLuJo). HCE's dreamtime breaks at the nightmare cry of Shem (Jerry, who is not forgotten by his father in "book III"), once Shem is comforted, HCE & ALP return to bed for late-night lovemaking (unsuccessful spiritually) and a nap.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with HCE & ALP's dissolution - awaiting Joyce's God "thunderclap" at the beginning of FW's "book I". A supposition may be made that Joycean Nirvana is attained by HCE (via Dzogchen Trekchö) and ALP (via Dzogchen Tögal) - realizing the heart of enlightenment in the present moment, transcending all defilements and fixations (beyond all dualistic polarities) so that their rainbow bodies are realized, unification with the Unmanifest (creation, incarnate conception) and Reincarnation (the baton has been passed on again).

- The night has passed, the morning arises, and all dissolves to restart again...

The shameful voyeuristic encounter in Phoenix Park ("book I ch 2", "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly") is Bloom’s major transgressions against his marriage bed (Ulysses ch Nausicaa) with Gerty McDowell who revealed herself to Bloom "she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent . . . she leaned back ever so far...she let him and she saw that he saw...because he couldn’t resists the sight of the wondrous revealment...looking and he kept on looking, looking...a sigh of o! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures..."(366-67), Bloom acknowledges “Still it was a kind of language between us.”(372) and "look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you’re a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming; legs...Wonder how is she feeling in that region... (373-4). Joyce acknowledges that the "revealment" has activated Bloom. That which cannot be "recorded" (physical occurrences: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch... in time and space) are Mankind's "unrecorded human thoughts and dreams". Joyce established in Ulysses "his revelations" of mankind's hitherto unrecorded conscious and unconscious "thoughts and dreams".

The Letter is all-letters, the "writings of all mankind", as well as, Joyce's body of work (Ulysses, FINNEGANS WAKE) - the "thoughts and dreams" of all Mankind. Joyce has a "historically traditional revelation" of the relationship between the sexes: "women activate men" (Gerty McDowell, Molly, ALP, etc.), men provide content, and women are the Muses (and repositories) of Mankind's "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip". Consequently, "the letter" is within ALP's repository and she is the Muse of the letter(s) - just as Picasso' women were his Muses. (Men) Joyce (and Shem) don't create letters they "reveal letters" from Mankind's collective consciousness (and unconsciousness).

Evolution of Everyman: every man will aspire to godhood during their lifetime, as Icarus flew too close to the sun, every man will aspire to dominate their profession (Joyce in writing FW) or dominate the world of men (Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, Russian tsars, etc.) yet they will fall, taken down by someone, "how Buckley shot the Russian General". The children: Shaun, Shem and Iseult will evolve (in book II) from children's games parodying their parents; to youngsters studying their forefather's past lessons; to adults participating in the "rustle bustle" of present life, aspiring to their own godhood (as HCE has), yet they too will experience the fall (dismembered by those around them); after the fall (but before the end/restart) they will dream of what might have been (not their current life) but when they were young, and when love was young.

Dreams: HCE dreams of how he may influence his children's loves (book II ch 4); HCE dreams of how his children's future may be an extension of his life (book III ch 1); HCE dreams of how his children's future may be influenced by his parenting (book III ch 2); HCE dreams of how he has prepared his children to defend themselves from their family inheritances (book III ch 3); HCE (& ALP) dream of the past dissolving and the new day arising (book IV).

Possible Timeline, if Joyce intended "HCE day" similar to "Bloomsday" (roughly 24 hrs)': HCE arrested in front of his tavern/home (unable to enter his front door, like Bloom in Ulysses) for disturbances in hours before dawn (I:3); HCE's conscious/awake or unconscious/dream psychological travails of past guilts (underworld coffin, Ulysses ch Hades) while incarcerated in the early hours of morning (I:4); HCE walks home through Phoenix Park accosted for the time of day (12 noon) which threatens (real/unreal memories, Ulysses ch Nausicaa) his innocent well-being (I:2). Finnegan's afternoon wake at HCE's tavern (1:1); inside HCE's tavern his patrons talk about his family, truthful (letters) and fabricated stories (I:5-8 and II:3); while the children (Shaun, Shem and Iseult) are in and out of the family tavern/home all day taking their lessons (II:2) and playing about with their friends (II:1); HCE, as proprietor, defends himself with a self-deprecating speech before his drunken late night collapse (II:3). HCE dreams on his tavern floor (II:4); then dreams in his bed (III:1-3); before lovemaking with his wife ALP (III:4); and HCE & ALP's dissolution dream (IV) to awaken to a new day.

Joycean Nirvana lies on the surface of FW's text (mandala, available to all) - excavating below the surface of the text reveals the arguments that support the Nirvana (present mindfulness) and refutes all institutional dogma and authoritarian oppression. Joyce reveals what may be Dzogchen "Father Tantras" or "Maha Yoga" (in book I, ch 1-4); Dzogchen "Mother Tantras" or "Anu Yoga" (in book I, ch 5-8); while identifying Shem as receptive to "Ati Yoga" or Non-Dual Tantras (Tiberiast Duplex, in book I, ch 6); the answer to the Riddle(s) the "Tiberiast Duplex" is Shem (Joyce) who is the Enlightened One. A supposition may be made that: the Children learn in "book II" Dzogchen Semde (Mind Series) self-knowledge (awareness) and Dzogchen Longde (Space Series) evolution-knowledge (primordial wisdom, rigpa); and that HCE intends (dreams) in "book III" to impart Dzogchen Mannagde (Secret Instruction Series) Self-Liberation-knowledge to his Children.

What does it all Mean: Joyce's gift to Mankind is that Life recirculates. Unlike Joyce's Ulysses (based on Homer's Odyssey) life does not end with woman (in Molly's bed): night passes, the morning arises, and all dissolves to recirculate and restart again - some actors leave the stage and are replaced / (re)incarnated by a "younger version of their former self". Joyce changes from Ulysses by using Giambattista Vico's framework of recirculation for FINNEGANS WAKE - Finnegan (re)incarnates to HCE, as Shaun (most like HCE) will largely be a (re)incarnation of HCE, Shem (most like ALP) will (re)incarnate some of HCE but also some of ALP, and Iseult will largely be a (re)incarnation of ALP - however, Iseult will choose a man much like HCE (who is (re)incarnated through his daughter) as Shaun will choose a woman much like ALP - while Shem may become the next Joyce. FW is the "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip" of all Mankind.

FW is aural (oral) history like Homer's Odessey and Celtic folktales - when one pronounces (phonology) FW's words (aloud) there are more languages than just English; also, when one reads (morphology) FW's words almost all the words are "portmanteaus / neologisms" which gives each of FW's "polysynthetic words" many meanings (impermanence, Heisenberg uncertainty), each FW sentence dozens of possible messages, each FW paragraph hundreds of possible readings, Joyce's rendering of a more expansive English language and multiplicating universal book with coalescing syncretic themes/stories (that responds to each reader's inquiries). Joyce schooled in Christian Jesuit metaphysics (pushed down into the mindfulness of human consciousness) breathes in the spirit of expansive Celtic (Irish) community tavern life where man's stories of life are told. Tavern life teaches the evolution of Joyce's ten God "thunderclaps" (one hundred lettered words) pushing man's evolution forward from cave man's tales to modern tv media tales. Inside the tavern man learns of the purely human (animal) fall, taken down by another human(s) - like animal taken down on the African savanna. A granular reading of FW can render FW as an updated John Milton's Paradise Lost (regurgitated knowledge from the tree, to affirm man's damnation); however, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859 and Joyce in FW book II clearly walks Shaun, Shem and Iseult through their earthly evolutionary lifetime travails. Every page of FW speaks to man's evolution and to Life recirculating (West meets Dzogchen East a "meeting of metaphysical minds") that binds humanity together into the future. Dzogchen (beyond all dualistic polarities) the heart of human consciousness - Joyce's underlying (subcutaneous) arguments refute the "Western curse of metaphysical/mythological damnation", the curse does not exist in the Eastern mind. Like "counting the number of angels on the head of a pin" (Aquinas 1270) Joyce provides a granular reading of FW as a "defense against all Western adversity" for our conscious and unconscious Western travails. HCE's angst is caused by his community that imposes a Western curse (damnation) upon him that man is not guilty of. To experience Joycean Nirvana, a defense against this man-made guilt is required - for as Zoroaster revealed cosmogonic dualism, evil is mixed with good in man's everyday (universal) travails (even the Dalai Lama must defend Nirvana rigorously from the most populous authoritarian state in human history).

Joyce's FW celebrates the (Joys of) Christian (Krishna, Shem) diversity of humanity (expansiveness of human consciousness, Gnostic Norwegian Captain, Archdruid), Brahma (Finnegan, HCE, Shaun, etc...), Divine Women (ALP, Iseult, etc...), his family - (and the Sufferings of) the inescapable "evil" of Shiva (Buckley), the debilitating harmful sterile authoritarian institutionalizing damnation (MaMaLuJo, St. Patrick) by Augustine, the manufactured clerical corruption identified by Luther (since 367 AD) and the burdens of "survival of the fittest" anxiety (modern commerce) met with a Dzogchen Buddhist stance. The (innocent infant) Norwegian Captain (Krishna, HCE), occasionally defensive (Shiva, HCE), though concretized (Brahma, HCE) by community family life (MaMaLuJo) - through spirits (drink) HCE can access his spirituality (dreams) and through spiritual (cutting through) love-making with ALP (direct approach) can access (their Krishnas) unification with the Unmanifest. Joyce was a Prophet who consumed Man's conscious and unconscious "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip", efforts and failings - to reveal the joys and sufferings of Mankind.

JCB

Was FINNEGAN'S WAKE written as an experimental novel, or as a literary prose mutation? Not knowing the literary terra incognita ahead, I approached my commitment to the understanding of this book as a trek through a vast poetic jungle, with much hacking through the vines of allusion & wordplay.

This is Joyce's "night book", a prodigious grabbag of allegory, history, literary allusion, and amalgamated word-alchemy. The words are fused & outright disfigured in order to assemble this pastiche, this mulligan stew, of seemingly unrelated ideas; the loops & pivots of the prose weave through many many puns, allusions and strange coinages.

Without bothering to find and focus upon a plot, I felt at times I was bodysurfing though some very choppy poetic surf. Of course, there is a vague cyclical storyline in this convoluted book: the tale of HCE & his family life in Dublin etc. For the reader who insists upon a traditional story structure ... well, you can forget about finding much more than vague patterns amidst the seeming absurdities of the text.

Joyce incorporated some of the text of FINNEGAN'S WAKE from listening to his schizophrenic daughter Lucia as she slowly lost her sanity. He composed this book as a leap through the subconscious imagination of mankind, with attention to all our collective guilt, conflict, love and fear. This book may be the quantum physics of modern literature ...

For me, it took the better part of 5 months to plow though this book. I had just come off a harrowing 3 months of aggressive chemo and major surgery, and was looking for ways to heal up. As strange as it may sound, the unintelligibleness of FINNEGAN'S WAKE helped to restore me back to a healthy life. By the power of poetic prose, my mind was occupied while the rest of me was allowed to heal up. I can say both literally, and figuratively, that James Joyce helped me gain back my life.

For a sample reading of this text, I recommend you find James Joyce on Myspace and listen to the clip where he reads the Anna Livia Plurabella chapter of FW; the spoken dream of the collective unconscious, the rhythmic cadence of Joyce's voice, all show the way to the endless cycling of the eternal ...

Most highly recommended.

Parataxis

The Cloud Reckoner

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

Should you buy James Joyce's Finnegans Wake? Three reasons for getting to yes, she said, yes, yes, yes.

1: An incredible value. You probably will be reading it delightedly if it is at all your cuppa, for at least the next forty years and at about $7, that's a bargain. Other books may be one-night gulps; this, like Shakespeare, will be pleasure and a joy as long as you can read. One can hardly better the per-word, per-page, per-year return on a $7 investment.

Or at least, so suggests Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who tells us he named the subatomic entity he discovered as he was "again perusing "Finnegans Wake" and happened on the section which included the poemlet beginning, "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Joyce might have been delighted to know that uniquely among subatomic entities, quarks come in flavors: up, down, top, bottom, charmed, and strange.

2. Like "Ulysses," which it closely resembles, "Finnegans Wake" is affirmative, gloriously, magnificently, strangely, honorably affirmative. Both books echo enduring, complex mythic figures----the Greek/Homeric Odysseus the man of many guises, the wanderer, and the Irish warrior, Finn McCool, who sleeps beneath a faery hill to waken again in Ireland's time of need. Both deeply reflect cycles: Ulysses, the cycle of a day (June 16th) and Finnegans Wake, night, sleep, the cycles of life itself and of the great rivers of place, space, and time. Both center, more or less, on the consciousness/unconsciousness of a single character---Bloom in Ulysses and Humphrey Chimpdon Earwicker (HCE) in the Wake. Both begin with sexuality (plump stately Buck Mulligan in Ulysses who is buck naked in the first sentence and the great river Liffey flowing past Eve and Adams in the Wake.) And both---oh the joy of reading this aloud, end in long soliloquies by women: Molly Bloom's glorious cascade ending in yes, she said, yes, yes, yes and Anna Livia Pluribell's glorious call to the land, its people, and her spouse--comatose? sleeping?---to arise, awake, renew, begin again, wake again, Finnegan in The Wake.

Achieving such affirmation seems an almost unbelievable stance at the end of Joyce's difficult life---almost blind, poor, his daughter insane, 20 years spent in writing the Wake--and it is not an affirmation glibly reached. Night, dreams (whose we don't sknow for sure, perhaps many dreamers), and in that sleep of almost death what dreams may come? One wants to stand to read the last section, like at the Hallelujah chorus.

3. The sheer magnificence, creativity, erudition, knowledge of the language; the playfulness like Lewis Carroll unshackled; the flow of thought, ideas, layerings. The flamboyance of langguage, all flags flying, all sails set.

If you delight in crossword puzzles, if you like reading Jabberwocky in as many languages as you can, if you think Hofstader's The Eternal Golden Braid a delight, and are not among those to whom A. E.Housman says, Ale, boys, that's the thing to drink for people whom it hurts to think"---you will find almost unlimited puzzlement and joy in every page.

Take---as an example, even that first reference to Eve and Adams. Well it was an actual pub situated near the ocean end of the Liffey; its' name suggests the Fall of Man with Eve as the instigator who, as Milton writes contributes in the end to our redemption. This first sentence about the river flowing in a commodius viscus around Howth Castle & Environs (it does) suggests too the publican (barkeep) whose initials are named in this first sentence, HCE, and who may represent the legendary Irish policeman, Here Comes Everyone. And the sentence begins in its middle, the start arriving many pages later, at the very end----only it isn't an end, but a cycle, a continuation.

Getting if need be to no. There are a few reasons NOT to buy this book. We are--or at least I am--more accustomed to novels telling stories be they happy or sad, complex or simple. This one tells many stories in fragments and complexes interweaving not only the story of the warrior Finn but also the Irish ballad, Finnegan's Wake, in which again in the Fall of Man, the tippling (and tipping) hod-carrier Tim Finnegan tumbles off a ladder, appears dead, is wildlythe waked, and revived when whiskey gets tossed on the apparent corpse. So one can get bored or exhausted by just a sentence. Impatient. One can feel too ignorant to understand even a little since Joyce wanders among Sanskrit, Greek, French, German, Old Icelandic languages as well as local sayings, great and more obscure literature. Enough already, one can feel.

None-the-less, if Murray Gell-Mann returns like Finnegans over and over and over, well, perhaps so can we. And have fun-again discovering those three quarks (quarts? seagull cries?) ourselves.

Oh: which edition? This one uses the original as published. One of my other copies uses the edition Joyce corrected himself over two years. Both are wonders, but this one is about $30 cheaper at present.

Joyce, man of Letters, fluent in Languages, Traveler in circles high and low and places near and far, Scholar of knowledge, Prophet to Mankind.

Joyce's Ulysses (is the story of a young man) whose framework is Homer's Odyssey: a tale of Modern-day Odysseus' personal existential/sexual quest overcoming his psychological internal travails (not Odysseus' external travails) affirming humanity (the fundamental family unit: the father, mother, son, and daughter). Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE (is the story of a mature man) whose framework is Giambattista Vico's "La Scienza Nuova's" 4 stages of history (cyclic): theocratic to aristocratic to democratic to chaos (followed by Joyce's God "thunderclap") which ends chaos and restarts the world again with theocracy.

Both FINNEGANS WAKE (FW) and Ulysses are situated in Dublin (Ireland) and though both books were written on the European continent, Joyce memorializes his birth home. FW is Joyce's continuation of Ulysses on a grander scale: Bloom becomes all-men (HCE) and Dublin becomes the World. Joyce's Ulysses (Bloom) is an energetic man hopping out of bed, plunging into the Dublin day, waging battles real and unreal, exhausted by controversy and rejuvenated by love (Molly). Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE (HCE) is man ever-living, man of all wisdom, man of all compassion, man of all understanding, man of all time - Joyce's FW protagonist is Finnegan, who (re)incarnates to HCE, who will (re)incarnate to Shem and Shaun.

Reading FW is entering the "mind of James Joyce", who for two decades labored on his masterwork - the mind of Joyce is the "library of mankind" he has reordered dictionaries, encyclopedias, and volumes of knowledge to reveal Mankind's thoughts, conscious and unconscious, in his masterwork. FW is a volume to be Read and Read again for 10,000 years.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with a half sentence "A away a lone a last a loved a long the" - the first words of FW is the second half of the sentence "riverrun,...".

1) The first chapter of FW's "book I" (Vico's theocratic) describes 1) Finnegan's fall, Joyce's God "thunderclap" restarting "book I" from ending "book IV" and 2) the transition from Finnegan (as protagonist) to HCE. The first 4 chapters of "book I" introduces readers to the protagonist HCE (and his many "names" and "attitudes") and the second 4 chapters of "book I" are devoted to HCE's wife ALP (and her many "names" and "attitudes"). Finnegan represents the "past", the place held by forefathers - forefathers with the wisdom of the history of all men and times. Finnegan passes his baton (his place in the fabric of the universe) to HCE now present in time with his particular past. The parents (HCE & ALP) are the "present anchored by their particular pasts" in FW.

- A Dublin wake for Finnegan (who falls, the past) and introduction of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE, the present). HCE's past and his shameful voyeuristic encounter in Phoenix Park (that may or may not have happened) and its memorialized retelling "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly". HCE is arrested (for late night disturbances at his tavern/home, unable to enter his front door just like Bloom in Ulysses), tried and jailed (for his own innocent protection from the public). HCE is resurrected from a metaphorical coffin (just like Bloom's underworld excursion in Ulysses ch Hades) and a revealing letter is introduced. Letter revealed from his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP, HCE's Muse), written by his son Shem (Joyce), appropriated by his twin brother Shaun is discussed. Analysis of the ALP letter and the informing parable of "The Mookse and The Gripes"(Shaun, Shem). Shem's nature, who shares ALP's attitudes. Two washerwoman gossip over ALP & HCE, and ALP's quashing of rumors of HCE.

2) FW's "book II" (Vico's aristocratic) devotes itself to HCE & ALP's children: Shaun (extrovert, man of the world - like Sartre's BEING in "Being and Nothingness"), Shem (introvert, artist - Sartre's NOTHINGNESS) and Iseult (daughter). The children are the "present future" of FW.

- Shaun (Chuff), Shem (Glugg) and Iseult play (children's world) in front of the family tavern/home games parodying their parents. Shaun (Kev), Shem (Dolph) and Iseult study their lessons (the past, adult world), Dolph antagonizes Kev who blackens Dolph's eye. HCE & ALP's children grow up (the present) in a raucous Feast of eating, drinking, storytelling, and a "free and open discussion of ideas" in the family (HCE) tavern, HCE's defends himself with a self-deprecating speech and latter his drunken collapse after the close. HCE asleep on the floor dreams of (his children's future) love, the tale of King Mark, Tristram and Iseult.

3) FW's "book III" (Vico's democratic) devotes itself to "what will be of" HCE & ALP's children's - the baton will be passed on (again) from HCE & ALP to: Shaun, Shem and Iseult (daughter). The children's "influences upon the world" is the "future generation" (presently unknowable) of FW.

- HCE rises from the tavern floor to go upstairs to bed with ALP, he dreams of (his desired) children's future and a prophetic Aesop's fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper" (Shaun, Shem). HCE dreams (of a more realistic future) of Shaun (Juan) sermonizing before his daughter Iseult and her 28 playmates and designates Shem (Dave) as Shaun's paraclete. HCE dreams (of his life's impact on his children's future) of Shaun's (Yawn) inherited "sins of the father" prosecuted by Four Old Inquisitors (MaMaLuJo). HCE's dreamtime breaks at the nightmare cry of Shem (Jerry, who is not forgotten by his father in "book III"), once Shem is comforted, HCE & ALP return to bed for late-night lovemaking (unsuccessful spiritually) and a nap.

*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with HCE & ALP's dissolution - awaiting Joyce's God "thunderclap" at the beginning of FW's "book I". A supposition may be made that Joycean Nirvana is attained by HCE (via Dzogchen Trekchö) and ALP (via Dzogchen Tögal) - realizing the heart of enlightenment in the present moment, transcending all defilements and fixations (beyond all dualistic polarities) so that their rainbow bodies are realized, unification with the Unmanifest (creation, incarnate conception) and Reincarnation (the baton has been passed on again).

- The night has passed, the morning arises, and all dissolves to restart again...

The shameful voyeuristic encounter in Phoenix Park ("book I ch 2", "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly") is Bloom’s major transgressions against his marriage bed (Ulysses ch Nausicaa) with Gerty McDowell who revealed herself to Bloom "she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent . . . she leaned back ever so far...she let him and she saw that he saw...because he couldn’t resists the sight of the wondrous revealment...looking and he kept on looking, looking...a sigh of o! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures..."(366-67), Bloom acknowledges “Still it was a kind of language between us.”(372) and "look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you’re a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming; legs...Wonder how is she feeling in that region... (373-4). Joyce acknowledges that the "revealment" has activated Bloom. That which cannot be "recorded" (physical occurrences: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch... in time and space) are Mankind's "unrecorded human thoughts and dreams". Joyce established in Ulysses "his revelations" of mankind's hitherto unrecorded conscious and unconscious "thoughts and dreams".

The Letter is all-letters, the "writings of all mankind", as well as, Joyce's body of work (Ulysses, FINNEGANS WAKE) - the "thoughts and dreams" of all Mankind. Joyce has a "historically traditional revelation" of the relationship between the sexes: "women activate men" (Gerty McDowell, Molly, ALP, etc.), men provide content, and women are the Muses (and repositories) of Mankind's "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip". Consequently, "the letter" is within ALP's repository and she is the Muse of the letter(s) - just as Picasso' women were his Muses. (Men) Joyce (and Shem) don't create letters they "reveal letters" from Mankind's collective consciousness (and unconsciousness).

Evolution of Everyman: every man will aspire to godhood during their lifetime, as Icarus flew too close to the sun, every man will aspire to dominate their profession (Joyce in writing FW) or dominate the world of men (Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, Russian tsars, etc.) yet they will fall, taken down by someone, "how Buckley shot the Russian General". The children: Shaun, Shem and Iseult will evolve (in book II) from children's games parodying their parents; to youngsters studying their forefather's past lessons; to adults participating in the "rustle bustle" of present life, aspiring to their own godhood (as HCE has), yet they too will experience the fall (dismembered by those around them); after the fall (but before the end/restart) they will dream of what might have been (not their current life) but when they were young, and when love was young.

Dreams: HCE dreams of how he may influence his children's loves (book II ch 4); HCE dreams of how his children's future may be an extension of his life (book III ch 1); HCE dreams of how his children's future may be influenced by his parenting (book III ch 2); HCE dreams of how he has prepared his children to defend themselves from their family inheritances (book III ch 3); HCE (& ALP) dream of the past dissolving and the new day arising (book IV).

Possible Timeline, if Joyce intended "HCE day" similar to "Bloomsday" (roughly 24 hrs)': HCE arrested in front of his tavern/home (unable to enter his front door, like Bloom in Ulysses) for disturbances in hours before dawn (I:3); HCE's conscious/awake or unconscious/dream psychological travails of past guilts (underworld coffin, Ulysses ch Hades) while incarcerated in the early hours of morning (I:4); HCE walks home through Phoenix Park accosted for the time of day (12 noon) which threatens (real/unreal memories, Ulysses ch Nausicaa) his innocent well-being (I:2). Finnegan's afternoon wake at HCE's tavern (1:1); inside HCE's tavern his patrons talk about his family, truthful (letters) and fabricated stories (I:5-8 and II:3); while the children (Shaun, Shem and Iseult) are in and out of the family tavern/home all day taking their lessons (II:2) and playing about with their friends (II:1); HCE, as proprietor, defends himself with a self-deprecating speech before his drunken late night collapse (II:3). HCE dreams on his tavern floor (II:4); then dreams in his bed (III:1-3); before lovemaking with his wife ALP (III:4); and HCE & ALP's dissolution dream (IV) to awaken to a new day.

Joycean Nirvana lies on the surface of FW's text (mandala, available to all) - excavating below the surface of the text reveals the arguments that support the Nirvana (present mindfulness) and refutes all institutional dogma and authoritarian oppression. Joyce reveals what may be Dzogchen "Father Tantras" or "Maha Yoga" (in book I, ch 1-4); Dzogchen "Mother Tantras" or "Anu Yoga" (in book I, ch 5-8); while identifying Shem as receptive to "Ati Yoga" or Non-Dual Tantras (Tiberiast Duplex, in book I, ch 6); the answer to the Riddle(s) the "Tiberiast Duplex" is Shem (Joyce) who is the Enlightened One. A supposition may be made that: the Children learn in "book II" Dzogchen Semde (Mind Series) self-knowledge (awareness) and Dzogchen Longde (Space Series) evolution-knowledge (primordial wisdom, rigpa); and that HCE intends (dreams) in "book III" to impart Dzogchen Mannagde (Secret Instruction Series) Self-Liberation-knowledge to his Children.

What does it all Mean: Joyce's gift to Mankind is that Life recirculates. Unlike Joyce's Ulysses (based on Homer's Odyssey) life does not end with woman (in Molly's bed): night passes, the morning arises, and all dissolves to recirculate and restart again - some actors leave the stage and are replaced / (re)incarnated by a "younger version of their former self". Joyce changes from Ulysses by using Giambattista Vico's framework of recirculation for FINNEGANS WAKE - Finnegan (re)incarnates to HCE, as Shaun (most like HCE) will largely be a (re)incarnation of HCE, Shem (most like ALP) will (re)incarnate some of HCE but also some of ALP, and Iseult will largely be a (re)incarnation of ALP - however, Iseult will choose a man much like HCE (who is (re)incarnated through his daughter) as Shaun will choose a woman much like ALP - while Shem may become the next Joyce. FW is the "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip" of all Mankind.

FW is aural (oral) history like Homer's Odessey and Celtic folktales - when one pronounces (phonology) FW's words (aloud) there are more languages than just English; also, when one reads (morphology) FW's words almost all the words are "portmanteaus / neologisms" which gives each of FW's "polysynthetic words" many meanings (impermanence, Heisenberg uncertainty), each FW sentence dozens of possible messages, each FW paragraph hundreds of possible readings, Joyce's rendering of a more expansive English language and multiplicating universal book with coalescing syncretic themes/stories (that responds to each reader's inquiries). Joyce schooled in Christian Jesuit metaphysics (pushed down into the mindfulness of human consciousness) breathes in the spirit of expansive Celtic (Irish) community tavern life where man's stories of life are told. Tavern life teaches the evolution of Joyce's ten God "thunderclaps" (one hundred lettered words) pushing man's evolution forward from cave man's tales to modern tv media tales. Inside the tavern man learns of the purely human (animal) fall, taken down by another human(s) - like animal taken down on the African savanna. A granular reading of FW can render FW as an updated John Milton's Paradise Lost (regurgitated knowledge from the tree, to affirm man's damnation); however, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859 and Joyce in FW book II clearly walks Shaun, Shem and Iseult through their earthly evolutionary lifetime travails. Every page of FW speaks to man's evolution and to Life recirculating (West meets Dzogchen East a "meeting of metaphysical minds") that binds humanity together into the future. Dzogchen (beyond all dualistic polarities) the heart of human consciousness - Joyce's underlying (subcutaneous) arguments refute the "Western curse of metaphysical/mythological damnation", the curse does not exist in the Eastern mind. Like "counting the number of angels on the head of a pin" (Aquinas 1270) Joyce provides a granular reading of FW as a "defense against all Western adversity" for our conscious and unconscious Western travails. HCE's angst is caused by his community that imposes a Western curse (damnation) upon him that man is not guilty of. To experience Joycean Nirvana, a defense against this man-made guilt is required - for as Zoroaster revealed cosmogonic dualism, evil is mixed with good in man's everyday (universal) travails (even the Dalai Lama must defend Nirvana rigorously from the most populous authoritarian state in human history).

Joyce's FW celebrates the (Joys of) Christian (Krishna, Shem) diversity of humanity (expansiveness of human consciousness, Gnostic Norwegian Captain, Archdruid), Brahma (Finnegan, HCE, Shaun, etc...), Divine Women (ALP, Iseult, etc...), his family - (and the Sufferings of) the inescapable "evil" of Shiva (Buckley), the debilitating harmful sterile authoritarian institutionalizing damnation (MaMaLuJo, St. Patrick) by Augustine, the manufactured clerical corruption identified by Luther (since 367 AD) and the burdens of "survival of the fittest" anxiety (modern commerce) met with a Dzogchen Buddhist stance. The (innocent infant) Norwegian Captain (Krishna, HCE), occasionally defensive (Shiva, HCE), though concretized (Brahma, HCE) by community family life (MaMaLuJo) - through spirits (drink) HCE can access his spirituality (dreams) and through spiritual (cutting through) love-making with ALP (direct approach) can access (their Krishnas) unification with the Unmanifest. Joyce was a Prophet who consumed Man's conscious and unconscious "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip", efforts and failings - to reveal the joys and sufferings of Mankind.

JCB

Finnegan's Wake is a notorious, scandalous and extremely difficult experimentalist work of fiction from the hand of James Joyce, one of the greatest of 20th century writers. It is also notoriously the most difficult of all modernist literary works (and in my reading it is the hardest of all great 20th century literary works to read, surpassing even the hardest works of other modernists such as T.S. Eliot or Woolf) leading to multiple critical charges against Joyce of deliberate obscurantism, bourgeois self-indulgence, extreme literary elitism and even simply concocting on of the greatest literary and intellectual hoaxes of the 20th century, rivalling the scandal of the 'Piltdown Man' or the linkage of autism with MMR vaccines and the discovery of cold fusion, among other things.

The extreme obscurity and difficulty of the text itself does not lend to any easy justification of Joyce's project and his style of writing.. In virtually every work of his, whether fiction or non-fiction, Joyce was meticulous and scrupulous to be clear and accurate in his writing. Even in Ulysses, his great novel which contains many difficult and strange passages, Joyce clearly remains in control of his work and design. Yet in the 'Wake', all we seem to get is an alphabet soup of words, phrases, strange sentences, obscure references and incoherent babble which resembles the rantings of a psychotic schizophrenic. No clear plot, characters, story or chronological sequence of events seems to emerge from the text, even with repeated reading of the 'novel', if even the text can be considered to fall into that genre.

Yet despite these challenges, in my view FW is not only a beautiful work of art, but it is also Joyce's greatest masterpiece. How can this be the case? I feel the biggest problem in 'reading' the novel and the charges laid against Joyce come from the text itself and also Joyce's intentions in writing the text. The first problem comes with the way people are 'taught' to read texts as such, whether novels, poems, plays, stories, and so on. In a 'scientific' age we expect absolute clarity and precision in our language, so a novel (or a good one) should tell us the facts clearly, precisely and in detail. Before Joyce and the modernist period, many novelists realised this approach was in fact was a mistake, but the 'realist' view of the world was no longer viable in a post-relativistic, post-quantum mechanical universe. The events of the 19th and early 20th century with the violence of WWI and WWII and toxic legacy of colonialism, the persistent current of racial hatreds and ethnic intolerance with repressive views around sexual morality and the rise of fascism and ultra-nationalism in the decades of Joyce's life meant a clear and distinct 'project' of scientific analysis of the human condition from a novelist was not just wrong-headed but unrealistic. (Len Platt, a critic of Joyce has studied this very well in a recent monograph).

FW is far too rich and complex a text to even try to summarise in a review. It is true the 'plot' of the novel seems fairly clear - it involves two main characters (HCE and ALP, husband and wife, and their family), some mysterious sexual impropriety HCE apparently engaged in while visiting Phoenix Park in Chapelizod (a suburb in Dublin) and the following social gossip and his attempts to justify himself as a respectable member of the middle class before conservative Irish society. The plot also seems to involve the subconscious thoughts and desires of HCE towards his wife, daughter and other women, and his life as a innkeeper with ALP (his wife). The time of the story seems to start sometime during the end of the week and goes through the night sleep of one or more of the characters until the early morning of the following day.

But the complexity of the text makes this obscure, and in my view the reader will get a lot more joy from the text not trying to read or 'understand' using ordinary reading but by treating more like poetry or music, i.e .to be read aloud or set to music. There are already several excellent internet sites and audio-versions of the text or chapters of the text which bring out the inherent poetical and musical beauty of the words, text and structure in the wake, which show the Wake is meant to be sung rather than simply read like a newspaper. In fact, it can in a way be read as a great epic (akin to Dante's Comedy or Milton's Paradise lost) set to the 'music' of the 20th/21st century period according to the canons of late modernity.

The second key feature is that like Joyce's other major fiction, the intent of FW is comical. This means that the book is full of humour and wit, delivered using a full range of comedic methods. From the laughable parody of the museum visit in the first chapter (the 'museyroom' involving Wellington) to the story of the Russian general being shot while relieving himself, to the ridiculous dreams of one character who imagines, Walter-Mitty style, he is something far greater than it is, Joyce mocks just about every pretension and form of hypocrisy of his time (and arguably ours) whether it is religious fanaticism and extremism (one of HCE's sons, a sexual pervert gives a long-winded morality sermon that is ridiculous), moral hypocrisy (the middle class gossip around HCE's vague misdeed in Phoenix Park), political machinations (HCE seeing himself as an analogue to Parnell in his dreams and his hilarious speeches trying to pass himself off as clean of any corruption) or cultural elitism (the ridicule of racist pseudo-science, psycho-analysis, Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical ramblings and the Celtic Twilight movement) and the cultural pretensions of critics and other writers. The way Joyce does this, in allusive, musical and poetic language, often sounding like it is coming from the mouth of the regular Irish pub drunkard, is what makes this book at the same time a work of incredible genius and so amazingly funny, much more so than most comic novels, movies or stories one sees elsewhere.

Ultimately Joyce does weave in some more subtle themes about culture, race, sex, identity, philosophy and religion. But these in my view are less important than the comic thrust of the work, which cuts right at the heart of the cultural and intellectual elites and their hypocritical pretensions to power and control over others. In this sense, FW represents a culmination of Joyce's bitter yet funny and true criticism of Ireland, Irish culture, the Catholic Church and more broadly the whole intellectual and historical basis of European culture as well. Yet when read and listened to with care as the majestic and magnificent symphony and funny story that it is, Joyce's work is profoundly humanistic in thought and intent in a manner that makes it feel that simply being human is good enough, a theme best capture in the 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' dialogue at the end of the novel (which mirrors that of Molly Bloom in Ulysses).

Any reader would be advised to read the Wake with some aids, such as 'The Skeleton Key' by Joseph Campbell, 'Here Comes Everybody' by Burgess (a sympathetic and understanding reader of Joyce) and Phillip Kitcher's more recent (2009) book 'Joyce's Kaleidoscope' which explains the book, its themes and ideas very clearly and succinctly. This will help enhance the reader's understanding and enjoyment of this great and funny work of literature.

My one star is based on the edition, not the novel (which gets five stars). I bought a copy of this book before it went out of print and was seriously disappointed by it on two accounts: first, the font is tiny (smaller than a size 8 on a word document). So it is difficult to read. Second, there is no critical apparatus. There was supposed to be a second volume containing that apparatus. But four years after this edition was published, the second volume has never appeared. Even if you can afford the roughly 300 dollars the book now goes for, prepare to be disappointed. I recommend the Oxford World's Classics edition, also published in 2012. The copy reads "newly set incorporating author’s corrections and keeping pagination of original; edited with list of variants by Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet; introduction, chapter outline, and bibliography by Finn Fordham; James Joyce chronology by Jeri Johnson."

Without a doubt this is the most fun I've ever had "reading" a book. I frequently had to put the book down to wipe my eyes and blow my nose from the tears of laughter. After just a few pages I started taking notes so I could go back to especially humorous passages and read them to friends. Forget all the garbage about how difficult the book is and how it will require all sorts of study and research to appreciate the deep meaning and language. Nonsense. There is no meaning and there is no language. The book is a continuous series of some of the funniest writing ever commited to paper. I suppose the reader gets from the book what they already have in their own mind and from the things I got from this book . . . I undoubtedly have a very dirty mind. Joyce frequently comes up with "sentences" that strike me as undoubtedly and hilariously obscene (in the best possible way). Honestly, this reads like a series of those filthy limericks that make you marvel at what sort of demented and nasty mind could have conceived them. For me, this is quite simply one of the dirtiest books I've ever read and certainly the most fun. I'm not even sure that "reading" is what you do with FINNEGANS WAKE. I confess I have no idea what it was about and couldn't care less (because I'm fairly certain the only person who knew what any of this meant was Joyce himself). It dosen't matter. This book is hilarious and not at all difficult to read if you immediately give up the idea that you need to understand it or even be able to pronounce it. Folks, there isn't anything to understand here. Just delight in what the book does to your head because (make no mistake) this book WILL do something to you as you "read" it that is somewhat like a strange and euphoric form of hypnosis. It is a work of absolute genious and a true one of a kind. It's the only book I can think of that contained characters who purchased wallpaper to match the cat. This is a book for EVERYONE to enjoy, not just stuffy academic "Joyceans" and those of the professorial ilk, in fact this is really a book for people who don't even like to read. I can't think of any other book that I would give a more enthusiastic endorsement of than FINNEGANS WAKE. If you are a fan of DUBLINERS, PORTRAIT and ULYSSES but have avoided reading this one because of its reputation as being impenetrable, then please dive into it with joy. It's a lot more fun than ULYSSES (though undoubtedly ULYSSES is the greater work as a "novel") and you will never have to work at trying to keep up with the plot (a sometimes difficult task with ULYSSES). READ IT READ IT READ IT. You will never be sorry you did (unless you have no sense of humor) as it is the greatest literary joke book ever penned and will almost certainly never be bested. You will enjoy it even more if you have (as I apparently do) a very dirty sense of humor. Don't let the length worry you either. It took me two weeks to read it and it was never a chore. I can't imagine what the people who say it took them years to finish were actually doing with this book. They were either more capable of wringing amusing perversions from it than I was or were more likely (sadly) trying to understand it. Don't try to "get it" just read it and you WILL get it.

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.)

This is an abridged reading (about 1/4 of the orginal) of a very long book that is probably the most notoriously difficult thing to read in literature. This may be the best way to taste the waters.

It is often said that you must hear the text in the spoken "oirish" to appreciate the music of the words. Well here you have two Irish actors very experienced in dramatic readings of Joyce.

The set includes a 110 page booklet with the text of what is read out. Thus you can follow and listen simultaneously, and this may prove your key to understanding just what the book is really all about. If you are at all curious you should give it a try.

A note of clarification: This set released in 2009 is marked as the "70th Anniversary Edition", the book having first been published in 1939, but this set is in fact a re-release of a recording made by Naxos in the 1990s and re-released once before in 2003.

I must admit, I am amazed at how many "five star" reviews this work receives. I TRULY RESPECT anyone who has taken the time to completely read and enjoy this work. I have read all of Joyce's other prose. I read the Wake to complete my study of Joyce prose. I guess I am just not a James Joyce kind of guy. In case it matters, I also struggle with lots of poetry that other people say they like. I also don't like most modern art. And I do realize it may just be me. But although this work has some very humorous puns, and studying it enough to even begin to understand it has been very educational, I read it and end up saying "Ok, so what?" In my studying of this work, I read that Joyce's friend, Ezra Pound, tried to read it and could make nothing of it. I ended up sort of getting it, but so what? It was sort of a literary survival test. Does everyone REALLY love this book as the reviews suggest? In my own life, other than myself, I do not actually know ANYONE who has actually read it. Most people I know have never even heard of it. I actually enjoyed the books ABOUT the Wake more than the Wake itself. Those books and the humorous puns get me to two stars. Other than that, I am with Ezra Pound.

... Yes, this book is hard to understand and read. That's where its beauty lies. For me, it's a pleasure to read it. Although the story's wiven through the book, you can follow it hardly. But for me, the story is not what the book's about. The book is just a great series of great sounds, wordplays and everything and it is in it's form as great as any other piece of abstract art. Because that's what it is. Abstract art. We have abstract paintings (do I have to name examples?), abstract music, so why can't we have abstract literature? I think it's very interesting to read this and give your own meaning to it, as you (might) do with abstract paintings and/or music. In that way it's a great effort of James Joyce, since you can give anything your own meaning: music, paintings... except for books. Books are beautiful but at the same time there are unwritten rules for books: a storyline, grammar... I could go on for hours. James Joyce breaks with this tradition. But that's great! It has been done before in every form of art! Look at the way music evolved: from classical music all the way to grindcore. There's such a big difference between all those. Music can be simple, and difficult, and I dunno how to explain it. It's just not so rule-based as literature. And therefore, once again, we should cherish this piece of art. It's groundbreaking. Can't say anything to that.

Reading James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (first published in 1939) is like reading a long really long surrealist poem. I got started by printing a 30-page article from Wikipedia and using it as my guide while I read book from book, chapter to chapter. Even the title is a mystery. There is, of course, no apostrophe between the "n" and the "s", so this is not a question of possession. It's been suggested that the title is actually a corruption of the phrase "Finn is again awake", Finn being the father of the gods in Irish mythology, like Odin in Norse mythology. But near the end of the book Joyce actually uses the phrase Finnegan's Wake, complete with apostrophe. The novel itself seems to be an interpretation of the symbolic death and resurrection of Finn or Finnegan in the person of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose name at times changes to Porter (Earwicker is the keeper of a pub), a mysterious sin he may have committed, and how it affects his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle and their three strange children, all this in very obscure poetic prose. Many scholars such as Edmund Wilson and Joseph Campbell have devised a plot out of all this abstract poetry, but I have to admit that finding a conventional plot in Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" is like finding a representational landscape in Pollock's "Enchanted Forest". It's significant that the scholars disagree on which chapters mean what. (I also have to admit that I have not read "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake", which is evidently considered indispensable.){Note: Since writing these comments I have read "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake". Yes, it is erudite and enlightening, but readers should be aware that this key is almost as complex as the novel itself.} By the way, I would have sworn that no one would possible attempt a translation of "Finnegans Wake" (that way lies madness!), but evidently there have been translations -- one in Japanese, no less. There is also a reading of the complete text on 17 CDs by an Irish philosopher Patrick Healy; but, you know, I really doubt if it's on the store.com's bestseller list. The reader must work his way through a thicket of puns (Book I Chapter 8 is a catalogue of the world's rivers and at one point an impatient gossip cries: "I amstell waiting. Garonne, garonne!") and obscure historical references (Earwicker's name may derive from a British politician Hugh Childers whose girth gave him the sobriquet Here Comes Everybody) as well as deal with mythological and Biblical comparisons. Scholars seem to agree that the novel was inspired by an 18th Century Italian work "La Scienza Nuova" by Giovanni Battista Vico, but a more familiar Italian book could also be mentioned, Dante's "The Divine Comedy", because Joyce's "night novel" ends with the revelation of dawn. Will a reader really be able to work his way through its nearly 600 pages? I think if you approach the book as fun (after all, it's considered a comic masterpiece) rather than as a chore, you'll find that its light wittiness outweighs any heavy expectations you may have had.

Haven't read FINNEGANS WAKE in many years, probably not since grad school, but here it is again, everybody talking about it for some reason--it's resumed its place in the zeitgeist, the way Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency," featured on the season opener of MAD MEN, is now rising up the store's best seller list as we speak--has anyone noticed the boxed ad for MAD MEN on AMC right on the page for "Meditations"? Merchandisers don't miss a trick. When I first read it we really thought it was the greatest novel of all time and we aspired to be just like James Joyce. Then postmodernism set in and FINNEGANS WAKE seemed valuable as a monstrous failure, one that moreover had everything in it, a capacious junkyard like the "golden" scrapheap at the center of Dickens' OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. In any case I pulled it off the shelf last night at 7:30 and have just come to the end, feeling like I've just swum the English Channel.

The back story has never been less obvious to me. Okay, I can just about believe that the whole of the novel (bar some "real life" events impinging on the dreamers' consciousness--chimes, house noises, bladder pressure) takes place during a dream of a very sound sleeper, but how do they know for sure his name is Porter and that he actually has three children? I always liked the idea of "Kevin," my own name, being taken up by the great novelist James Joyce, and that "Kevin" was the golden boy of the family, but now I don't even remember how I knew his name was Kevin. In any case the dream of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker shows the eternal return of man (and woman), the endless of cycle of history, exemplified by the legends of Swift, Parnell, Adam and Eve, Tristan and Iseult, even nursery rhyme characters like Humpty Dumpty and Little Boy Blue. The two boys are always in competition with each other, and physically different too, like Laurel and Hardy, except sexier, while the young daughter is the apple of daddy's eye, and sometimes he seems to be lusting after her in an incestuous way. The great setpieces remain hypnotic, but it is significant that they are the extracts that most respect genre conventions--the trial of HCE, the procession of ALP giving out treats for 111 "children" (or are they the witnesses in Porter's trial for--and what is it he did in Phoenix Park, showed off his "penrose" I expect? The puns, anagrams, and blended languages keep one guessing, but I can see how they might grow wearying--just keep inhaling them, like weed, and you'll be able to ride the wild surf to the end.

I noticed on page 387 that there's a reference to "poor Merkin Cornyngwham, the official out of the castle on pension," and I wonder if this is where Merce Cunningham got his name from? Because it's such a grab bag, you can find everything in the book, and it's no wonder my professor used to say that Joybe had predicted events like the Berlin Wall going up, the assassination of JFK and the war in VietNam. Without even meaning to I found Lindsay Lohan! You doubt me, punk? The extravagant exchange of the quarrelling washerwoman, in which every river of the world is named, yields the following: "The wee taste the water left. I'll raft it back, first thing in the marne. Merced mudde! Ay, and don't forget the reckitts I lohanned you." After that I knew I would find Lindsay, too, quite close, even though her name might be muddled. Page 527 has, "Linda, our seeyu," that sounds close, or how about page 492, where "Lindsay" becomes "Loonacied," as in "Loonacied! Marterdyed!! Madwakemiherculossed!!! Judascessed!!!! Pairaskivvymenassed!!!!! Luredogged!!!!!! And, needatellye, faulscrescendied!!!!!!!" Why all the exclamation points? More acts of prediction, mirroring the way I feel about Lohan's relationship with Samantha Ronson. All in all, a five star book with something for everybody.

This is the only book I've ever read that I: 1) Love; and 2) Don't recommend. It's definitely not for everyone, but I absolutely love it. You have to read this book with your subconscious, along with your conscious mind. Virtually every page has moments of staggering greatness, tinged with laugh-out loud humor...especially the way Joyce invents new words by combining bits of other words...which, put together, are consistently playful and tremendously funny. Perhaps the best aspect of F's Wake is...the reward readers can receive when they, at last, "get into" the FLOW of the prose. Don't let your logical mind roadblock your appreciation of the flow...and as you go...its diamonds shimmer right out at you! Don't worry about lack of plot, etc. Just keep at it until you, at last, "get" the flow...and there you go! It's a joyous ride. Incidentally, not only does it NOT bother me that this is the first edition, not the later, so-called "corrected" version, but I PREFER the original edition. Once you penetrate the "flow" of this relentless work of incredible genius, the idea of "correcting" it seems absolutely absurd. Correct what? It's beyond correction! So...with all the love I have for this treasure of a book...I still, ironically, do not recommend it for general readership. For the general reader, try Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, which is one of the greatest books ever written...but leave F's Wake alone. If you can't dig it, it's not for you.

Nirvanic FINNEGANS WAKE: James Joyce's West/East Revelation Joyce, man of Letters, fluent in Languages, Traveler in circles high and low and places near and far, disciplined in conscientious Mindfulness, Scholar of knowledge, Compassionate husband father and friend, Prophet to Mankind.

Aspirationally, James Joyce has thrown all Mankind's manifest gods/deities/idols into FW, reading FW is like circumambulating the Kaaba's 360 idols. Each reader/critic will find their own manifest god and if enlightened, a Bodhisattva's perspective, move on to the Compassionate Omniscient Eternal Unmanifest/Visnu and to their own individual spiritual karmic path.

Joyce's Ulysses' is the story of a young man, its framework is Homer's 'Odyssey'. A tale of a Modern-day Odysseus' personal existential sexual quest, to overcome his psychological internal travails (not Odysseus' external travails) and to affirm humanity: father, mother, son, and daughter. Joyce's FW's is the story of a family, its framework is Giambattista Vico's (road/path) 'La Scienza Nuova's' 4 stages of cyclic history: theocratic to aristocratic to democratic to chaos. Fractured by Indra's thunderbolt (Shiva's trident) ending chaos and restarting the world/day again with theocracy.

FINNEGANS WAKE (FW) and Ulysses (a tantalizing 'Punic admiralty report') are both situated in Dublin, though written on the European continent Joyce memorializes his birth home. FW is 'Ulysses' on a universal scale, Bloom becomes All-Men (HCE) and Dublin becomes the World. Joyce's Ulysses (Bloom) is an energetic man hopping out of bed, plunging into the Dublin day, waging battles real and unreal, exhausted by controversy and rejuvenated by love (Molly). Joyce's HCE is man eternal, a universal man of all wisdom, compassion, understanding, a man of all time. Joyce's FW protagonist is Finnegan, who (re)incarnates to HCE, who will (re)incarnate to Shaun and Shem.

Reading FW is entering the "mind of James Joyce" and his expansive word palette. Joyce labored for two decades assembling his masterpiece tantras/sutras. The mind of Joyce is the "library of mankind" who has reordered dictionaries, encyclopedias, and volumes of knowledge to reveal a West-East allegorical perennial mandala of Mankind's (HCE/Krishna's and ALP/Radha's) compassionate thoughts (manifest and spiritual), a revelation. FW is a spiritual volume to be Read and Read again for 10,000 years.

Readers have for decades mis-attributed dozens and dozens of characters in FW. Mis-reading Joyce's recognition that all personalities always have two-aspects at any moment in time (past/present, evolving/devolving, present/future, observed/Maya & observer/Thaya or Tamas/Creation & Rajas/destruction, truth/falsehood, light/darkness and hopefully an Enlightened recognition of two-worlds, manifest & spiritual), a recognition that "two becomes one" and "one becomes two". Consequently, Joyce has hundreds of "paired names" for the Father, Mother, two Sons and Daughter. A young HCE (Shem-like) Persse goes to sea as the NC (HCE adventuring) but on displacing Kersse ('Son of Ashe's' cursed-aspect) the NC/HCE leaves his bachelored Persse to become a married HCE with two new-aspects (*T & R) His Shaun-aspect and His Shem-aspect, which will be manifested in His sons. While the maid Ana upon consummation of their marriage has two new-aspects ALP and Kate (ALP's drudge-aspect, *M/T), this occurs with almost all of Joyce's FW's characters.

"Dreams of Clarity" imparted gifts: HCE dreams of how his family's lives may influence his children's future loves, book II:4. HCE dreams of how his children's (play) future adulthood may unfold as an extension of his life's experiences, books (II:1) & III:1. HCE dreams of how his parenting instructions will influence his children's future of moving past their life's manifest obstacles to their independent & individual Unmanifest/Visnu spiritual lives, book III:2. HCE dreams of how he has prepared his children to defend themselves from their family inheritances (FW), ALP his soulmate is invited (Mannagde-shared) into his dream to defend him, as is his cherished Issy (Mannagde-shared), book III:3; and Shem's (Glugg/Jerry) receptive "Tibetan dream Yoga" (Mannagde-shared, HCE gifted), book II:1 and Shem's channeling intrusion interrupting his parent's sexuality/meditation, HCE rebuffed, book III:4. "Clear Light Dream" Moksha, ALP's and HCE's lovemaking Nirvana, the past dissolving and a new day arising, book IV.

Each day we awaken from our dreams to the Joys and sufferings of our lives, restarting from yesterday, I:1. Our failings (susceptibilities) presenting our daily confrontations I:2; our past shortcomings, augmented daily, having left a memorable trail of our karmic path I:3; which we must defend, our stases and imperfections, with the help of our partner(s) who share with us their perspective and solutions to save us from our daily actions I:4. Our partner'(s) helpful informed 'a priori' (spiritual Quantum) indeterminate/non-Cartesian and 'a posteriori' (manifest Classical physics) understandings of consciousness I:5; our partner'(s) evolving, expanding & refining, understandings (through time) of our daily lives, spiritual aspirations and sexual relations I:6; understandings and enlightenments shared with our family I:7, while observed and judged by the members of our community I:8. Our children will inherit our gifted past of personal loves & wars, attachments & engagements, II:1; our children will intuitively realize the Unmanifest/Visnu and learn of the dualities of manifestation, sexuality and individual's spiritual free will II:2; they will experience the activities of men and women II:3; and their personal experience of sexual love II:4. Children will learn of Compassion "Hinayana self-reflection" enabling personal re-positioning, III:1; and graduate onto acceptance of the participations in the Joys and sufferings of this life "Vajrayana enlightenments" of imperfect possible Compassionate choices, III:2; not only will parent's lives be judged, by themselves and others, but their parenting will be judged, by their children and others, III:3; we will carry into the future, tick-tock, the Joys and sufferings of this Life as have our parents III:4. Enjoying the Paradises that this Life offers us, IV:1.

"HCE day" similar to Bloomsday (roughly 24 hrs): Chronologically FW starts with courtroom memories (travail, book I:3) of HCE arrested in front of his gated refuge (from MaMaLuJo's tale) unable to enter, unlike Bloom HCE does not enter through the back door (Ulysses ch Penelope), instead HCE is arrested in hours before dawn. [newly incorporated dream: HCE's samsara/awakens in jail (book I:1) after his dream remembrances/anamnesis of NC/HCE arrival/attending Finnegan's wake at the 'House of call', to marry Ana/ALP, and assume the tavern keeper's role (consciousness space) made available by Finnegan's passing years ago.] Followed by (book I:4) HCE's psychological musings of past travails/guilts (living death, underworld Hell excursion Ulysses ch Hades) while incarcerated in early hours of morning, visited by ALP in jail before HCE's courtroom trial & defense and release & liberation. HCE walks home (accusation *T/R an evolving Sattva, book I:2) through Phoenix Park accosted for the time of day (12 noon) which threatens (real & unreal choices, Ulysses ch Nausicaa) his innocent vico/"well-being". Joyce rewrites 3 chapters of Ulysses to incorporate Vico's road/revelation of restart & recirculation into FW: When He is denied Her front door, He is in Hell (on earth), when released (from Hell) His odyssey to Her begins again (with His ever-present accompanying internal travails) for She always knows when He is worthy of Her acceptance, their Paradise.

FINNEGANS WAKE is James A.A. Joyce's evolving aspirational "family/bodhisattvas all" who all understand that the intention behind all existence is Compassion, Buddha/Christ's teachings. Our eternal compassionate Spiritual (Unmanifest/Visnu) and interpreted cosmic Dharma (Stone of Law, dispassionate astronomic exergonic) by impermanent evolving conscientious sexual Lovers (Tree of Life, compassionate quantum *M/T & T/R&S endergonic). Our Joys and sufferings (daily anamnesis, reinterpreted cyclic samsara) our Middle-way/Christian vico. Joyce's Christian paradigm (C.S. Lewis' "Christian love" hall) was globalized by his readings of transcendent/spiritual T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land's' "Shantih"/Nirvana and Neapolitan Giambattista Vico's understandings of China's silk road (waterways/rivers and roads, arteries transmitting ideas back from Zhang Qian) chronicled by Sima Qian (eunuch/'baile') where East/West trade carried manifest commerce/mammon (to 1st century Christianity) and Tamil-Shiva bhakti Mahayana (to 1st century Hinayana/ascetic India) across Asia. Joyce rediscovered (in the 'midden heap') Shachi's request succedent to 'The Humbling of Indra' (via Brihaspati) of peaceful sexual equilibrium, both psychological virtues of the spiritual and manifest. Subsequently, our manifest multiverse dharmas chosen/created: Dzogchen, C.S. Lewis' "Christian rooms" or other compassionate dogma, e.g.: 1) neither being excessively for/Tamas or against/Rajas a particular team/player in a match but "enjoying/honoring Sattvas the game/play", 2) in the game of GO neither being greedily/fearfully (biological fight/flight) offensive or defensive, in your choice/dualities of moves, but playing the "enlightened Sattva offensive or defensive move", 3) not suffering Alice's angst observed/observer of Hatta/Haigha: Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse but participating vico/vivo in the "timeless Tea party", 4) Prufrock's observed/observer "timeless Tea party" conundrum/vico to Eliot's '[Shantih]...the peace of God which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus' nirvanic Unmanifest/Visnu, will be your dharmapala. Happy evolving long-life lies along your conscientious mindful karmic path, defending against manifest attacks 'unwishful...of being hurled into eternity' spirituality is assumed until it is threatened "Kerrse" and/or subordinated "accursed Russian General", your "free will" Compassionate (not recidivist) spiritual Joycean 'Mere Christianity' / Buddhist Middle-way vico.

JCB

The thing that makes Joyce so difficult is his tendency to write stream of consciousness, with an emphasis on the here and now. But you figured that out.

In Ulysses, the narrative is more or less linear in time. Not necessarily so in FW, or not obviously so. Where Ulysses' narrative involved a sort of mumbling about what to prepare for breakfast, a running commentary of the act of doing so, and then fleeting thoughts of friends, family, and events from the past.

FW? Well there are definite sections to the book where the mood and the activity level changes. I'm told this indicates the various stages of sleep, and the physiologic changes during sleep.

That being said, the rest of the book is less of a narrative and more successive word plays, tangents, I understood only a fraction of his references in English to literature and history. I understood very little of the foreign language bits - and there are many bits from many languages. You'd pretty much have to be an ethnographer to get any of it, I believe. It not Reader's Digest, that is for certain.

But I still believe it's worth reading in a odd out of control sort of way.

Who the hell is HCE?

I plan to obtain Joseph Campbell's "A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake" and use it as a study guide next time. Joseph Campbell was one of very few people in this world with the extensive knowledge required to actually understand James Joyce.

I read Finnegans Wake in eight days. My goal was to get through it, reading every word and trying to make sense out of the puns but not worrying excessively about deciphering the meaning. Someday I may go through it with a fine-toothed comb, but this time around I wanted to read it as I would any novel. The verdict?

Well, Finnegans Wake is clearly masterfully put together. For someone like me, with a solid knowledge of Latin and word roots, the puns that made use of etymology (and those are a large proportion of the puns) are not difficult to decipher; I also frequently had the pleasant experience that miscellaneous bits of obscure knowledge floating in the back of my head, that I never thought I would use, were jolted into memory by a passing reference in the book. Joyce poured references of every describable kind amongst the pages, and I could tell that I was not understanding even a small fraction of them, nor was I (by a long shot) understanding the book at every level. Finnegans Wake is like a delicious ice-cream cone that is covered in one of those crunchy shells. Now, imagine trying to eat through that shell only by licking, and that is what kind of task getting to the meat of Finnegans Wake is. The reward is delicious, but you have to lick through a heck of a lot of hard chocolate and nuts (I would liken biting through the chocolate to using one of the companion guides: you get to the good stuff quicker, but it might alter the shape of the ice-cream by biting off a chunk).

Painfully protracted analogy aside, Finnegans Wake is an excellent investment of time for an educated reader, and even (dare I say it?) fun. Yes, the words are impenetrable, but they are just difficult, not outright gibberish, as some would dare to say. Go on, give it a try!

I'm not a Joycean scholar nor am i linguist, though i do speak 4 languages. I'm just an enthusiast with an appetite for extremes in art. Keeping that in mind, let me just confess to being blown away by how pleasurable it was to read this new edition.

This is my third time reading Finnegans Wake. I decided to chain-read this new edition immediately after second successful slog through the Penguin edition, desperate for an improved reading experience.

I bought this book on a Monday and finished it on the Sunday. My quota was reading a minimum of 50 pages a day, but often doubled that, because of the clarity and legibility of this new edition: paragraph breaks and punctuation are a massive help with comprehension.

I think that the trick to enjoying and having a good time with this beast is to arm yourself with a bit of foreknowledge regarding the plot and the theme, and then just read through it as though it were a regular novel, savouring the rhythms puns and jokes neologisms, and relate them back to what you already know about the book. And just going with flow (flow? flood more like it) without getting to caught up with decrypting every exotic word or phrase you encounter along the way. And for heaven's sake don't read it while flipping back and forth to a guide. If use a guide you must, then do so between long runs of reading!

That's because despite some of the confusion in the form and content, the underlying structure upon which all of these jokes & tropes are hung, is really solid enough to sustain several pages of something approximating comprehension...you almost always sort of know what's happening just by the structure and formatting alone: sermons, class lectures, stage plays, courtroom testimony.

I spent most of my time trying to and notice as many sexual puns and references that i could. Given the importance of sex in the story, genitals aren't such a bad handle from which to grab hold of this beast. I usually get bogged down at the end of part II and all of part III because i find it less jaunty and jokey.

Don't let the scholars intimidate you from reading this great book.

Because in reading it, you almost get the feeling that when Joyce said that he wanted to write a book that would confound critics, he meant that as a trap for the academics, whom he knew would jump at the bait. For the rest of us, the general reader he left a book full of puns dirty jokes and wordplay.

And what wordplay; this book should be mandatory for every english speaking rapping MC.

The only problem is that there is no published list of changes so that the changes could be verified. So it remains to be seen whether this edition will receive the approval of the Joycean Academics. Though it must be said the search for a definitive version of the text at this point is a pipe dream.

Reading this is the literary equivalent of doing pull-ups.

I thought it was interesting to read it out loud, like poetry. It had a different feel to it that way.

Boring, gratuitous Finnegans Wake story follows:

I had heard about this book for years, ever since high school, and one day, while in college, I went to the library and took out a copy. I started reading it and thought, "What the . . . . "

Actually I realized I was reading Anthony Burgess's short version, so I went back and took out the real thing. I showed it to my friends who were likewise all bewildered.

So next I marched into my 20th Century Literature professor's office and asked him what was up with this book. He actually began laughing at me. When that was over he told me I shouldn't simply start reading Finnegans Wake, I should begin with Dubliners and then move on to Portrait. Then I could try Ulysses. If I made it that far I could proceed to Finnegans Wake.

At that time I had just read The Promise by Chaim Potok and was impressed with the way those Jewish kids studied the Talmud with various guides and commentaries opened side by side - so that is the way I approached Joyce - like a young Talmud scholar. (But on my own - never in the context of a class or seminar, unfortunately)

I found Burgess's ReJoyce very helpful, and of course there are a million Ulysses and Finnegans Wake guides available.
Eight years later (punctuated by six years of podiatry school and residency) I had finally finished all four and honestly have no idea what I was reading as far as Finnegans Wake was concerned; but I appreciated the style, the rhythm of it, and the overall experience.

The Wake is reviewed by so many people who haven't read it!

How can anyone familiar with Joseph Campbell's Wings of Art or Skeleton Key, or even John Bishop's Joyce's Book of the Dark, suggest that the Wake is not great art?

The greatest novelist of the twentieth century did not spend seventeen of his most creative years on a prank. Joyce had a flair for foreign languages, regarded Catholicism as "a beautiful lie", had at his disposal the collective wisdom of East and West, was *extremely* well read, gifted in music, delighted in wordplay, extensively researched the psychology of sleep, and was notoriously autobiographical in his literary productions.

Joyce describes a night's dream in both biographical (Freudian) and archetypal (Jungian) terms: Brother against brother conflict, inevitable haunting guilt ("this municipal sin business"), raging lust percolating through "the fury and the mire of human veins", chrysalis-like psychological dependence on (temporal and ecclesiastical) authority, ultimate redemption through love, inevitable death. These motifs characterize both human history and tomorrow morning's news. And so, the Wake is *our* dream: Each of us is the poor harried protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, subjected to the cold patrician ridicule of the Four Customers and Twelve Jurymen and burdened by guilt and the misplaced faith of our personal and collective innocence.

Those with little patience for Joyce's presentation are not willing to reassess what a book should convey or else lack a herculean desire for wordplay. In defence of detractors, knowledge of at least one foreign language probably helps, as does general knowledge of comparative religion and mythology, Vico's historical cycles, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, alchemy, Biblical tales, children's games, the history of English literature, etc. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to approaching the Wake is that many readers come in bad faith, unwilling to believe that an order is there, hidden in the obscure labyrinth of protean wordplay.

If you want to turn the lead of the Wake into gold, then you must be a modern-day alchemist. And do not expect to complete the Great Work without much meditation and effort.

A test of patience? An extended discourse on sanity?

"She gave ilcka madre's daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein: but the grapes that ripe before reason to them that devide the vinedress. So on Izzy, her shamemaid, love shone befond her tears as from Shem, her penmight, life past befoul his prime."

This quote should be the example under "obfuscation" in the dictionary, or perhaps "q.v. `Finnegans Wake.'" If you have not the patience, nor the intellectual wherewithal to wield a skeleton key to unlock this cryptic prose, then you may not want to bother, because this quote is relatively tame.

Howevernever has the concept of living in the moment been more prevalent; one must literally take each sentence word by word- just to enjoy his belletristic meanderings, luscious lyrical lilting, extensive portmanteau's, abandonment of grammatical sense and plot linearity, and on and on. Some words can be made out, of course, even if his sentences construction purposely shuns any discernable semblance of the rules of English. Deciphering each lines meaning would surely risk your sanity (and take a lifetime). My advice: just enjoy the ride. It's okay to do this. This is not a conventional novel and it does not have to be read conventionally. Really, it's okay. One necessity when reading this book is reading aloud in your head. Your brain may see "huh?" But when it's spoken you go "oh." I couldn't really decipher any fine plot points. There was like, a letter... Finnegan and a wake was mentioned multiple times... Yeah... I heed my own advice.

Thus marks Joyce's penultimate achievement; a unique hodgepodge of hitherto unmatched literary artistry, and a brave absence of linearity and all convention of plot. A bold move for a famous author writing what I'm sure he knew would be his final novel.

Finnegans Wake is the most controversial and experimental of Joyce's works. As far as sheer ingenuity goes, it is one of the greatest novels ever written. Each sentence needs deciphering as he has double-meanings, and multiple languages, in almost every word. I think it would take a true Renaissance Man, skilled in classical and modern languages, with an understanding of Irish history, and a strong grasp of literature, to even have a chance of understanding what is occurring within these pages.

I am not such a man.

The book scores high on what it is: an experiment in language and literature. It is abysmally unreadable to what I would consider an average reader, however, and in this sense it fails completely as a novel.

I forced myself through this book simply because it was the last one I needed to read to finish Modern Library's Top 100 English Language Novels of the Twentieth Century. If it had been the first one I tried, I highly doubt I would have continued reading this book or the others on the list.

If you want a challenge, or need to read this for a class or penance for great sins, then proceed. If you are looking for something that is enjoyable, then I would suggest Joyce's Dubliners as being great literature that is also readable.

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not as good as sex...depending. Drugs...yes, unless you're tired, in which case Joyce, Sex and Drugs wont help, so play some music instead. Oh, it's music, more than it is literature, only you have to play it instead of just listen to it. More like a score of notes and symbols. Some people can't read music, can't hear the result. Hell, I can't ready music either, but this book is the only thing I have *ever* found that matches my natural astonishment at the intense immediacy of being alive in all it's frighteningly beautiful detail. If and only if you have the right type of cosmic laughter and "tape recorder" like open eyes inside of you, it will play your mind wild and hard, and you *will* smile, because it *is* you.
It can ruin you, though, to "he said, she said" type of literature. Like any pleasure drug, there is an associated let down when you turn to other pursuits, such as boring things like skydiving.
I've been searching ever since.
***
Favorite Quotes:
Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A pour soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
A space. Who are you? The cat's mother. A time. What do you lack? The look of a queen.
A sewerful of guineagold wine with brancomongepadenopie and sickcylinder oysters worth a billion a bite....
Words weigh no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.
Sexcaliber hrosspower.... The wagrant wind's awalt'zaround the piltdowsns and on every blasted knollyrock.... Right rank ragner rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha, whydidtha? Thik is for thorn that's thuck in its thoil like thumfool's thraitor thrust for vengeance. What mnice old mness it all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects!.... Venuses were giggliby temptatrix, vulcans guffawably eruptious and the whole wives' world frockful of fickles.... The Pythagorean sesquipedalia of the panepistemion.... A round a thousand whirlingig glorioles.... A sing a song a sylble; a byword, a sentance with surcease; while stands his canyouseehim frails shall fall.

Finnegans Wake places the act of reading in crisis. One cannot so much "read" this novel as study it, or at best re-read it. The most pleasing surprise of FW is that spread out among passages that are difficult and abstruse there are other passages that are surprisingly beautiful in their lyrical quality. When one comes across such passages, we realize that FW is a typological work, a landscape that quickly changes (really a seascape, since the transformations are more like bodies of water flowing into other bodies of water). For the casual reader, not interested in parsing every pun and allusion, this is the best way to approach this novel. Read it and allow yourself to flow with the stream of language. Understand that nothing exists but language here, that the language has no REAL representation, and amazing things being to happen. The very act of reading is transformed.

"Finnegans Wake", the central scripture of devout Joyceanites is, as far as could read into it, a monument to Joyce's artistic enterprise & simultaneously an elephantine failure. Briefly:
1. Books are written to be read. They are to be read in a human language, not in a privately constructed enigmatic mishmash one can decipher, but the process of deciphering leads to...nowhere. Even turgid & clumsy philosophical authors like Hegel or Heidegger had something to convey, a "vision" of reality. "Finnegans Wake", on the other hand is a carefully constructed labyrinth of "perennial" themes, inducing in reader's mind...epiphany ?...wisdom ?...emotions ?.. no, unfortunately only boredom. This is a book built on books & mythic ( rationally catalogued ) patterns, but not a living creation nor a powerful myth itself. There is something unpleasant, musty, simply *wrong* about this novel....In other words, I experienced this "novel" as Joyce's prolonged ( over almost 20 years ) "masturbation" on his private, but in no way universal, fantasies.
2. What are the merits of this book ? Let's see:
a) is it cognitively strong ? Do I perceive the world in enhanced or expanded way after reading it ? Plato, Nietzsche, Augustine, Shankara, Jung ? No.
b) is it aesthetically satisfying ? No. Apart from a few "musical" passages, this is, compared to Joyce's earlier work, a sad spectacle of a "noble mind o'erthrown" ( or ensnared by its own projections- something similar to the Tibetan Book of the Dead ).
c) is it a book of wisdom, like Conrad's or Proust's ? Or of mythic power, like Melville's or Dostoevsky's novels ? Or a "philosophical" prose, like Mann's fiction or Freud's essays ? Or esoteric vision(s) of cosmos, like Tantric or Gnostic scriptures ? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding NO to all these questions.
I suppose the only people ( apart from professional idolaters ) who would extract some sort of pleasure by reading "Finnegans Wake" are folx who revel in puns, conundrums & rebus-addicts. As for the "Wake", I gave it 3 stars as an homage to author's relentless pursuit of his vision ( however flawed or sterile it may be )....

Some books cost more than several dollars, give reading pleasure for a few weeks or even months, then we move on.

Not so for other books, books we may read most of our lives,including if you like it at all, "Finnegans' Wake." One such reader was physicist Murray Gell-Mann. As he was perusing (his word) the Wake, he came across the arresting "Three quarks for Muster Mark," which inspired his designation of some fascinating sub-atomic particles as quarks.

This edition is the copy I read, the one --the only edition now available--- incorporating James Joyce's own corrections. Costs more than other editions, yes.

Worth it, yes yes yes. If we could get the complete works of Shakespeare with Shakespeare's own corrections, we'd probably be willing to pay a bit maybe even somewhat maybe even a lot more for his corrected edition. It must have been important to James Joyce to spend two years getting "Finnegans Wake" the way he wrote it.

Amortized over a lifetime, even the price at least used doesn't seem out of line---and what a gift for someone, maybe yourself, who treasures the real thing.

Recommended, recommended.

5 stars for Finnegans Wake; 2 stars for this edition.

This edition does not match up with the popular supplementary work Annotations to Finnegans Wake. You have to get an edition with 628 pages to match up with Annotations.

Also, the text is not very large (628 pages crammed into 540).

So as hardcover editions of Finnegans Wake go, this is just about the worst. The only thing it has going for it is that it incorporates Joyce's corrections.

The Viking hardcover editions of 1958, 1960, and 1963 all have the trifecta: 628 pages, readable text size, and Joyce's corrections incorporated into the text. If you're looking for a good hardcover edition of Finnegans Wake, those are the ones to get. (The 1960s Faber editions are also nice, but they are smaller and the covers don't look as nice in my opinion.)

cheers

This work is Joyce's finale. It is the logical extension of processes within his work from the earliest writing through Dubliners the Portrait, through Ulysses, and at last 'Finnegan's Wake'. He invents a language of his own , a language of all languages, and expects Mankind to spend ' all the years of the nights' reading it. Aside from his courage, and conviction his great arrogance and literary power this work is the proof of the artist going to the end of what he is with all that he has.

And this said in praise- the truth , the basic truth of the unreadibility of the work, of its being rescued for readers by certain lyrical passages, the opening and ending most notably, leaves the work as a secondary one in the Joyce canon. Joyce is Joyce because of Ulysses. Finnegans Wake is the curiosity of his middle old age. The truth is too that the fundamental efforts to make all of history myth, and to find in repetition the answer to our meaning is mistaken historically . And the other great failing is in the punning language itself, the proof positive that in trying to mix up everything into one , one arrives primarily at confusion.

Finnegan 's Wake thus stands more as kind of chapter in the literary biography of Joyce than as a literary work of value in itself. And yet how to forget ' riverrun past eve and adam's from bend of bay to swerve of shore' all the way to ' carry me along taddy like ya done at the toy fair a way a lone a last a long the '

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...

You can read this book by yourself and then go mad once, mad twice and then jump to your death from the Chrysler building rooftop..OR..

You can read it with a group of people aloud with a case of Irish beer, and let the discussion penetrate the madness

You got options that is all Ima sayin

the book love it or leave it

1---understand all public advertising, including that of computers, to its depths.
2---understand how the internet formed.
3---read ANY book written in English, no matter how "difficult".
4---understand your relationship to all your senses.
5---read with all of your senses.
6---not feel uncomfortable or frustrated when you don't understand stuff.
7---feel at ease with being overwhelmed.
8---understand how knowledge institutions need to be subverted, temporarily destroyed, and radically reconfigured to better suit not only the economy but also the individual's private intellectual life.
9---understand the nature of most communication mediums and art forms,
10--not take high art and literature so seriously.
11--not feel the need to have a psychedelic experience via dropping acid, which is can be ify.
12--predict the future, and in turn see how this isn't a big deal.
13--stop being a language nazi, if you are one.

The last work of his that Joyce ever saw published--the work he labored on for 17 years--is Finnegans Wake and easily one of the oddest books ever. Some people do get hostile towards the book, because it IS odd, but you have to appreciate Joyce's OTHER works the way I do to even want to read it. I can honestly say I don't get all of it--no one ever will. I don't think it's a book intended to be read just once.
The one problem is that Joyce maybe got a tad out of hand. Okay, it was the book he probably wanted to be remembered for (although "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and maybe "Ulysses" are more accessible and therefore get more readers today), but I think maybe he was showing off a bit. Not that he didn't have the right to.
The first time I read a work by Joyce I figured I was going to hate him. When I hate an author, I really hate one. But somehow Joyce grew on me. That was pretty strange. And although I haven't read most of Joyce's stuff, I like to get in over my head--hence, reading Finnegans Wake.
This is not a beginner's book, that's for sure. If you've heard of Joyce and want to explore his works, start with "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", because that is a classic all its own and also much easier to follow. Actually, I'd build even more than that before Finnegans Wake, but that's up to you.
In all, I strongly suggest Finnegans Wake for people who like interesting literature.

My fervent belief in Finnegans Wake:

I have thought warm thoughts about James Joyce's great masterwork Finnegans Wake before (Ulysses? Feh!). Sure, at first it was the bizarre novelty of it. And to this date I have only, cumulatively, read eleven pages of it. But once one passes through the I-can't-believe-this-is-a-book phase, the this-is-sort-of-good-in-an-unreadable-but-fascinating-way phase, the look-at-me-I'm-reading-Finnegans-Wake phase, and the why,-he's-very-talented-phase, one comes to the ultimate utility of the great Finnegan's Wake: ballast.

Does what you read define you? Well, that's an easy question, because everything defines you. Emerson said “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” which isn't exactly "Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven.", but it makes my point better. And that point is that you are what you read. So if you are a bit over fond of rereading old Dick Francis novels, and the first third of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and random YA Fiction featuring talking dinosaurs, and stories where nice people fall in love or fix the universe or whatever, Finnegans Wake will act like condensed mass, it will hold your ship to the water, it will bleed gravity into every sentence you touch.

Here, check out this random reading list:

Ten favorite novels:

1. The Fulfillment by LaVyrle Spencer

2. Bygones by LaVyrle Spencer

3. Savor the Moment by Nora Roberts

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5. Vision in White by Nora Roberts

6. Perfect Match by Jodi Picoult

7. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

8. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

9. November of the Heart by LaVyrle Spencer

10. Manhunt by Janet Evanovich

You cannot judge this list. It is impenetrable unless you have read and fully understood Finnegans Wake, which you haven't. So get off your high horse!

Not that you were on one.

I mean them. You know, they.

Here's another reading list for you:

1. The Collected Reviews by Feldenstein Calypso

2. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

I'm just saying, when it comes to your reading, keep everyone confused.

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.

There are scholars who make their careers on Finnegans Wake. I have read many of them, hoping to understand this book. However, among the scholars, there is no agreement as to what this book is about, or even if it is about anything, or even if it is readable. To those of us who have enjoyed Joyce's other works, such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Dubliners, Finnegans Wake is a real disappointment.
The book consists of 628 pages of crypticisms, foreign languages, and languages that haven't yet been invented. In those 628 pages one will struggle to find two words that actually go together to form a discernable thought. Of his works, Joyce said, "Ulysees is the day; Finnegans Wake is the night." Well, I take a lot of walks at night, and even on moonless nights I can make out shapes and shadows, something that is quite impossible in The Wake.
No one will ever deny that James Joyce was a brilliant writer. But, it took him 13 years to write Finnegans Wake. If he actually meant to say anything, 13 years is enough time to come up with a way to do so that actually communicates. This book actually seems like Joyce took a set of the Oxford English Dictionary, placed it atop a couple of sticks of dynamite, detonated the dynamite, and walked through the fragments, writing down whatever his failing eyesight was able to pick up. Hence, one is left with the conclusion that Joyce has succeeded in pulling off a hoax, the literary equivalent of the Sokol hoax on the high-brow journal Social Text. And this is what is so disappointing about Finnegans Wake.
If you feel that you must read James Joyce (and you should), then by all means, read one of the aforementioned books. But avoid The Wake; you have better things to do with your time.

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.

John Lennon put out a book while the Beatles were still together, titled IN HIS OWN WRITE. That title is a Joycean pun (it's even "bad" and ungrammatical in the way of Joyce's puns) and the entire book and its sequel is written in the manner of FINNEGANS WAKE, slightly simplified (fewer foreign words).

John Ashbery also writes in a simplified form of FINNEGANS WAKE's style, and some people think he is the greatest living American poet.

Thornton Wilder based his 1942 Broadway play THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH on WAKE, and was "found out" by Joseph Campbell and by Edmund Wilson.

There are several other writers who have been influenced by WAKE in this way, including several hit rock lyrics. Lennon's book was not only popular among Beatles fans, it demonstrated to lots of them how Lennon was a very special and intelligent writer -- yet he couldn't have written it without the example of Joyce behind him.

All this is no particular reason to think WAKE is good or great. But it did create a new way of writing, and that new way has led to success for other writers beside Joyce. That in itself suggests that WAKE is an important book. It can also be thought of as a "failure" or a "mistake." Even so, with that kind of influence, it would still be important.

Of course it didn't spring up out of nowhere: the Humpty Dumpty chapter in THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS covers a lot of its techniques. And there's a lot of writing from the nonsense writers of the nineteenth century that is (deliberately) harder to understand than WAKE, or even impossible to understand, because the authors wanted it that way. Those writings were also popular and influential. Some people enjoy nonsense. And of course language specialists study nonsense, because it shows how complicated language can get and still be interesting (and worth the price of a book) to some people.

Joyce was a very thorough comic craftsman and he had a lot of fun with his works. He is not part of a conspiracy and readers like John Lennon liked him from Day One. The negative reviewers on this site honest to goodness don't get it.

I like to keep this book around to impress people.

You know how Joyce's Ulysses shows up on those best of all time lists, but you secretly haven't read that book and suspect that no one else has talked about that day's journey in the Hibernian Metropolis?

This one is like that but worse. You can't even rightly say what it is about (many will disagree). It is deep to the point of deliberate obtuseness, a work Twenty years in the making that was so mythical that halfway through it Joyce's peers wrote a book about this book, "Our Examination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress".

It can blow you away and bore you. It can make you want to visit Zurich to stop buy his grave and ask the same question Joyce asks on his death bed, "Does nobody understand?" Most who read this won't. And you know what? That's just fine.

I admit it. I never 'finished' Finnegans Wake. I did not sit down and read it from cover to cover like I did Ulysses. And yet I read Finnegans Wake. Those people who treat it as a hoax are missing the point. Finnegans Wake was meant to be read out loud in small sections. The richness and beauty of the language are unbelievable and the cohesive structure of the book is astonishing. The book begins with the passage of water, and ends with the sea. It is the journey down a river, the journey through life. During the past few years I have picked up Finnegans Wake on numerous occasions and read parts of it. It is beautiful. The sounds are so overwhelming that I always find myself repeating them over and over. Joyce was a master with language and this book was his 'masterpiece' of language play. It doesn't matter that you don't understand the words. Read it for long enough, and the words will begin to make sense. Maybe by the time I die I will know the full meaning of Finnegans Wake.

British author (and ardent admirer of Lolita) Martin Amis once drew a connection between the work of Nabokov and Joyce. He said essentially that both authors' minor work is guilty of a fair amount of self-indulgence. To clarify, Nabokov is famous for passages such as this doozy:

"the distant meadows opening fanwise, the near trees sweeping up on invisible swings toward the track, a parallel rail line all at once committing suicide by anastomosis, a bank of nictitating grass rising, rising, rising, until the little witness of mixed velocities was made to discharge his portion of omelette aux confitures de fraises."
--Speak, Memory

Finnegans Wake is also self-indulgent in its use of esoteric language, but in a different way. Its characteristic poorly-spelled utterances parody many different modes of writing, from eulogy to nursery rhyme to literary criticism:

"Shize? I should shee! Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye die? of a trying thirstay mournin? Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain's chrissormisss wake, all the hoolivans of the nation, prostrated in their consternation, and their duodismally profusive plethora of ululation. There was plumbs and grumes and ccheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too. And the all gained in with the shout-most shoviality. Agog and magog and the round of them agrog. To the continuation of that celebration until Hanandhungigan's extermination! Some in kinkin corass, more, kankan keening, Belling him up and filling him down. He's stiff but he's steady as Priam Olim! 'Twas he the dacent gaylabouring youth. Sharpen his pillowscone, tap up his bier! E'erawhere in this whorl would you hear such a din again?"

"And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our rand remonstrancers there'll be iggs for the brekkers come to mount him, sunny side up with care."

"Have you whines for my wedding, did you bring bride and bedding, will you whoop for my deading is a? Wake? Usqueadbaugham!

Did ye drink me doornail?

Now be aisy good Mr. Finnimorre, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad...You're better off, sire where you are, primesigned in the full of your dress, bloodeagle waistcoat and all, rmembering your shapes and sizes on the pillow of your babycurls under your sycamore..."

"A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint. It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecrackers (the stinks of Mohorat are in the nightplots of the morning), that he suffered from a vile disease. Athma, unmanner them!"
--Chapters 1 and 2

E'erawhere in this whorl would you hear such a din again?!

These are only the most recognizable of the plethora of parodies Joyce invokes in the mammoth text. They have meaning, no doubt. What is the meaning of the eulogy? "Twas he the decent gaylabouring youth!" shout hordes of drunk coworkers, friends and party-crashers at his "chrissormiss wake," as his body is being lowered into a grave, most likely, sobbing sighs, crying and making a good deal of noise, as evidenced by the ample misspellings. How did he die? He fell off a ladder, like Humpty dumpty, and was put back together, "sunny-side up" (so his wake-goers could eat him??? Seems like it. They certainly want him back in his coffin, when he wakes up asking them whether they've drunk him out of house and home). How will this text be received? With Freudian speculation, and, as Joyce sees it, nonsense. The reviewer becomes a character in the novel himself, who seems to be writing sections of it himself in short mini-essays on various topics, obviously still very bizarre and dreamlike (the one on the Lord's Prayer has at least 200 different names for it, none of them real, all some sort of pun or biblical reference or HCE butt-size reference or other...("Peter Peopler Picked a Plot to Pitch his Poppolin," "For Ark see Zoo," "An Apology for a Big..." etc).

Truthfully, it is a book about the disintegration of language into nonsense. If there is a major flaw in the book, it is no doubt aesthetic, as the book lacks the momentum to keep the reader going: in a sort of prelude to the Nabokovian trend of maximalism, in which the associative anarchy of the innermost crannies of the sleeping mind is regurgitated onto a sheet of paper. There are very few books in this vein worth reading, aside from Burgess's masterwork A Clockwork Orange, and the plays of Beckett. Perhaps take it off the shelf every now and again, just for a laugh, but that's probably all you'll get.

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

Don't judge a book by it's cover, as this text:

"James Joyce - Finnegans Wake: A Symposium"

is no other than the famous collection of critical essays about 'Work in Progress' with the eccentric title of 'Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of 'Work in Progress,' written two years before James Joyce's last novel 'Finnegans Wake' was published in 1939. Excerpts had been published and some people had seen parts of it in MS, but Joyce was still withholding the final title for 'Work in Progress.' The lead essay, by Samuel Beckett, bore the equally eccentric, if quieter, title of 'Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce.' Each dot in the Beckett essay's title represents a century of real time: Dante in the 14th century, Bruno in the 17th, Vico in the 18th, and Joyce in the 20th. Of course, Beckett didn't explain all this: he left it up to us to figure out (much like Joyce himself): what Joyce called 'the ideal reader with ideal insomnia.' The period after 'Bruno' is really just a single dot, but the publisher couldn't be expect to know that.

Joyce himself contributed an essay (at least we think so) under the name of Vladimir Dixon, entitled 'A Litter to Mr. James Joyce' where he refers to him(self) as 'my dear Mr. Germ's Choice' and 'Shame's Voice.' He was assuming the role of his own first hostile critic.

This text should be a required read for all Wake Readers.

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It takes patience and a great deal of time to work through Joyce's experimental style, but is well worth the effort. "[Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published it in 1939, two years before his death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.]"

Finnegans Wake inspired me to create a children's book on life, loss, and the space between. It can be found on the store.com as well as at paperbackswap[dot]com.

If you enjoyed Finnegans Wake and have children you might take a look at it. It's been called, "An extremely creative collection of stories where the reader plays an active role in the outcome. I found this to be sort of a cross between a book of fables and a collection of poetry, with an homage to Finnegans Wake mixed in. Very enjoyable."

In his classic collection of aphorisms, The Trouble With Being Born, the Romanian-French essayist Emile Cioran, makes the following remark: "Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?" James Joyce spent seventeen years composing and recomposing a book that he undoubtedly knew would be unintelligible. This maddening monstrosity, this monumental darkness, takes on the universe itself in its mixture of breathtaking poetry and emptiness. It is at once the saddest and the funniest book ever conceived. Our heart breaks for the author, a man nearly blind, poverty stricken, sickly, in whom such ambition was festering, in whom such an enormous soul flashed and fizzled. Thank you, Mr. Joyce, we remember you fondly.

This book is not really readable, straight through anyway. But I own a copy and I flip through now and then. I treat it like a long poem, and then, it can be cool. The language sounds good and you can get sucked into it and there is something of a plot I suppose. I personally think the book is a blend of Eden and Babylon; confusion and also paradise, and Joyce was probably bored. This book is more of him being a linguist than a novelist. I recommend the companion by Burgess called Re-Joyce and would say, you may not want to buy this, just get it from the library. But you would have to buy it to play my fun game with guest: What Are You Reading. Here is how you play- whenever someone says wow you have a lot of books, so what are you reading now, I say Finnegan's Wake and hand them the book. Read a page I say and then walk out of the room. When I come back their face is priceless and really, the conversation could go in any direction. Now that's worth paying $8 to have the book laying around.

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?

I firmly believe that most who have read -- or so they say -- "Finnegans Wake" extoll its virtues because, to coin a phrase, its reputation precludes it. I am only aware of one detractor: Vladimir Nabokov, who, while considering "Ulysses" one of the four greatest works of the 20th century (a view which I don't share, incidentally), described labelled "FW" only a blot on his memory. (Note: not offered as a proof.) What is "FW", what is it really? Ultimately, I declaim it a failure -- not because I don't like it (an understatement!), but a failure on its OWN terms; and these, after all, are the only terms which any given work of art is obligated to fulfill. I offer one example of this failure -- an example which, however, is crucial to the entire structure of the book. "FW" is, within the story (such as it is) of one man, one family, supposed to represent the history of all of humankind. The history, of course, is relatively easy to represent, with its contextual Vico-ian circularity &c.; but the humankind is a foundering point (no pun intended). Joyce portrays this omnium gatherum of humanity through the meduim of what is commonly referred to as "dream consciousness," the collective unconscious of history, and he exemplifies this through a gallimaufry of languanges: all people, all languages. Fine, makes sense. And it also makes sense that there is a predominant language: English (alright: a very broguish Irish-English), because Finnegan/Humphrey/et al. is/are Irish. But we've glossed over the problem: all people, NOT all languages. Joyce, while being a brilliant linguist, didn't remotely have even snippets -- or even a good percentage -- of all of the languages extant (never mind those of antiquity); and while I'm perfectly willing to accept that NO ONE could have the languages to pull off this idea properly, that does nothing to the fact that Joyce fails to successfully complete his endeavor (on this front). I don't care if Michael Johnson is (currently, at least) the world's fastest 200 meter runner: if he promises a 15-sec. performance and runs it in 19, he's failed to deliver, period! Joyce's idea here IS possible: since there are certainly a finite number of languages, it would be quite possible to represent them all within one book, even if not humanly possible. What Joyce does, though, is make a helluva LOT of languages stand in for ALL languages. Weak, very.
There's a lot more wrong with "FW", too. For example, in a great many of his neojoylogisms, Joyce conveniently ignores the possible readings of his recombinations -- and subsequently asks the reader to do so. Joyce, the control freak, is not in complete control, his words come back to haunt him. (I don't say this is all the time, but . . .)
And I haven't even gotten to my tag line: the ultimate one-trick pony. (Okay: a couple of tricks.) "FW" is nothing more than a collection of erstwhile fables and puns, served up with the aforementioned linguistic salad (vide supra for the implicative failures of the latter). There's nothing to probe beneath this rococo surface, only the unscrambling and decoding. Recirculation of history? That can be probed in a paragrpah or two, perhaps a pair of pages. What else? Does Joyce score points of originality? Of course! Ambition? O my! But how long before different manifestations of HCE gets old? Just because Joyce's allegories are bigger must we pretend he came up with the idea? Ad rem ad nauseum.
If you love Joyce's writing (and I never much do) here, fine. Perhaps you'll find his puns amusing, his tales compelling. Certainly his workmanship is impressive -- I don't care how short it ultimately measures up. To me, "FW" is a crucible of Joyce's elementary particles, his three flavors of quark -- patience, knowledge, and ego. But I suspect that this book is little above what could be produced by a later series of HAL if you fed it enough information and a rather simple list of specifications. No computer could approach "Lolita", "Crime and Punishment", or "Arcadia" -- or "Ulysses", for that matter; but "FW" does so few things (instead simply doing them over and over and over and over (okay, perhaps that's somewhat fitting), changing the players but never the play) that it seems little more than the work of a machine, so contained is the arc of creativity which subsumes the various recombinatives. Madelbrot sets produce something similar, although with infinite (as far as we know) variety. I give it a 6: one above average for all that hard work. O Jamesy!

Virtually any prep you are given for Finnegans Wake amounts to this: misdirection. Sometimes, the pretentious will tell you that you need decades of study before even glancing at the first page of text, or times, it's the assertion that a dry gloss of wounded-hand heroes and other Joseph Campbell-style tropes of myth are the required lens; that the sexuality, humor, and apparent spontaneity are all illusory because this is a serious book. Of course, it is a serious book, because sex, jokes, and the moment are all serious things. Serious enough for great consideration and extended rumination, serious enough to include one truly tragic and one genuinely funny moment per page, at a minimum. But, never so serious the ribald excitement, the childish humor, the elegant puns or pretty wrecks should be locked up and kept from everyone.

One strain of Finnegans Wake's story is just that, the locking up for fantastic elements of our everyday wonderful existence, ostensibly because we aren't educated enough, serious enough, or blessed enough to have and appreciate nice things like that, and throwing away the key into a fastrunning stream of rhetoric. But the rest of the Wake is set in opposition to that strain, makes a mockery of those empty stabs at repression, those silly trite bouts of selfish self-congratulatory elitism pretending to be knowing concern. Finnegans Wake has little need to obfuscate for any reason but to entice, as a beautiful scene beyond a parting veil or a what-the-butler-saw peep machine. It makes a burlesque of life, and teases away while giving forth just as that, but it is not malicious in its restraint or its flourishes; it wants us to come along!

Foremost, Finnegans Wake is fun and wants us to have fun. Anyone tells you different, is lying or misguided. Lilting leaning longing lunging lusting and lasting, the Wake wants us all along. It wants us to keep up. I say it, because it does escape the commands of authors and the demands of readers. The book lives extant, it reacts to us as we react to it, and its self-reflexive nature allow the read of the book, the text(s) and the gloss(es) to grow and change as we grow and change, as the world, its history present and future change.

You understand Finnegans Wake. Go in knowing that and let no one convince you otherwise. What you understand, reading it, may not be what someone else understands, but neither need by incorrect or immature. You understand Finnegans Wake. It may fall on you as a happy wreck's debris hits the street or is sucked out to see, it might rule over you as queenly puns or prestigious parents, but parents are always progeny, too, queens are moved about quite easily when you are playing the right games, salvage has charms to muse as sooth (or something similarly reaching).

The book is about a mountain and a river and as anyone who has played king of the mountain or water games knows, if you take the games too seriously, the conquest as more important than the play, you probably end up having a miserable time every moment you aren't on top. Give up the conquest and go for the play! Jump in, splash about, climb to see what you can where you can, and to jump that much further and make that much bigger a splash when down you crash! And ignore anyone who tells you, you can't backstroke along a mountain or climb up water; "Any landing you walk away from," they say, "is a good one," and that includes the landing at the top of the stairs, the height where you're king of the hill, or the muddle of the river rushes.

Finnegans Wake (spelled without an apostrophe, and spelled many different ways in the actual text) is one of the most difficult, enigmatic, and comedic novels ever written. An extremist might argue that the novel is gibberish--however the language certainly is real and flowing, albeit heavily peppered with portmanteau and deliberately misspelled words. Even characters' names are spelled inconsistently, such that one may not realize how early the three youngsters, Shem, Shaun, and Isobel, are introduced into the novel until rereading. As the novel intentionally ends on the word, "the," one can start to reread the book and discover more of its secrets just with an appreciation of the feel for what Joyce is doing.

And just what is Joyce doing? At its most basic level, the book is an attempt to capture an entire night of dreaming with the same feel that a dream actually has, and it succeeds. The book reminds me of a more sophisticated version of what I was doing in seventh grade in response to novels that I found pretentious and enigmatic largely due to my more limited vocabulary and life experience and try to write literature that had that same feel, sounded interesting, but did not necessarily have any real meaning. Here, however, there is more to that in Joyce, who certainly inflects his work full of social commentary and satire, and thus, meaning. The book is predominantly composed of wordplay, and its narrative, if it can be said to have any is structural and slight.

My understanding of the book is based on my own perceptions of the actual text combined with the introduction by John Bishop and the outline of chapter contents. The central character is a man named H.C. Earwicker, in the sense that he is the dreamer, but he is not telling us the story, at least not most of the time--he is experiencing it. He has a wife named Anna Livia Plurabelle, and they have the three aforementioned children, young adults now, who are major players in the dreams that follow. It begins with a town and a museum, and we are introduced to many colorful characters who never appear again, but not in the conventional way of a narrator, but rather experientially. Various crimes are committed and suspects nabbed.

The book becomes lucid in a Carollian sense more than eighty pages in with the trial and exoneration of the obviously guilty Festy King, followed y his sea passage. There is something about a letter from Anna to H.C.E., but that shifts into a manifesto on writing nominally about The Book of Kells, but more trying to philosophize how one goes about the act of writing..

H.C.E. has two sons, Shem and Shaun. Shem is guilty of forgery and all sorts of non-violent crimes. Shaun is the good son and adored by his sister, Isobel. H.C.E. eventually reasserts himself into the story, but while in a drinking bout with his friends, he passes out and we enter into a synapse-firing remembrance of the story of Tristan and Isolde. If you don't know the story, you won't learn it here, since it's mostly follows arguments of a bunch of men in a boat, with references to King Mark and the ill-fated romance, ending in a poem.

Shaun and Shem get into a major argument over Shem's ethics, and after example and counterexample, Shem sends Shaun down a river. Eventually he crashes onto a shore and receives a new identity. Nevertheless, he is still able to speak at Isobel's confirmation in the church. She sends Shaun a letter telling of her deep love for him, perhaps not entirely appropriately for siblings, and joins a convent at the age of twenty.

Shaun, now called Yawn is pushed into a seance and answers questions as numerous people. Eventually, H.C.E. asserts himself, and he proves to be brash and arrogant, claiming himself as the conqueror of many lands and going into detail about supposedly heroic acts and the building of a new city, as well as his marriage to ALP, which seems to be alternately a courtship and a rape.

Nevertheless, after an examination of the greatness of a youth named Kevin, Anna Livia Plurabelle tries to wake H.C.E. This section of the book feels very romanticized. Although it is as opaque as the rest of the novel, it is reminiscent of the common romantic tropes of older couples reminiscing on their courtship and how young they were when they became husband and wife. This, then trails off into the intro, through its ending on the word "the," and not because Joyce died or stopped writing--he lived three more years after the book was published to his exact specifications, seemingly misspelled words and all.

No book has ever captured what it is really like to dream the way Finnegans Wake does--as interesting as, for example, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman is, it still takes more or less a conventional and relatively rational approach to the most irrational of thoughts and makes too much sense to be the capturing of a dream on paper. Can the book be faulted for its use of clichés? It certainly has a lot of them, even if the hybridized words present these tired sayings with multiple meanings of new and old. More unfortunately is its frequent use of the N word in ways that do not appear to be parodistic. He even creates an obvious portmanteau with the word "niggardly" that doesn't seem to be anything but pure racism, which is kind of disappointing since so many ideas in the book seem so ahead of their time. Moments like this are embarrassing to read. It is often in the danger zone between being puerile and writing about puerility in many of its anatomical references, most of which actually do not appear in the "four positions of lovemaking between HCE and ALP" section.

Overall, the work is best appreciated as a work of art with a comic vision, rather than as a story, or as a series of jokes. Anthony Burgess's comment on the back cover that the work has things to make one laugh aloud on every page is probably true. I laughed aloud at many a page in this book, and I am sure there are many, many jokes in the book that I did not get other than appreciating the entire tapestry. It left me wondering if it is even possible to do anything truly experimental with the written word, or if Joyce completed every possible verbal experiment imaginable with the book. He probably did not, but as much as I would like to write in this vein, it seems that he covered so many as to have made a creative cul-de-sac, in that one is simply doing a take-off on Joyce. Many have said that this is exactly what Samuel Beckett did, although I do not agree. While Joyce influenced Beckett, Beckett's work is pretty standard-lexicon and even a book as difficult as The Unnamable is more of a character study than Finnegans Wake, and thus move in a new direction that is not a dead end, in a spare style of observation rather than the fill-in-the-blanks of the conventional novels that general retell the same stories we already know and feel like clichés even if there are not any cliché phrases as such. This is not your plot-driven page-turner. You will not be compelled to return to it out of interest in where the plot is headed (though you may at some points in the second half, which is a little more accessible than the first, if only because reading the first half makes the second half seem clearer), but to appreciate the artistry, the wordplay, what clever bit is he going to give you next, and what thoughts will it provoke in me. Any book that works in those latter terms is a triumph for the author. It may be a triumph for the reader to get through, but the reward is not in having finished something so difficult. I found myself wanting to read it again immediately upon coming to the final "the," and as the clarity of the first several pages improved a great deal, I really had to decide that now is not the time to begin the book again, simply because it is such an insider work that one has to have been exposed to as much literature prior to 1939 as one possibly can to gain more fruit. Not far from the beginning, and not far from the end, are dialogues between characters modeled on Mutt and Jeff--the characters have different names from the end as to the beginning, but with all of Shaun's name changes, one can only assume Joyce wanted us to read these as the same characters--old comic strip characters most people today would be unfamiliar with, and whose names mean something to me only because I have heard of them in reference to the history of comics. Joyce draws from so many disciplines--some portions are enhanced by familiarity with the work of Mozart, for example--that it is clearly a book to return to years later, or else take a shortcut via the many books written about it. The book took me about two months to read at roughly an hour or two per day. I would definitely want to acquire my own copy and go back to it and see how my perceptions have changed now that I have a feel for the work's overall structure, although it would probably years before I reexamine the novel, if it can be called that rather than simply verbal art, musical and poetic, as a whole.

I can't see why everybody, even if they don't understand Finnegan's Wake, proclaims it to be a 'masterpiece' and that it encapsulates 'the entirety of human history'. How absurd. This piece of inconsequential nonsense may mean something to James Joyce or 'Neeborg' from the planet 'Zobtreeg', but not to any rational person who doesn't pretend to be intelligent or philosophical.
I paid seventeen dollars for a book that is puportedly a 'classic' that discusses all sorts of important issues. I read the first page and thought "this is ridiculous", so I put it back on my shelf and got a book that actually makes sense. Irish history/literature professors and well versed people that boast about having Ph.D's and masters degrees, in my opinion, use this book as a vehicle to sound smart and convey all these ideas that could not possibly be derived from the actual text. Therefore, I've formulated my OWN little theory about what this book is about: it's about nothing. It's just words that mean nothing, so that people can make whatever they like out of it, and smart people can sound smart and dumb people can listen to them, then transcribe the smart people's words verbatim, and sound smart! That little theory makes just about as much sense as Finnegan's Wake and all of the professing Professors that devote their lives to sounding intelligent, when, ultimately, Finnegan's Wake is just a bunch of nonsense.
Don't get me wrong- I'm a nice guy (don't worry- I'm from Australia)

I've just reached the end ... or is it the beginning? It's taken me six months, with Anthony Burgess' 'Here Comes Everybody' providing a basic and unsatisfactory commentary on this nightmare of a book. I can't really recommend anybody to read this unless you know exactly what you're letting yourself in for ... unlike Ulysses, which I believe everybody should attempt at some point in their lives. So why have I given it 5 stars? Because it simply had to be written.
Without the Wake, twentieth century fiction would have been simply an extension of the nineteenth century. This book is what sets us apart. Don't believe the people who tell you it's a joke - a genius like Joyce doesn't spend 15 years, resign himself to penury when a "Ulysses Lite" could have made him a rich man, and ultimately ruin his eyesight all for nothing more than the literary equivalent of a whoopee cushion. There are deep things here, it's just that they're buried so deep that it's mostly not worth the effort of mining them. But again, I've given it 5 stars because this book is like a nail bomb in a library (shhhhh!) - it destroyed everyone's perception of what could ever constitute literature. If the Wake can be created, anything is possible. The Wake gave the green light to everyone's wildest imaginings and bizarre method of telling it - after all, whatever you write it won't be as difficult or as slow or as mad or as painful as this work.
Don't let anybody tell you that there is an easy way into this book. Whichever way you approach it, however many primers and explanations you read, nothing will prepare you for 650 pages of dense dream-imagery written in polyglottal puns through which you grasp at anything that makes the slightest sense (and I mean slightest). The basic story of a publican dreaming over the repercussions of being caught urinating in a public park by two soldiers and then being accused of indecent exposure is by the by and of little import, because it is so thoroughly buried beneath hundreds of layers of Irish, oedipal and religious history, myth and gossip and the minutiae of everyday life transfigured by dream, that it would be easy to miss (and if you did, it wouldn't be a problem anyway - this is hardly narrative-driven). There are moments of comedy, but they're few and far between. The publican becomes the man-myth-mountain Finnegan, who represents Ireland, his forgiving and defending wife becomes Anna Livia Plurabella, the river Liffy and mother nature herself - reading the book is a battle that's impossible to win and you ultimately simply surrender yourself to the flow, the cycle of life which, like water taken from the sea to clouds to rain to rivers to sea to clouds .... takes you from the end to flow back to the beginning without even a full stop to halt things. I wondered whether it would make more sense the second time round, then decided that I didn't really care to find out.
So, be glad that you don't have to read this book, but you should all definitely celebrate that it was written.

While Joyce's Ulysses demonstrates his monstrous success with literary experimentation styles, FW does not. I find it poor by his standards. In academics (and among pseudo-intellectuals) the book is quite fashionable, and understably so - the style is unique. Its almost comical to listen to my fellow Joyce fans rave about it. But whenever I corner them, and beg them to dissect the work for me, the responses are as incoherent as the book itself. Perhaps it inspires creative thinking/translation from its readers, but nothing of the sort on my part, despite my repeated efforts to sincerely read it.

I've read far worse, that's for sure, but someone thinking of dabbling with Joyce for the first time should seriously consider selecting one of his more substantial earlier works, or the frustration with FW may alienate them forever from an otherwise brilliant and often very powerful author.

I don't think that Finnegans Wake itself makes so many so angry. Rather, the offending party is that tiresome brood of sanctimonious and disgustingly pedantic clowns collectively insisting, in a manner devoid of decency and respect for the common man, that it is the greatest and most important piece ever written, that somehow the entire history of the universe is encoded within its babblings, that it is their duty to proclaim its manifold glories to the vulgar masses, and that you are but a debased philistine and a hopeless product of the MTV generation if you either don't like it or can't understand it upon your first perusal. It is they who engender such ire, and deservedly so. Ignore them. In the words of Christ, "Verily I say unto you, they have their reward."

The idea that one should sit down and read FW as one would your average novel is as absurd as they come. I say that if you are so inclined and are looking for a challenge, by all means give FW a try. Dig up for yourself a quality dictionary, preferrably of the Oxford variety, whether in print or online (many works of classic literature practically require one as a companion piece anyway), an explanatory work like Campbell's if such suits you, and dig in. Take it little by little, don't feel yourself obliged to plow through it like a steamroller, and don't be afraid to read other, lighter works along the way (this last suggestion also works for those looking to tackle Proust in its entirity, but that's another can of worms). Reading it aloud, as has been said, is highly recommended. Of course you're not going to understand it all or even most of it(those that say they do belong to that class of fools already mentioned), but with adequate preparation and time for reflection you'll surprise yourself. No, it isn't easy, but it absolutely is rewarding. FW is one dense fruitcake, and it is comforting to know that you can return to it again and again throughout your life and continue to pick out all manner of goodies.

So if you like it, great! If you don't, you're in good company, as some of the sharpest literary minds of the 20th century didn't like it either. In the end, it's a matter of individual taste and whether or not you're looking for something as radically experimental and unique as this. As I have read somewhere (although I forget where), Ulysses was Joyce's masterwork and this, his grand experiment.

Unfortunately I did not receive the used third edition that I ordered, but a new first edition. It shipped from the UK so it took about a month to show up, and I'm certainly not going to fritter with exchanging. I own Finnegans Wake, but not the one I want. What a minor drag.

The type of book that stands alone. It is a true masterpiece and a sentinel for the English language. I was not able to follow the story very well but the the combination of words that are strung together are magnificint. It is something that I think should be read aloud as ther reader will be able to put the sounds together in a more coherent structure. It is enigmatic and incomprehensable. A mystery that will take scholars centuries to try and decifer but guess what? The never will. Not for your average reader but for the lover of words and language.

Finnegans' Wake is only underrated by those who either A: Think a good piece of fiction is one that should pour through their brains at the same rate as television drivel, or else B: forget that Joyce's entire career was a Work In Progress, and should be taken from start to finish. Those readers who cannot make sense of the novel should begin with "Dubliners," and when they have successfully digested that, proceed chronologically through Joyce's works; to pick up Finnegans' Wake and then try and read it without having any of Joyce's nuance of style under your belt is akin to mental suicide, and, worse, will frustrate you into not reading Joyce at all. Every word, even the hundred-letter Thunderwords, Joyce placed carefully in his seventeen years writing the novel; surely, no one of them can be easily dismissed after one or two hours' cursory reading. What is more, the book requires only that someone have the barest knowledge of Language to begin with-- it is the human sense of music, that sense from which language derives all of its power to both frighten and quell, that Joyce's prose tries to capture. Little wonder that certain episodes from the book have been called "The greatest prose ever written by a man."

...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...

The best and truest use of Finnegans Wake is to practice the divination called "bibliomancy". In bibliomancy, you open a book to a randomly determined passage and peruse the selected text for insight into a question or problem so vexing that you've turned to divination for answers. Traditional books for this purpose are the Bible and Homer.

The Bible and Homer are not ideal for this purpose the way Finnegans Wake is, though. With them, you're likely to light on something like a genealogy, a ship catalogue, or instructions for the curtains on the Tabernacle. But every page of Finnegans Wake is properly oracular, laden with obscure hints that might actually shed prophetic insight on the topic at hand. No other book is its equal for this purpose.

And, of course, Finnegans Wake also has the advantage of being inerrant in all matters of fact clearly stated therein.

When I first saw finnegan's wake in the library, I had already heard of its difficulty and strangeness, before i lifted it and looked inside, which only affirmed my suspicion.

it was then that I decided I would never read the book. it took only a year or so later to decide to give it a shot.

Of course, i recommend at least some sort of guide to help you through, because this is the most difficult book to read possibly in the history of man. 'A Skeleton Key...' is a good one, but I have never checked the other guides so I cant recommend any others, but Campbell's other book on Joyce, 'Mythic Worlds, Modern Words' is also good, perhaps even better, because it provides a guide to all the works of Joyce.

He was a difficult writer to read and of course he will get even more difficult to read as his 'pop' (not sure if i should call it pop...) culture reference...historical references is a better term, when his historical references become obscure...not to mention he is a very vague writer, and he expects the reader to exert him/herself on his works constantly. But once the rudiments of the story gather together inside of your head, you can see the sea of information he had inside of his crowning achievement, and thus the reason for the title of the review, and the true beauty of his rambling words, sentences and phrases that at first glance mean nothing, only to eventually coalesce into meaning and poetry.

it is a very difficult read, but those up to it might be able to appreciate its grandeur.

also, to spoil some of what joseph campbell says in his 'mythic worlds, modern words book', this book is purgatory, evidenced by its dreamlike repetition and idiosyncracies, while Ulysses was Inferno, his illumination of hell within the psychologies and eccentricities of the human mind. his version of paradise was never written, but campbell finds within a letter Joyce wrote to his brother that the words were to be 'simple, lucid' (a clear departure from anything he wrote).

i almost feel cheated now that he never wrote it....makes you wonder what might have been in his head, after his latter two monster works...

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.

A lot of people say that 'Finnegans Wake' is a worthless book because they don't understand it. They're right, of course--nobody fully understands this book. That's the whole point.
'Finnegans Wake' does not tell a story; it plunges the reader into it. The reader becomes the dreamer-- things are slightly out of focus, the real and the unreal mix freely, words and thoughts blur and merge together, everything has multiple connotations, and it is both beautiful and baffling. However, its not simply unstructured chaos-- there is a "plotline" which seeks to examine the relationships between members of a family through the dreams of H.C.E (the central character and father) and his wife. But Joyce extends the "plot" far beyond the specific characters, so (like 'Ulysses') 'F.W.' becomes timeless.
Speaking of Ulysses, I think many people (I, in some ways, was one of them) are upset when they realize that F.W. is entirely different, because Ulysses is so amazingly beautiful and perfect. Many reviewers here ask why Joyce didn't write more of the gorgeous prose-poetry of 'Portrait...' and Ulysses. Here's why: Joyce was genius. And geniuses never hold still for very long. Ulysses proves Joyce as a literary master. F.W. proves Joyce to be a master of ideas, art, and language itself. Comparing Joyce's previous work with F.W. is like comparing apples to oranges, as his aims and motives are entirely different. 'Portrait' and 'Ulysses' are both literary masterpieces, while F.W. is simply a masterpiece (though it may perhaps fail as "literature" because it isn't meant to be-- that probably won't make any sense to those who have not read it). The structure, ideas, and concepts Joyce puts forth allows F.W. to transcend the medium of a book; it really belongs on its own seperate shelf at the library or in a museum.
Bottom line: 'Finnegans Wake' is a work of art. Those who dismiss it because it is confusing as well as those who try to analyze the meaning of every word are missing the point. Its beauty lies in its confusion, double-meanings, and wordplay. Yes, it is difficult, but reading F.W. is an experience that no other book compares to. It is beautiful. It is chaotic. It is magnificent.

Finagans Wake is unlike anything I every read. It's a bit scary. You catch yourself seeing and thinking of words in reference to the dream world of the Wake. Give yourself about four months and get a hold of Tindall's guide. Although the Wake deserves five stars, I most confess Joyce's use of obscene and vulgar motifs detracts from the work on the whole. If your going to be in traction for a while this the book for you.
Waken knot new!

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.

Finnegan's Wake is a beautiful, profound work. It succeeds as an interpretation of the dream of everyman (history). The reader becomes an active part of the novel because, even if two or three meanings escape notice, the meanings that have relevance to one's own life stand out and are easily interpreble as having signifigance to the entire work. Secondary sources are unnecessary. Understanding the entire work is not the point of reading the Wake- the book is meant to help one understand one's role in history, but not to allow a holistic vision of history itself.
As an expression of the state of sleep from the sleeper's perspective, Finnegan's Wake is intentionally garbled and thrown together as a rubbish heap of information from the dreamer's life. Because the sleeper is meant to represent Everyman, however, the dreams and thoughts of this particular night are applicable to everyone's life in some way or another. As in Ulysses,although to a greater extent, the words are often obtuse while the scenes depicted are commonplace. This gives an air of mystery and insolubility to everyday life. You may say that this is disingenuous pompous posturing- but I would respond that life in itself is a great mystery and that I am sorry you think you have it figured out.
The language is decipherable, but don't read the book just to decipher the words. As with any novel, the innate joy in reading it is just that- reading it. Take what you find therein- if you do, upon reading it again, you will find more. The humor and power of the work shows itself again and again if you allow it to do so, and the many meanings and perspectives of Joyce's universalism are often subconciously understood and not realized as such until later thought.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with a great amount of time on their hands. "Phall if you but will, rise you must." Dive in; Finnegan's Wake does not disappoint.

Finnegans Wake is a wonderful, brilliant and complex magnum opus of the past, present, and future of humanity. It encompasses everything that a book possibly can, and is of such density that years can be spent getting down to the various layers and depths of meaning in the book. Of course, the style of writing and language can be (more than) a little challenging at first, but after one reads and re-reads--first merely with the uninterfering awareness and perception of one listening to a symphony of music, and then, each subsequent time, with increasing comprehension--the nuances and subtleties of the writing become more accessible. It is a conscious, personal and adventurous discovery, and it is one that will leave you perplexed and pleased to no end. Give it a shot. And then a dozen more. Give it as many shots as it takes to make Finnegans Wake your favourite book.

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.)

Actuation of `Wake': Unravelling the soul from the eternal male-orgasm of temporality-a synthesis of anthesis; like complete, utter annihilation, the result of Anti- and its opposite, devouring each other to nullity. When, for that infinite instant, you connect to the unveiled phallus of divinity and in that harsh omnipotent instant ecstasy become nothing that is nevertheless something. On the graphic stage, the rudimentary marks of letters become the defined ingeniousness of language in cascading momentum to incontrovertible self-expression (another Grail Quest doomed to failure in the physical pursuit).
The permutations of word in letter, phrase, and text provide the hit and miss of the Perfect Word (that makes both cosmos and chaos-`Chaosmos') in embryo. The Perfect Word being ever unspoken (and conversely: ever-spoken-and thus hidden in infinite division) is illiterate because it is both before and after language. Swollen and glowing clandestinely with the enticement (the promise) of the literary, the inner illiterate scythes into sensibility a billion cuts of unexpressible feeling, which are the pangs of death, the noumena of being outside of being. The embryo-illiterate is the anti-saviour (though still Saviour) of sentience, immolating intellect upon the searing combustibility of antithetical mindlessness.
So words become emblems (thus amorphic and undefinable, and are shown so through ingenious distortion to dis-acculturate). And metaphors are a joke on reality as a serious world view. Thus the text is a profound banality (as a fem-divine response to the ego-emperor of vain-glory), showing nothing, giving nothing except that which is sublime in the experience of the reading as a vocal phenomenon-a reckless (and thus potentially poignant) abandonment in intonation and rhythm. Thus is the stuff of magic. And so the soul (in its aspect of the nullity of the literate-illiterate combustion) is set free of convention and the stereotypes of communication (and, consequently, monosyllabic being). The words and text fall not then on culturally limited perception but rather on reception-it is what it is, judge not, and transformation-transfiguration through cadent text brings reader to eternal fem-orgasm of the unravelled soul, and thus redemption from the Fall that words as mind-memes concrete us to (ie, harsh homo-divine eroticism).

i haven't yet finished my first read through of this book, but even now i think it's fair to say that this is an amazing piece of work. i just want to reiterate what a couple of people have said. firstly this is not literature, as such, it shares far more with music than it does with literature, and secondly, it should be read as you would listen to music, letting it wash over you, not trying to control any of it, not trying to realize what is happening. you should realize that after a while things will make sense, and even if the book never makes sense to you entirely it doesn't matter. to view this book as beautiful nonsense does no disservice to it, i think, because it is definitely the ultimate in beautiful nonsense if that's the way you want to see it.
and really, if you're going to write this off as gibberish, realize the man spent 17 years of his life perfecting this book. he went blind while writing it. his daughter was put into a mental asylum and europe was in the begining throes of world war II and still he wrote this book. more work has been lovingly poured into these pages than most writers put into their entire career. if you don't like it, fine, but calling this book gibberish is doing a huge disservice to the author and only making yourself look stupid. just say you don't like it, that's all you need to say.

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.

Before continuing this review I would first like to make it clear that I have only read parts of 'Finnegan's Wake.' Not the entire thing. I personally don't think it's necessary to read all of 'Finnegan's Wake' to truly enjoy it -- it is, for the lover of nonsense, explosive creativity, and utter literary chaos, a delight. I loved what I read of it and intend to continue sifting through it's many linguistic treasures. Who knows, maybe I'll finish it one day.

'Finnegan's Wake' was an experiment. The result of an idea James Joyce wanted to flip around. I'm sure all you writers out there understand the concept -- Joyce was trying out a new form of the art. Whether or not he succeeded is totally up to the reader. Fan of the nonsensical? Sick of technical, murky prose? Give 'Finnegan's Wake' a try. To those people (myself included), Joyce's book is an absolute joy; a hilarious, thought-provoking joyride through the English language.

However, there is the other side of the argument, a side not entirely without merit. 'Finnegan's Wake' makes no sense. Literally. It is not supposed to. It represents the intricacies of Joyce's complex mind. There are those that scorn that type of literature, calling it pointless and difficult, lacking depth and meaning. To them, 'Finnegan's Wake' is a failed experiment. Perhaps you are one of them -- if so, read the lovely section the store has open and decide whether or not you REALLY want to spend your money on this book.

What's truly wonderful about 'Finnegan's Wake' is that it's ambivalent. It is the embodiment of ridiculous (sometimes frustrating) linguistic puns, yet also hints at a deeper meaning. Perhaps that in and of itself was Joyce's experiment, to create tension between the rational and the irrational, and he's poking fun at us 'artsy intellectuals' as we argue over this oddity in traditional canon.

One last note: to anybody that enjoyed 'Finnegan's Wake', I would highly recommend John Lennon's book 'In His Own Write' (yes, John Lennon wrote other material besides songs). It is a similar mish-mash of twisted words, running together in a very James Joyce-esque manner. Sometimes the similarities are eerie. The one thing about Lennon is that his work tends to be slightly more coherent...

I could not understand 95% of the book. Understanding came as a sort of blissful peak above the fog, the crest of the high of the ride.

But it was still fun, & probably the most original novel I have ever read.

I noticed if I took a hallucinogenic, it all seemed to make perfect sense to me - however, if I was stone cold sober, it all sounded like random word generated garble.

A dublin
sleuth
drops
The search for
The clue to
Go pubbin

the city
built under dublin

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!

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

People who miss the point of FW are missing the point of Irish wakes, indeed of Irish culture; Irish wakes are a celebration of the continuity of life.
This is probably the most erudite, and literate book I have ever read. Certainly it is one of the most symphonic - for this really is a book that should be experienced aloud. If Shakespeare's plays need to be seen and heard on stage to appreciate them, then certainly FW needs to be experienced aloud. The overall plot is a celebration of the cycle of life.
Did I understand all of the quips, multi lingual puns, and word plays? No, but I could make sense and appreciate most of them. This is truly a superb piece of art written by a master of several languages.
Was I intimidated before reading the book? Frankly I am more intimidated now after reading FW. This is one that should not be missed.

Finnegans wake is a written out dream. It took 17 years to write, it was a labor of love. Upon release it polarized critics, with its sampling of 60-70 different languages, its use of multi-lingual puns, portmanteaus, it reads more like a word puzzle than a book. It has no discernible plot upon first inspection. The first sentence is the middle of the last sentence making it an endless cycle, and upon first read it looks like a load gibberish. And you friend reader may wonder why one would read such a work? Simply put: It is one of the most brilliant works of the 20th century (or any time for that matter). Here is the reason why. It is highly inter-textual, upon closer inspection you can see the level of detail Joyce put into this work. Every page is layered with meaning upon meaning upon further meaning. If you calculate it, 17 years, 628 pages, thats about a sentence or a little more a day. With that said. How can anyone say (like these many one star reviews) that it is just gibberish. if someone wrote that little a day, it should be apparent that this is the exact opposite of gibberish. Gibberish is to imply that it is nonsense and lacks meaning altogether. This couldn't be farther from the truth with this work. Each word or group of words or sentence is so packed with meaning that one could spend a week analyzing one page. That is the complete opposite of gibberish in my opinion. but also, this work is a hilarious tome of comedy and beauty. its use of language can make you laugh on every single page. but I digress. this work as previously stated is a work of genius and there is the reasoning. (i'm also fairly sure it is a microcosm of the universe which contains the meaning of life and other things).

I have been reading some of the positive and negative reviews of Finnegans Wake, and decided to post my own thoughts.

I think of Finnegans Wake as an experiment. It's really up to the reader to decide whether it is a successful experiment or not.

I kind of like it, but it probably wouldn't be a book I would take with me if I was going to be marooned on a desert island and could only take a few books with me. On the other hand, maybe I would, because it is a book that the more time you put into it the more it gives back. So if I was going to be on the island for a LONG time, Finnegans Wake would be a good choice.

Some folks have been saying there is no plot or characters. Well, yes there is. The main character is a fellow named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, HCE for short. He is a bar-owner in Dublin, Ireland. His wife is Anna Livia Plurabelle, ALP. They have two sons, usually called Shaun and Shem (short for Seamus), and a daughter named Issy. Also at the bar work an old woman named Kate and an old man named Sackerson. Other characters are the customers at the bar and schoolgirls who are friends of Issy.

The main plot concerns rumours that circulate about an incident involving HCE. These rumours are very vague, but they usually seem to be accusing HCE of some sort of sexual misbehavior in the park.

But Joyce has written the novel so that it can be read on many levels. HCE and his family stand for every human family, and for all of humanity. The rivalry between Shaun and Shem stand for all sorts of struggles between man and his "brother man". The two of them together come into conflict with HCE in a basic Oedipal struggle. HCE comes to stand for every person accused (rightly or wrongly) of misdoing. The whole thing is structured as a pattern that repeats itself over and over, from generation to generation, in families and whole nations, throughout history. Each generation takes the place of the previous one, and then in turn has its place taken by the next. Joyce symbolizes this by beginning the book with the end of a sentence that begins on the last page, making the whole book a circle with no real beginning or end.

In order that the book can exist on so many levels at once, Joyce uses the peculiar Finnegans Wake language. The words of this language are each able to mean two or more things at once. So any given sentence or section will mean one thing on the level of the story of HCE and his family, but will mean all kinds of different things on all the different levels that Finnegans Wake exists on.

Looking at just the first sentence:

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

So he is saying that he is now circling back from the end of the book back to the beginning.

On one level, he is talking about the river Liffey, a river in Dublin which does almost go in a circle, but starts near Howth Castle and runs past a church called Adam and Eve's.

He is also talking about the historical theories of Giambattista Vico (hence the word "vicus") who saw history as going in circular patterns that constantly recurred.

And Joyce realizes we could call this a "vicious circle".

When he says "Howth Castle and Environs" he incorporates the initials of his protagonist HCE, which is where he is going to start. (note that Joyce capitalizes the H, C, and E.)

He has also cicled back to the beginning of humanity, with Adam and Eve. (On a certain level, HCE and ALP stand for Adam and Eve. Think of how Adam was thrown out of a garden for committing a sin)

And the one sentence, or selected words from the sentence, can mean even more different things. The opening word sounds like the french for "Let us dream", and Joyce described all of Finnegans Wake as a dream.

The point is that this one sentence means all these things, and more, all at the same time. And these are the kind of word-games that Joyce plays with us for 628 pages. It doesn't get any easier, it stays like this for the whole book. To play the game well, you need to try to think the way Joyce did. It often helps to read the words out loud, with an Irish accent (like Joyce had). (Parenthetically, when I personally read a book, or anything else, I can "hear" the words in my mind. My understanding is that there are at least some people who when they read do not "hear" the words they are seeing. Finnegans Wake really requires the reader to "hear" the words, so if you have trouble with this try reading the book out loud.)

I guess the problem is that many people find these sorts of word games very difficult. Also, Joyce doesn't tell us the rules of the game. (There is one chapter where it looks like Joyce is about to tell us the rules, but then he doesn't) Many scholars have written excellent books about Finnegans Wake and their personal understanding of the rules of Joyce's game, and also the parts they believe they have "solved". But with Finnegans Wake, there always seem to be more levels of meaning that can be explored.

So if you enjoy these sorts of word games, you will enjoy Finnegans Wake. If you don't, then you won't. And you may not be able to tell the difference between Finnegans Wake and random gibberish, such as a computer generates. But this is not random gibberish, Joyce is really telling the story of humanity through this one Dublin family. If you know how to play the game, you will be able to find the characters and themes. I would recommend that someone coming to the book for the first time should get a hold of one of the books that gives some idea of how to "play the game".

There are a lot of people all over the world who enjoy playing the Finnegans Wake game. But if this is not your thing, that's okay.

The one thing that has struck me upon reading the negative reviews of Finnegans Wake on this page is the seemingly immature reactions of those who failed to enjoy it. One reviewer says his 'farts make more sense', while another says he urinated over a picture of Joyce because he couldn't understand the book. Pathetic. Sounds very like a 12 year olds reaction to me. I know, I know, it's a big step up from your Harry Potter books, but get over it, you either like it or you don't. I find it hilarious to hear people rave on and on about how Joyce commits disgusting crimes against the English language and so on. It's so plainly obvious that the people who write these things are people who are frustrated and afraid because they can't understand a book that is so acclaimed and highly-regarded and so to cover up the fact that they simply couldn't decipher it (which is nothing to be ashamed of) they attack Joyce and accuse him of destroying the English language. Give me a break - he revolutionised it.

Now, Finnegans Wake is not exactly a book with an exact point or meaning to discover. It is there for you to use, so to speak. It is a wide open universe of sound, image, thought.... almost everything. You can just open a page and draw something magical from it. It is like an encyclopedia of literature. It is also probably one of the most self-indulgent books of all time, seeing as only Joyce was able understand its 'true' meaning, if there is one at all. It would be completely impossible to read this like a novel, page to page, chapter to chapter. This is a book with no beginning and no end, literally. The first line continues from the last line. This symbolises the theory that history goes around in circles. There really is not much to be said, other than you can find every other book written inside Finnegans Wake. It is a linguistic zenith. It is the sum of all modernist work. It is a masterpiece. And, there is no pretense or snobbery with this review. I am an Irish teenager and I happened to enjoy Dubliners so I read his other books in order of their release, and I found each one a work of genius. This is not simply an intellectual book, for intellectual garble is only a fraction of the books power. I feel you could give this book to a ten year old and they could fall in love with it, that is, if it had a nice colourful cover with smily faces and flowers on it. Anyways, that's my review. You can either surrender to immature jealousy and fear just like D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf did when Ulysses was published, or you can open your mind and really use your imagination to get something from this classic.

(You started reading Finnegans Wake at age 13? Where were your parents, teaching the dog to write in terza rima? It's amazing you didn't catch aphasia and die.) No, it isn't incomprehensible, it's infinitely comprehensible, that's the whole problem? Gibberish? You read it, didn't you? Do you know what "gibberish" means? Do the one-star people here understand War and Peace, or even Germinal, or do they take bits and pieces for narrative and content? It's only tougher to recognize your goal as a reader...and it's the funniest book ever written. But "The Work of a Thousand Geniuses"? Sounds a bit spastic, like something Yeats would say while putting on his magic shoes. Joyce is no Shakespeare, and David Foster Wallace is all his fault, and we must never forget it.

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.

Okay, so maybe I'm an idiot, but I tried reading this thing about ten years ago. I'm an educated guy -- two masters degrees and work toward a Ph.D. -- but I got nothing out of FW. Now, I'm not suggesting there's nothing there to get, but whatever it is I just can't say.
I have no idea how many stars this book deserves, so I'll leave it at five. When it comes to FW, everything seems meaningless. . . .
I read the first 50 pages, determined to wade through it all. I finally realized, since I didn't have the faintest notion of what I had read to that point, I could quit and have the same experience as if I had finished it, but with less time spent and far less frustration.
Now, don't get me wrong -- I usually enjoy difficult fiction. I've read The Sound and the Fury a half dozen times, for God's sake and I love it.
Okay, just wanted to put my two cents in. I've just checked Terence McKenna's Surfing on Finnegan's Wake (the audio version) out from my library and will give it a listen. Perhaps I'll give Joyce a try again some day.

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 the store, 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.

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.

1---understand all public advertising, including that of computers, to its depths.
2---understand how the internet formed.
3---read ANY book written in English, no matter how "difficult".
4---understand your relationship to all your senses.
5---read with all of your senses.
6---not feel uncomfortable or frustrated when you don't understand stuff.
7---feel at ease with being overwhelmed.
8---understand how knowledge institutions need to be subverted, temporarily destroyed, and radically reconfigured to better suit not only the economy but also the individual's private intellectual life.
9---understand the nature of most communication mediums and art forms,
10--not take high art and literature so seriously.
11--not feel the need to have a psychedelic experience via dropping acid, which is can be ify.
12--predict the future, and in turn see how this isn't a big deal.
13--stop being a language nazi, if you are one.

Finnegan's Wake is perhaps the most difficult book in the world to read. If you hope to understand it, don't read it. There is no way to possibly comprehend this book. I have read 590 of the 628 pages and am convinced that it is an enjoyable book that nobody in their right mind could understand. Even if you read thousand page books in a day, give yourself an absolute minimum of a week for this great work of nothing. Not a book for the impatient. --Sean Moberg --13 years old

This book is a drug. This book is a weapon. I'm almost surprised it's legal. But then a friend of mine tells me that people can get away with a lot more in books than they can in other mediums, because so few people read these days. Buy this book. Pick any page. Make sure it is daytime; reading late at night may cause insomnia. You do not have to finish or understand this book to enjoy it. It's like Joyce took all of human energy and made it into one huge handy random reference tome. Incredible. A sure cure for depression. When I discovered it I almost immediately felt like going out on the street and reading ramdom parts to random people.

to mix among the manglemento of chaos, to expose man's larceny, his lust-bulls and his absurdity, to portray the bipedal tool-smith as corrupt, mentally handicapped and dire - this then is fìnnegans wake, categorically the most convincing portrait of absurdity ever written. but what humor! what laughter! although this work concerns pessimism and the inevitability of crash and foam it nevertheless resounds in a splurge of joke! this baffling maze, once understood, cannot help but entertain us as we watch it meander from one scene to the next, each portrait as absurd as the one proceeding. begin with the seventh chapter, the easiest chapter. immerse yourself in its fold as you read shaun castigate his brother as he writes a slanderous history of his life. then move onto part three chapter one where we see shaun in action, in a bar, boasting among his compatriots, attacking shem, narrating the story of the ant and the grasshopper, his speech slurred, his mind jumbled in chaotica. with that you should have the ability to then master this outrageous tome dedicated to exposing man's most profligate urges. here man is a lecher, incapable of beautezza, nowhere judicious, circumspection a thing of nihlum. here only nonsense governs the reason as the men herein spout only mangled sentences, shouting mostly, helplessly inept in their decorum. it is a bold work, radical, original, rarely imitated in its shape, color or architecture.

author of Lorelei Pursued and Wrestles with God

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.

I just finished a graduate seminar on the Wake, and I found it stimulating and enlightening, though still daunting. I believe the format we chose helped tremendously; we had nine strong, informed readers who each read the same passage and gathered once a week to discuss it. Reading in groups, I think, is the only way to begin to grasp the Wake; everyone brings their own idiosyncratic knowledge to the table, and can shed light on passages that would otherwise remain obscured. I believe the Wake is uniquely built in a way to reward group studies. It seems all of history is in these pages, and discussing it with some wise colleagues is the best way to unpack it all. Of course it helps if one of your colleagues did her dissertation on Joyce!

you will, not likely, ever "read" the wake in any average sense of the word. joyce has created something amazing, a book that, rather literally, has something for everyone, yet encompasses all too much to be read by any one person (likely even himself, he spoke only a handful of the languages (estimated at upwards of fifty) he made use of in his prose). making sense of even just a paragraph may contain a slive of russian history, a nod to the great italian violin makers, and (almost without fail) contain some lesson about the catholic church burried in it somewhere. if you enjoy puzzles that require remarkable reliance on outside sources for help, this is an excellent place to spend your time. truth be told, whatever it may be literarily, what it is socially is even greater, for an attempt at a reading verily requires a group of variagated back-grounds to even begin to scratch the surface, an end-result of which is that it brings together people (particularly academics) of various backgrounds to work on a single problem. i would imagine few other ob- and/or sub- jects require such interdisciplinary coöperation. so, the next time you find yourself sitting around a table with a physicist, a musician, a historian, a linguist, and a carpenter, pull the book out and see if you can't make some sense of it. it's all there, it just takes a bit of work.

This book is not to be read literally, rather it should be read aloud -- "sung" as if it were a piece of music. And like a piece of music, I find myself lazily following the words whilst occasionally getting a flash of images. One wonders how a musician, not of instrument or voice but of words, would interprete this piece.
I know there are audio book versions available, but they're abridged. Besides, they're probably read as if the text were prose not poetry -- like a student reciting an historical document. I eagerly await the release of an unabridge version in the vein of the complete and unabridged Ring of the Nibelungs by Wagner (with James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera).

I see a plethora of 5-star reviews here for Joyce's opus. I think it is natural to dislike it, however, and I don't think it makes a neanderthal of me because I dislike it too. Look, as a teen I read Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica; I struggled through at least half of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and I've read Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Faulkner. I don't mind struggling with a book if I can mine something from it. FW is too long for such playful babble. I might read a pamphlet of such gobbledegook just for the fun or the exercise of my imagination, but this monster book? I have to feel that Joyce was playing a joke on everyone, or he'd really gone off his rocker. Why should we even bother? I also read Beckett's Waiting for Godot and found that a complete waste of time. My reaction was that it was absurd, but I guess the theatre of the absurd is supposed to be just that. But why bother? I can stand on a crowded street corner and hear trivial chatter as meaningful as Beckett's play. It kind of reminds me of something I saw in an art gallery years ago, during the "pop art" craze: a rectangular piece of cardboard, painted with white enamel, mounted on a flat-white background, named, appropriately, "White Enamel on White." Yet it had an inflated price tag, and I did hear a few oohs and ahhs from people behind me. Feeling like a barbarian, I snorted and left the gallery. This is art? And Finnegan's Wake is literature? Please, give me a break.

Words that don't communicate are just meaningless black symbols on white paper. What was Joyce trying to communicate? Sure, I can get a kick out of several minutes of it, but then I'm eager to return to the real world. I can't help wondering if the 5-star reviews for FW are written by the same kind of people who sighed over the white cardboard in the gallery, or who find deep meanings in Waiting for Godot. Still, maybe I am a barbarian, and maybe they're of a higher order than I am, so I'm willing to congratulate them for finding gold ore in FW, and wish them happy babbling on their re-read of this inflated classic. Joyce I don't demean, but this FW is a perfect waste of time. If this is literature, then it's at a dead end.

There is, I think, one prerequisite for enjoying this book. Be open to it. Whatever legendary reputation is attached to it, is there because it is, in any sense, an extraordinary book. Understanding a plotless novel that a positively brilliant man spend over a decade on is not a very realistic goal, I think, when reading it. However, enjoying it is no hard task at all. Reading it attentively, not meticulously, left me smiling all the time. People complaining about its inaccessibility are, I think, too preoccupied with assuring their own intelligence by trying to understand everything.

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.

Joyce's Finnegans Wake is a masterwork of linguistic indecipherability. His puns, wordplays and encyclopedic depth reflect the genius at work in this novel of night. The disgust shown above clearly reflects a culture of sarcasm and anti-intellectuality. But this novel is no place to start with Joyce: he made monumental leaps between Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake--to start at the end is like trying to do quantum physics without having taken an algebra course. Joyce has written either the twentieth century's masterpiece or the greatest practical joke in academic history. Try to read the work, but understand its context.

To answer a few points made by other reviewers:
1) Yes, some people have finished this book. I have, and so have several people I know.
2) Some people enjoy this book. (see above).
3) It isn't just self-indulgence by academics. For example: a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University has said that it's not worth reading. Lots of academics have. These are people who 'know everything' for a job. Can you imagine how much FW annoys them?
4) It's hard. Yes, that's right, hard. But hard can be fun. Just like sex. (FW does take longer though).
5) The reason why lovers of Joyce sound so passionate about it is that they genuinely feel that way. For real. Imagine you'd fallen in love and noone around you had a clue what it felt like. You'd want to shake them and tell them.
6) It makes sense. To fully understand it (if that's possible) would take generations of study. But i) If you're reading for pleasure, not ego kicks, surely how much you get out matters more than what proportion of the book's meaning you can lay claim to, ii) like life, reading FW is made up of lots of small pleasures and ii) Lighten up!! It's funny! Anyway, when was the last time you 'fully' understood a book?
It's easy to see why the great majority of people would decide that they had other priorities. I respect that opinion. But please don't fling insults at a book that some of us love. Yes, love. Reading FW was a high-point of my life. Emotion and excitement: anger, frustration, joy, humour, delight, even boredom. Deep relationships are difficult. They hurt. And they make us more alive.

I can't understand why anyone would spend 20 years writing this

The book is incomprehensible. Read a regular book you can understand without having to read it aloud

I love Joyce. Portrait, Dubliners, great stuff. Wonderful poetry. He starts to get a bit wonky in Ulysses, but even that is readable (if not altogether understandable - Giffords book is definitely a necessary provision)

But why write a book such as the Wake? Didn't he say he thought people would be laughing while reading it?

But writing a book noone can understand..

He must've been out of his tiny little mind. Couldn't he have written another play, or more short stories about the Eire he loved/despised.

It makes no sense to me! Why would anyone want to read what is, basically, a mess. How was this even published? Didn't someone tap him on the shoulder and say, "Joyce, this makes no sense"

Good grief! Joyce was actually a decent writer to this point!

This book makes you gifted and all your past readings become more accurate and connected with everything you have in store to read. And it's immensely funny,too. One should read it in several places: during a buffalo stampede, under some really huge cataracts, to the love of your life, standing naked near some old country river, amidst improbable beasts and birds and having it read back to you, using retro reading apparatus. I mean this book is so unique that after some lines , if wou catch its energy, its sense of flow, its wateriness you'll come back to it day after day, always finding some newness.

Of course it will revoultionize your identity as reader. It will distrub your a prioris about the act of reading, and instead of telling you some linear tale about our age and anxieties it will lift your view some thousand meters above the Collective Insect and all tales and myths beautifully encrypted will be displayed decoded and perform new actions before you. No need for brain expanders, whether chemical or organic. This book is pure psylocibes, Unadvisable for shy minds, for conformists of all sorts.

If you've heard anything about this novel, it was probably that it is difficult. Well, it is. Very, very difficult. It is so hard to get through, most people need more than a little help along the way. This book shows just how far a writer can push language, and just how farthe novel form will go. This is a book by an obtuse, highly literate type for other obtuse, highly literate types. If you fit the bill, dig in.

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!

Were it not for this novel (?) somewhere some little known writer would create something similar and put him/herself on the litereay map, causing the rest of us to have to hear about it for an unbearably long time. I am glad an already established, and, at this time, much revered writer pulled this linguistic trick so as not to have hear about what a genius the beforementioned hypethetical author is. Joyce was already loved for the slightly more comprehensible books he wrote prior to this one, and therefore the release of this prank, whoops, novel did little more than secure his place as the "greatest novelist." Now we can go on ignoring the gags and babble of "Finnegan's Wake" and go back to enjoying readable books.
Thanks.

book cause when you're reading it you're on the other part; they're calling it the levels. I was running earlier when this book came along. Some people in the other room were sleeping until I fell of my chair. That is. It was arguably the best moment because of smiles and of course the "Temper-Chur". Zabadoo-zing song rides twice in the loop. Finnegans Wake is a spectacular

Oh, man, it just puts me down to see how people who obviously haven't read the whole book (and more importantly read it twice, thrice and so on) slag it down, blame it a joke, a pure jumblebumble of twisted words, blame the author insane and so forth... It's not too great to hear, when I recommend it to someone: "oh, i've read it's just Joyce's joke" or "it's just puns, it's meaningless" etc. If you don't understand it, let it be, it's not for you. You've right to your opinion but...
I'm reading FW for a 3rd time now, and I'm convinced it's not a novel, or poetry or even a book (although it is, in a way) but a new kind of medium. It's written vertically, like counterpoint in music. That one leaf on the last page, that the mother river is bearing on her, is the actual page you're holding; the river takes it out to the sea and to the first page. It's a spiral. I have no words to describe it; the feelings, the moods I get when reading it. You HAVE to learn to read FW. It took me 4 years of struggle before it actually struck me, and I got it. And the text hasn't ceased to suprise me since. It's always with me, wherever I go. Even if I don't even open it, because I've noticed that when I've left the book home, I'll be missing it sooner or later.
Joyce insane? I don't care, but it takes a genius to write something as striking as this.

Obviously both and Finnegan proves it. Joyce spent seventeen years on this book, which can be properly read and understood by only one person - James Joyce, who passed away in 1941.

Now if you'd like to devote yourself - and perhaps your life - to achieving an understanding of Finnegans Wake, you are certainly free to do so. And, having once attempted to achieve such understanding myself, I can assure you that some of your time will be well spent. But the facts are as follows:

1. Joyce was fluent in a number of European languages and had a nodding acquaintance with many more.

2. From this knowledge he fashioned a special vocabulary of multilingual blends and puns which he used, with ordinary English syntax, to create the solipsistic discourse of Finnegans Wake. It is, in effect, a private language.

3. Since most of his vocabulary is drawn from, and puns on, the languages Joyce was familiar with, the only way one can begin to understand what's happening is to be as familiar with them as James Joyce.

4. The entire book is said to narrate the mostly incoherent nighttime dream of its antihero, "HCE." This was Joyce's way of "getting at" (whatever that means here) some sort of unconscious European cultural mind - as apprehended and imagined by James Joyce, of course.

5. Finnegans Wake is thus basically incomprehensible. The explications in Campbell & Robinson's Skeleton Key, while well informed, are, as the authors admit (though not in these words) the only sense they could make of it with the assistance of a shelf full of reference books. By getting in on the ground floor, C & W effectively dared anyone to disagree. Which would, of course, require another pair of literature Ph.D.'s with another shelf of reference books. There can be more than one interpretation of Finnegans Wake, including a belief in the profitlessness of interpretation.

6. Once in a while Joyce can still write a melodious sentence that is close enough to English to carry some meaning. As readers of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses are aware, Joyce was at one time a master of poetic English prose. Searching for the poetic moments, and those alone, makes for a pleasant diversion, and will undoubtedly reward the extremely well read and knowledgable.

If you're still intrigued, your best bet is to find a copy of the drastically abridged edition with commentary that Anthony Burgess put out forty years ago. Burgess loved Finnegans Wake in the Campbell-Robinson interpretation, and he supplies enough editorial matter to aid you in your innocent quest to believe in Finnegans' greatness. The book may be useful to some as a kind of Rorschach/I Ching for your own creativity: "How many puns and themes can *I* find?"

This book allegedly turned Derrida into a Deconstructionist. I believe it. Students of OCD and associated disorders should take a look at the entire Finagin Fannomenikonn, if you know what I mean.

Possibly the most difficult book in the English language (if that is what it is in) but worth all the trouble in deciphering, which is immensely helped by the Introduction. I recommend also all the other guides to The Wake because, believe me, you will need all the help you can get in getting through this book. Then, read it again; then, read it again. Soon the mesmerizing language of this dreamscape will reveal its many beauties. Well worth any effort.

Fascinating as a look into the symbol-laden mind of the highly learned James Joyce. The entire history of the world up until the first quarter of the twentieth century is here. Unfortunately, you have to spend years playing archaeologist to discover its hidden treasures. I've spent two years studying this thing, and will waste no more of my life on it: everything that Joyce has said in this has been said more eloquently and (obviously) more clearly elsewhere.

NOTE: If you're undecided about this, read the first page. If you hate it, you'll hate the rest. If you love it, you'll love the rest. The quality of the writing stays fairly consistent.

Above all,this book must be read ALOUD-to oneself and/or to others, in a fake Irish brogue (or a real one if you're Irish); using this method, it is amazing how formerly incomprehensible references will come to light! This is the only way I have ever found it possible to read at all...

Read the good key by Joe Campbell and don't try to understand every blasted drunken reference,as surely Joe did not (though granted he probably got 99% of them)

And don't read the abridged version, read what the man wrote all the way through and then again, for corn's sake! USQUEBAUGH!

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?

For the uninitiated, the crowning of Joyce's mad genius is summed up best here---

Hugh Hall "Speakcore" (NJ, USA) -

With this lit tall reave view I rue in all love Joyce is "Fink Against Wake." Poor Read errs, why do use still read that mess?! Be cause it is litterassure! Aye con cur! Joyce sad little skill lend less art. I ownly at hack him be cause tomb many read errs prays him. He is dead end gone. I am all I've! Your hear owes dead! Go back kenned lessen to what he rote. Then calm back hear end read this say gain. Come pair. There is no con test.

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Mr Hall does not even recognize the influence Joyce has had upon him!!!

For anyone involved in writing---poet, rapper, novelist, journalist, etc.---THIS is the definitive book to have on your shelf if you want to be a BETTER writer.

The secret to this book is discovering where it begins...and the answer is THE SAME PLACE IT ENDS...and the magic of Joyce's masterpiece is that you can begin and end anywhere. A GREAT book is one that you finish and wish that it didn't end...Joyce takes that concept one step further and GIVES you a book that NEVER ends.

Confused?

You will be totally perplexed once you read *Finnegans Wake,* a perplexity that will open the doors of perception...a confusion that will blow the hinges off of reality.

I just finished reading FW last night after almost six weeks of thorough plowing-ahead through it. I don't know where to begin in my review of it. I would start by summing it up in the word amazing. This book reinvents language. All through school, we're taught grammar, spelling, punctuation, the format for writing essays, letters, etc., but Joyce rejects that education, says the hell with it and does his own thing. What interpretation of a word is right? Is there a correct interpretation to be conceived? Is there any possible way to wrestle the magnitude of this book to the ground and pin it down to really understand what's going on?? Who knows. Joyce has the reader in the palm of his hand, and it's frightening what FW can do to one's mind. I'm sure that now everything else I read will make me think of Joyce in one way or another. I probably don't know 2% of the amount of foreign languages, literary, geographical, historical and mythological allusions and references which are crammed into the book, but the parts that I CAN decipher are very clever. It's not an interesting "story", but it's captivating simply because it's such an enigma of a book.
There is not so much a story here as there is a SERIES of stories or vignettes parodying various myths, historical events, etc. But several patterns occur and reoccur. Variations of the initials H C E and A L P (What does Joyce achieve with FW? Why, He Confuses Everyone! All Living Persons!), rearrangements of the name of Finn MacCool, the mythological Irish hero, and the predominant Vicoian theme of history repeating itself. H C E is born and reborn as Adam, as Humpty Dumpty, as Finn MacCool himself.. ad infinitum. Joyce deliberately left the whole thing open-ended so that every word can be interpreted in any way, depending on the individual readers personal knowledge. The more you learn, the more meanings will apply themselves to FW. Tip.
And those of you who call this book a piece of garbage have to admit one thing- at least it's original and unique. There's no other book quite like it. Joyce didn't write for other people to understand him. He didn't write to appeal to the literary elite. Joyce wrote for Joyce, and if the reader can be in on the joke, it can produce great results. If you don't get it and call it a pretentious collection of random phrases, then darn it, it's your loss. And don't criticize people for saying they like it. And no, I'm NOT "pretending" to like it- I LIKE IT! Certainly it has some dull spots, but it's 90% great!
It Awnly tuck me sicksweex to reed the hole booke, anned I enjoid it vary moch. Tip. To you extramely pretentious revousers who say that knowbody has ever red it all the weigh thru (whaat maycs you so dammed shore of it in the fursed plays?!), then increase the number of people of all time who have read it all the way through from "zero" to ONE. That one being me. Not only did I read every last word, but I ENJOYED it, and very much so. So stack that in yore piep und smoe kit!
On to bigger and better(?) things! I'm starting Ulysses tonight!

One of the defining moments in my life has to be the time that I read a few pages of Finnegan's Wake while tripping on psychedelic mushrooms. I have yet to read a series of words like the ones I read that night. My soul wa literally tranfigured by the sheer brilliance of Joyce. While I wouldn't recommend drugs anymore, I would say that one has to have a certain amount of expanded consciousness to fully appreciate and be moved by this fractally complex work. "Two thumbs up!"

I've read a lot of difficult works - Hegel's Phenomenology, Proust, the Tain, Goethe, Joyce's Ulysses. As difficult and obscure as they were at times, they all had some relative merits. I eventually even found some of them enjoyable on 2nd or 3rd readings (Proust was even enjoyable on the first).

This book, on the other hand, is devoid of anything approaching meaning on any level but the most reductionist as an occassional examination of words at play. It's a series of puns and obscurantist references without anything approaching a story or structure or even internal coherency. Of course, what could just as easily be the warblings of a paranoid schizphrenic has been inexplicably hailed by some academics as a masterwork. This is not a masterful examination of language. It's more like the musings of a 6 year old struggling with it who has a taste for bad puns and a serious case of apophenia.

If you have finished Joyce other works (which are mostly excellent btw) pick up some Dostoevsky or Proust, Borges, Chesterton, or Calvino. Avoid this book. It's a waste of time.

all. After just reading a small portion of Finnegans Wake here on the store - 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.

I think the time has come for Finnegans Wake fans to stop having to constantly justify their passion for this book and share our favourite aspects of this inimitable work.

What often gets missed among all the discussions about the book is just how funny it is. There are few books that have had me crying with laughter - this is certainly one of them.

Joyce's inventive use of language allows him to create a world like no other - few more enjoyable reads can ever be had.

Okay, here's the first paragraph:
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 and Environs.
(it's actually the end of the last sentence in the book). I defy anyone to honestly say that they would have any desire to read further (in fact, I am certain that no one has ever actually read this book). But, lest you think it must get better, here's a random paragraph from later in the book:
So olff for his topheetuck the ruck made raid, aslick aslegs would run; and he ankered on his hunkers with the belly belly prest. Asking: What's my muffinstuffinaches for these times? To weat: Breath and bother and whatarcurss. That breath no bother but worrawarrawurms. And Slim shallave some.
Uh-huh, fascinating stuff, eh?
Here's the cover blurb from the version I have, as written by Joseph Campbell, one of the folks who tried popularizing Joyce:
Finnegan's Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind...a compound fabe, symphony, and nightmare...Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necesssities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development, into a circular design, of which every part is beginning, middle and end.
Let me just point out that "freed...from...logic", is code for "it doesn't make sense". And the blather about circular design reflects something I recall reading about how Joyce intended the reader to be able to read the book from any point and in any direction with equal felicity. It worked; it's idiotic from start to finish.
So what's the end result? Well, you remember that old example that's used to demonstrate the magnitude of infinity--if you set down infinty monkeys in front of infinity typewriters (I suppose now it's computers) eventually one of them types Hamlet. Well, I think it's safe to suppose that in the meantime, they're typing Finnegan's Wake.
Now, some folks claim that it should be read for the beauty of it's language alone. But let me just say this, you'ld get en equally enjoyable aural experience by listening to the dialogue of the Ewoks from a Star Wars movie and it won't make any less sense.
GRADE: G (as long as we're being experimental, let's go lower than F)

Well, it has finally happened: I had divorced my wife, forgotten to feed all of my pets, and now my children don't even call me father anymore, but the "Strange man with a beard who lives downstairs," but I have finally finished and understood Joyce's novel, Finnegan's Wake. Was it worth it you may say? No doubt. My brain had grown three sizes that day. I felt as if a door I had been barging against for years (three to be exact) had finally opened and I'd fallen flat on my face from my own momentum. But once you lift your dirt laden face masked in grime, tears, and tomato sauce, you see that everlasting glow of true knowledge.

I gave this edition 3-stars because I could not find the obligatory Gun and/or noose provided for my own benefit. Ah, well, as you lowly mortals with your basic languages might say 'C'est La Vie'

What helped me understand this monument of literature a bit better was the anecdote I read in Nora Joyce's biography "Nora", where she complained that she couldn't sleep at nights when Joyce was writing FW in his working room, laughing at his own scribings.
Finnegans Wake is one of the most hilarious/beautiful books I've read. In fact I could replace the "hilarious/beautiful" with just about any other adjective, and it would explain as much.

"Out door, keel cooling vorsnevou." You could add this sentence to this mass of drivel and no one would know it wasn't written by Joyce. If the point of this book is the utter incomprehensibility of mankind, Joyce greatly contributes to it with this rambling waste of paper. A monkey and a typewriter could have written this "experimental" trash. I cannot see any way in which this "work" is a classic. It is stream of conscience gibberish. Anyone could have done it.

the need of this edition was to keep Finnegans Wake in copyright for another fifty years. this is the gabler edition of Ulysses all over again ( read "The Scandal of Ulysses" by Bruce Arnold). Joyce corrected both texts in his lifetime; now an army tinkerers service the James Joyce Estate "correcting" James Joyce. What towering hubris. If a new copyright for "The Day of Rabblement" or "Gas For A Burner" would induce college students to buy them they would be on the store in the morning.

Read this book while high on cannabis, shrooms, or acid. It is incredible!!! May be the greatest book ever written, next to the Bible which also should be read high because it was written under the influence.

If someone tells you he or she has read Finnegans Wake and understood a fair amount of it, you may safely assume he or she cannot be trusted to tell you the truth. Read the first five pages -- any five pages -- and declare otherwise. I dare you. Although there are undoubtedly a handful of literary scholars who feel compelled to try to grasp everything Joyce wrote, the vast majority of those who actually venture to wade through it -- let alone those who pretend that they have done so -- are playing ego games.

Nirvanic FINNEGANS WAKE: James Joyce's West/East Revelation Joyce, man of Letters, fluent in Languages, Traveler in circles high and low and places near and far, disciplined in conscientious Mindfulness, Scholar of knowledge, Compassionate husband father and friend, Prophet to Mankind.

Aspirationally, James Joyce has thrown all Mankind's manifest gods/deities/idols into FW, reading FW is like circumambulating the Kaaba's 360 idols. Each reader/critic will find their own manifest god and if enlightened, a Bodhisattva's perspective, move on to the Compassionate Omniscient Eternal Unmanifest/Visnu and to their own individual spiritual karmic path.

Joyce's Ulysses' is the story of a young man, its framework is Homer's 'Odyssey'. A tale of a Modern-day Odysseus' personal existential sexual quest, to overcome his psychological internal travails (not Odysseus' external travails) and to affirm humanity: father, mother, son, and daughter. Joyce's FW's is the story of a family, its framework is Giambattista Vico's (road/path) 'La Scienza Nuova's' 4 stages of cyclic history: theocratic to aristocratic to democratic to chaos. Fractured by Indra's thunderbolt (Shiva's trident) ending chaos and restarting the world/day again with theocracy.

FINNEGANS WAKE (FW) and Ulysses (a tantalizing 'Punic admiralty report') are both situated in Dublin, though written on the European continent Joyce memorializes his birth home. FW is 'Ulysses' on a universal scale, Bloom becomes All-Men (HCE) and Dublin becomes the World. Joyce's Ulysses (Bloom) is an energetic man hopping out of bed, plunging into the Dublin day, waging battles real and unreal, exhausted by controversy and rejuvenated by love (Molly). Joyce's HCE is man eternal, a universal man of all wisdom, compassion, understanding, a man of all time. Joyce's FW protagonist is Finnegan, who (re)incarnates to HCE, who will (re)incarnate to Shaun and Shem.

Reading FW is entering the "mind of James Joyce" and his expansive word palette. Joyce labored for two decades assembling his masterpiece tantras/sutras. The mind of Joyce is the "library of mankind" who has reordered dictionaries, encyclopedias, and volumes of knowledge to reveal a West-East allegorical perennial mandala of Mankind's (HCE/Krishna's and ALP/Radha's) compassionate thoughts (manifest and spiritual), a revelation. FW is a spiritual volume to be Read and Read again for 10,000 years.

Readers have for decades mis-attributed dozens and dozens of characters in FW. Mis-reading Joyce's recognition that all personalities always have two-aspects at any moment in time (past/present, evolving/devolving, present/future, observed/Maya & observer/Thaya or Tamas/Creation & Rajas/destruction, truth/falsehood, light/darkness and hopefully an Enlightened recognition of two-worlds, manifest & spiritual), a recognition that "two becomes one" and "one becomes two". Consequently, Joyce has hundreds of "paired names" for the Father, Mother, two Sons and Daughter. A young HCE (Shem-like) Persse goes to sea as the NC (HCE adventuring) but on displacing Kersse ('Son of Ashe's' cursed-aspect) the NC/HCE leaves his bachelored Persse to become a married HCE with two new-aspects (*T & R) His Shaun-aspect and His Shem-aspect, which will be manifested in His sons. While the maid Ana upon consummation of their marriage has two new-aspects ALP and Kate (ALP's drudge-aspect, *M/T), this occurs with almost all of Joyce's FW's characters.

"Dreams of Clarity" imparted gifts: HCE dreams of how his family's lives may influence his children's future loves, book II:4. HCE dreams of how his children's (play) future adulthood may unfold as an extension of his life's experiences, books (II:1) & III:1. HCE dreams of how his parenting instructions will influence his children's future of moving past their life's manifest obstacles to their independent & individual Unmanifest/Visnu spiritual lives, book III:2. HCE dreams of how he has prepared his children to defend themselves from their family inheritances (FW), ALP his soulmate is invited (Mannagde-shared) into his dream to defend him, as is his cherished Issy (Mannagde-shared), book III:3; and Shem's (Glugg/Jerry) receptive "Tibetan dream Yoga" (Mannagde-shared, HCE gifted), book II:1 and Shem's channeling intrusion interrupting his parent's sexuality/meditation, HCE rebuffed, book III:4. "Clear Light Dream" Moksha, ALP's and HCE's lovemaking Nirvana, the past dissolving and a new day arising, book IV.

Each day we awaken from our dreams to the Joys and sufferings of our lives, restarting from yesterday, I:1. Our failings (susceptibilities) presenting our daily confrontations I:2; our past shortcomings, augmented daily, having left a memorable trail of our karmic path I:3; which we must defend, our stases and imperfections, with the help of our partner(s) who share with us their perspective and solutions to save us from our daily actions I:4. Our partner'(s) helpful informed 'a priori' (spiritual Quantum) indeterminate/non-Cartesian and 'a posteriori' (manifest Classical physics) understandings of consciousness I:5; our partner'(s) evolving, expanding & refining, understandings (through time) of our daily lives, spiritual aspirations and sexual relations I:6; understandings and enlightenments shared with our family I:7, while observed and judged by the members of our community I:8. Our children will inherit our gifted past of personal loves & wars, attachments & engagements, II:1; our children will intuitively realize the Unmanifest/Visnu and learn of the dualities of manifestation, sexuality and individual's spiritual free will II:2; they will experience the activities of men and women II:3; and their personal experience of sexual love II:4. Children will learn of Compassion "Hinayana self-reflection" enabling personal re-positioning, III:1; and graduate onto acceptance of the participations in the Joys and sufferings of this life "Vajrayana enlightenments" of imperfect possible Compassionate choices, III:2; not only will parent's lives be judged, by themselves and others, but their parenting will be judged, by their children and others, III:3; we will carry into the future, tick-tock, the Joys and sufferings of this Life as have our parents III:4. Enjoying the Paradises that this Life offers us, IV:1.

"HCE day" similar to Bloomsday (roughly 24 hrs): Chronologically FW starts with courtroom memories (travail, book I:3) of HCE arrested in front of his gated refuge (from MaMaLuJo's tale) unable to enter, unlike Bloom HCE does not enter through the back door (Ulysses ch Penelope), instead HCE is arrested in hours before dawn. [newly incorporated dream: HCE's samsara/awakens in jail (book I:1) after his dream remembrances/anamnesis of NC/HCE arrival/attending Finnegan's wake at the 'House of call', to marry Ana/ALP, and assume the tavern keeper's role (consciousness space) made available by Finnegan's passing years ago.] Followed by (book I:4) HCE's psychological musings of past travails/guilts (living death, underworld Hell excursion Ulysses ch Hades) while incarcerated in early hours of morning, visited by ALP in jail before HCE's courtroom trial & defense and release & liberation. HCE walks home (accusation *T/R an evolving Sattva, book I:2) through Phoenix Park accosted for the time of day (12 noon) which threatens (real & unreal choices, Ulysses ch Nausicaa) his innocent vico/"well-being". Joyce rewrites 3 chapters of Ulysses to incorporate Vico's road/revelation of restart & recirculation into FW: When He is denied Her front door, He is in Hell (on earth), when released (from Hell) His odyssey to Her begins again (with His ever-present accompanying internal travails) for She always knows when He is worthy of Her acceptance, their Paradise.

FINNEGANS WAKE is James A.A. Joyce's evolving aspirational "family/bodhisattvas all" who all understand that the intention behind all existence is Compassion, Buddha/Christ's teachings. Our eternal compassionate Spiritual (Unmanifest/Visnu) and interpreted cosmic Dharma (Stone of Law, dispassionate astronomic exergonic) by impermanent evolving conscientious sexual Lovers (Tree of Life, compassionate quantum *M/T & T/R&S endergonic). Our Joys and sufferings (daily anamnesis, reinterpreted cyclic samsara) our Middle-way/Christian vico. Joyce's Christian paradigm (C.S. Lewis' "Christian love" hall) was globalized by his readings of transcendent/spiritual T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land's' "Shantih"/Nirvana and Neapolitan Giambattista Vico's understandings of China's silk road (waterways/rivers and roads, arteries transmitting ideas back from Zhang Qian) chronicled by Sima Qian (eunuch/'baile') where East/West trade carried manifest commerce/mammon (to 1st century Christianity) and Tamil-Shiva bhakti Mahayana (to 1st century Hinayana/ascetic India) across Asia. Joyce rediscovered (in the 'midden heap') Shachi's request succedent to 'The Humbling of Indra' (via Brihaspati) of peaceful sexual equilibrium, both psychological virtues of the spiritual and manifest. Subsequently, our manifest multiverse dharmas chosen/created: Dzogchen, C.S. Lewis' "Christian rooms" or other compassionate dogma, e.g.: 1) neither being excessively for/Tamas or against/Rajas a particular team/player in a match but "enjoying/honoring Sattvas the game/play", 2) in the game of GO neither being greedily/fearfully (biological fight/flight) offensive or defensive, in your choice/dualities of moves, but playing the "enlightened Sattva offensive or defensive move", 3) not suffering Alice's angst observed/observer of Hatta/Haigha: Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse but participating vico/vivo in the "timeless Tea party", 4) Prufrock's observed/observer "timeless Tea party" conundrum/vico to Eliot's '[Shantih]...the peace of God which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus' nirvanic Unmanifest/Visnu, will be your dharmapala. Happy evolving long-life lies along your conscientious mindful karmic path, defending against manifest attacks 'unwishful...of being hurled into eternity' spirituality is assumed until it is threatened "Kerrse" and/or subordinated "accursed Russian General", your "free will" Compassionate (not recidivist) spiritual Joycean 'Mere Christianity' / Buddhist Middle-way vico.

JCB

I'm going to be politcally incorrect: Finnegan's Wake is a pointless soup of random words and "ideas", jumbled together in a pseudo-artsy way. I suspect that most people would agree with me in this opinion, but are too afraid to sound "uneducated" by saying so. A cocktail party: "So, you think Finnegan's Wake is hogwash? How...gauche. How naive."
Well, Finnegan's Wake *is* hogwash. I know people have devoted their scholarly "lives" to "translating" this or that or the other passage...what a sad, futile, and pathetic way to devote one's energies!
Listen: I have worked as a computer programmer. Instead of "reading" this James Joyce monstrosity, just get 10-15 different foreign language dictionaries, then program your computer to randomly jumble words together. Every few lines or so, make some random allusion to some mythology, or country, or river. You'll get something completely indistinguishable from Finnegan's Wake. (In fact, I've always wanted to arrange a test to see if the average Joyce fan could even tell the difference.)
Come to think of it, maybe that's what is so "impressive" about Finnegan's Wake...Joyce had no access to a computer!
One pet peeve I have is that everyone assumes that every nonsense word actually has a meaning in some language, and that this was INTENDED by Joyce. Well, that's nonsense. For example, the quote "bad of wind" is supposed to make us shudder with admiration for such a clever author, since (supposedly) "bad" means "wind" in Persian. Ah hah...get it? So clever! What a genius!
Well, you know what? "Bad" has meanings in other languages, too, including English. I doubt Joyce knew three words of Persian. My point is that in a collection of random nonsense words as dense as Finnegan's Wake, a HUGE number of randomly selected words and letter-groups will have meanings in SOME language. There are lots of languages out there, folks. Coincidence doesn't make genius.
I'm not saying ALL the "puns" are unintentional, but that doesn't mean that Joyce is an artist. He just had the almost unimaginable patience (bordering on obsessive-compulsive) to sit down and string together a densification wordwise palabradesic geoneodiscritization of phonemesis syllabustop and charibdistance to paragramaphone rub dub dub three men in a tubular pregnancy.
10 yrs. to write! Egads! Joyce was INSANE.
I could write the sequel to Finnegan's Wake in 1 month, with a little help from my PC.
By the way, before you dismiss my viewpoint, I will point out that I am one year away from my PhD. Of course, that PhD being in a "hard science" (i.e. physics) will let me be villified by all the "pseudo-scholars" (you know who you are: people who, instead of making their own works of art, devote years of study to someone else's creativity).
Anyway, I guess that the purpose of a review is to let someone who has NOT read the work know a little bit about it. Well, I have not read the book in its entirety. I bet the number of people OF ALL TIME who have read the entire book, living or dead, is ZERO. That includes Joyce. And the original editors of the book.
Q: how many typos are there in Finnegan's Wake?
A: How would you know?
Summary of my main point: there are intelligent people who think FW is pointless. You can think that, too, if you have the courage. Don't pretend you "like" the book just because you think you have to.
Cheers!

A long long time ago, before my Grandma passed away, I watched her sitting at the window, wandering outside. I said to myself " Boy I'm so lucky. I have read Finnegans Wake and my grandma doesnt.Lucky me.I'm smarter than her. I have done something beyond her thought" Yes At least I'm miles ahead of her even tho I myself dont really understand this book.

Even when i was a kid I knew that someone somewhere out there must be writing something that no matter how good iam or how smart i am, I will never understand it. Boy how I was right.

This book maybe difficult, but books like this should be written- just to show how smart we human being can be.

I think alot of the reviewers on both sides here have no business reviewing this book in the first place. Let me explain with this example: If you don't speak French and you pick up a book written in French you will probably recognize some of the words and even understand a few sentences based on knowledge you might have of basic French and because of the similarity of many French words to English words (or whatever language(s) you know). But you won't be able to completely understand the book unless you sit down and translate it. It would be stupid to proclaim that the book is a failure just because you don't understand the language. In the same way, you might appreciate the beauty of the French language and think the book sounds pretty even if you can't understand it, but this is no reason to claim that the book is a masterpiece.

We might as well consider Finnegan's Wake as a book written in a different language that we aren't fluent in. A book (or any work of art, for that matter) isn't bad just because you have to work to understand it. That may make it frustrating but it doesn't make it bad. So, if you don't think it's worth the time and effort to use reading guides or whatever to make sense of this book, then you should just leave it alone instead of going around acting like anything you have to say about the book has any merit whatsoever.

On another note, it's completely absurd to review this book just as you would a book by Stephen King - based on how entertaining the storyline was or how realistic certain characters were - simply because this is not what the book is aiming for in the first place. This would be like judging the Mona Lisa as a piece of crap because you're a big fan of cave drawings showing a chain of events and you didn't see what the chain of events was in Mona Lisa. You judge a work based on how well it succeeds at what it is trying to do, not at how well it succeeds at what everyone else it trying to do.

I read them aloud with my kids, age 7 and 5. They have been force fed phonics and Dr. Seuss for the greater part of their lives. I read to them nightly, and have to compete with video games and action adventure comics for their imagination.
2 sentences in I knew I had them; They were wide-eyed. 1 page in they were slack-jawed. After 5 pages I closed the book came the myriad pleads "No, don't stop..."
Thank you, Mr. Joyce, for making my children smile.

This version of "Finnegans Wake" is the uncorrected version. Joyce spent the final years of his life correcting "Finnegans Wake", and this book omits all of those corrections. While this may not pain the casual reader of the wake, it does cast a vale around Joyce's maddening masterwork.

"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."

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.

The question of the Wake is rightly espoused by Harold Bloom, who wonders, and then affirms: "Can one live the whole of literary history in a night's sleep? Finnegan's Wake says yes and asserts that all of human history can pass through one in a long, discontinuous dream." The long-accepted and necessary route a writer must take toward greatness is to read for influence, to read as much as possible, and then twist all of that into one monstrosity of singular talent, and by doing so, to create your own voice. James Joyce took this further than any other writer in the history of the world, and in the end, because no one else (as the novel and the legacy of literature dies) will ever approach what he accomplished in Finnegan's Wake, he is the only writer who shall ever have the credit of having absorbed all of literary history, turned, and exploded all of it onto a page.

The criticism of the Wake universally stems from incomprehension, and I allow, the work is certainly incomprehensible. What the nu-Critics cannot understand, however, is that literature does not have to be clear. Are any of you crazy enough to truly believe Joyce wrote the Wake to have it read in the same manner as Stephen King's "The Stand"? This is a work of literature, not of entertainment. The reason that fact fails before this generation is because literature is dying at the hands of those whose worth to humanity is far lesser than that which it is destroying.

The movement misnamed "multiculturalism," which is altogether anti-intellectual and anti-literary, is removing from the curriculum most works that present imaginative and cognitive difficulties, which means most of the canonical books. Finnegans Wake, Joyce's masterpiece, presents so many initial difficulties that one has to be anxious about its survival. I suspect that it will find company in Spenser's great poetic romance, The Faerie Queene, and that both works will be read, for the rest of time, by only a small band of enthusiastic specialists. This is a sadness, that we are moving toward a time when Faulkner and Conrad may have to endure the same fate. One of my closest friends defended her university's decision to drop Hemingway from the required course in favor of a rather inadequate Chicano short-story writer, by telling me that her students would thus be better prepared to live in the United States. This is why literature will die.

I can hardly explain all the reasons why Finnegans wake is a masterpiece, a work so singular in nature that it belongs alongside Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and Tolstoy. That argument would far exceed word requirements posited by the store,com, for the work is indeed that deep. It is not a book for high school students, or even for college students, and we will never again live in a society where it might be the choice of a casual reader. Joyce's masterpiece is to literature what Heidegger's "Being and Time" is to philosophy: utterly blinding to anyone who has not had a long and studied history with their respective subjects. But for those who give it a genuine try, I can recommend only one piece of advice: read it aloud. The words so many claim Joyce makes up in the Wake are not made up, but purposefully misspelled. If you read it aloud, you will realize what he means to say.

Finnegans Wake is the ocean of literature. It is everything that has come before, and because of our culture, will likely be more than what will ever be said after. I leave you with the monologue of of the dying Anna Livia of Finnegans Wake--mother, wife, and river--which is frequently and rightly esteemed by critics as the most beautiful passage in all of Joyce.

"But I'm loothing them that's here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt and saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms."

Going on fifty-eight he wrote this final fiction, and was dead two years later. We will likely never see another like him, and given our current trends, likely never take the time to study him as we have studied authors before, to recognize his greatness. His memory will die. Look at this book's rating on the store. Three and a half stars? This novel took sixteen years of Joyce's life to complete, and people have the audacity to believe he intentionally made it difficult to play a joke on those he left behind? Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece worthy of a thousand stars, and soon none will see it. The words of Anna ring true, as if they come from Joyce's own mouth: "I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me."

It is a genuine shame.

I'm 13 years old, however, I started The Wake when I was 12, and I must say, it is possibly the best book I've ever read. I think that Joyce's use of language, puns, allusions, and references other pieces of work,completely unlike the Wake, was amazing and better than Lolita, Pale Fire, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His main theme is renewal and the fact that history is cyclilic. This is represented by an abundant number of things, such as the fact that he has exactly 1001 characters, and that he has the first and last sentences combine. GET THIS BOOK NOW!

I admit that I am not qualified to "judge" FW. Not because I am stupid, as many 5-star reviewers would assert, I think. I would consider giving up on THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO "stupid." I cannot judge FW as literature because literature is meant to be read, and comprehended. It is not complexity, depth, or any of the like that make this book incomprehensible to me. It is written in its own language. It is its own realm. To judge it would be like judging the writing of an alien civilization. And that is why I gave FW 1 star: it is nonscoreable.

This book--FW--seems to be Joyce's joke, or private world, or both. I doubt that any one who claims to love this book has "got it" in the sense that Joyce meant it to be understood, either. If one has the perserverance, one will find one's own meaning/pattern in FW, if only because it is human nature to impose order on chaos and...gibberish.

FW is certainly fascinating for its complexity of word games. As for the poetic quality of the words? I couldn't speak for that. When a word is over 20 characters long, a mishmash of randomness, I generally stumble like an idiot over every syllable. Thus: it was not fluid. It was not poetic.

Yet, for all of its puzzle-like quality, I could not call FW great literature. This is unreadable. Even if one knew all of the languages Joyce was acquainted with, it would still be, I think, unreadable. Joyce was the only one who understood it, and he is dead. I agree, the many interpretations FW has spawned are impressive; but also quite pathetic, if one considers how many scholars spent their lives trying to decipher this.

If there is any definite meaning here--any statement Joyce was trying to make--then he failed in conveying it.

I'd recommend that anyone who still has any doubts look up FINNEGANS WAKE online--one can find a free online copy. If still your ego insists on reading this, then purchase as many supplementary books as possible, and good luck.

I really enjoy obscure references and allusions. I love that feeling of being in on something. It's nice to discover those little goodies that everyone else glosses over. Clever puns and whatnot are great, but they are no substitute for a good story, strong characters, and so on. Finnegans Wake has nothing going for it. (While it does have puns, they are anything but clever). When you read a good book it should have an effect on you. You should lose sleep turning it over in your mind. Finnegans Wake sort of makes you think in that you have to try to figure out what this word is, or what language this might be, or what Joyce was smoking when he wrote this schlock. What it doesn't do, however, is make you laugh, cry, gasp, grimace, or reminisce like true literature does.

Questions for all those that gave this 5 stars: Did you really enjoy reading this? Did it elicit any sort of emotional response out of you? At best it will make you feel smart for recognizing a few foreign words.

Honestly, I think Joyce was just a polyglot wordsmith and wrote this as a sort of mental exercise for the same reason people do Sudoku puzzles. But that doesn't mean others should read it, and it certainly doesn't mean it belongs in the canon of English classics.

I am convinced that people do not read Finnegans Wake, or at least not in the same sense that we ever normally use the word "read." FW is 600+ pages long and I've yet to find more than a handful of standard English sentences among them. In 1999 (this is 2005) I started to read the Wake, with the best of intentions, but I soon noticed a problem. A few paragraphs in, my mind would start to wander, for there was nothing solid that my mind could hang on to. I encountered no setting, no characters, no plot, no narration, nothing concrete nor conceptual. The best that I could say was that every once in a while, some group of words would be evocative of an image or memory, but even when this would happen I could not say for certain whether it was intentional on the part of the author or accident. Eventually, I started reading it aloud in order to keep myself "in" the book but, no help. Today, I am 100 pages in; I can't really bear to read more than a page at a time, and even this is an effort. I get as close to 'zero' from reading it as I can imagine.

Now, please understand that I am not a stupid man, nor unaccustomed to difficult literature. I've a college degree and, in fact, currently teach 10th grade English. I've read (and understood), among other things, Shakespeare, The Bible, War and Peace, and also Ulysses. It is sometimes said that this book was written "for the intelligensia"... well... I consider myself part of the intelligensia and this book was not written for me. I am not here trying to argue that the book was written as a joke, or has no actual meaning (though I think those arguments have some merit, when one considers the work) but that a person who picks this up and starts running their eyes over any given page will not be engaging in the same activity as they would when reading a book. The Wake might be closer to some sort of giant puzzle, though I doubt this as well, but a prospective reader should ask himself whether he wants to engage in a 600 page rebus. Further, I doubt that the Wake could have been "written" in the same sense that other books are. Am I to imagine that Joyce had a firm intention in mind that guided his decisions in writing this book? That he, say, edited it? Rearranged sentences for impact? Checked for consistency? Is this book translated into other languages? How could it be? And wouldn't that assume that it had been written in some language to begin with. And, finally, if it's not written in English (and it's not), or in any other intelligble language (and it's not), then in what sense do we have a book?

Is everything printed on paper literature?

I think not. I do not believe that the Wake was written as a book, and I do not think it possible to read it as one, and I submit the book itself as my evidence. It has occured to me that it would be fun, someday, to take some group of people who've given the Wake 5-star reviews, and then test them. Perhaps we could give them a group of five selections, with one of them a faux-passage and four of them authentic FW-Joyce, and see if they could determine the fake? Or, we could provide them with a passage and then ask for an explanation, and them compare their explanations with one another to see if there's any validity. In fact, FW could make for a great party game along the lines of Balderdash.

Yes, FW is perhaps (doubtful, though) a rebus and it could, with some imagination, provide a party game of sorts (largely revolving around mockery), but it is not a book to be read. Don't feel bad--it wasn't intended to be read. Through it all, the most interesting thing and the greatest value of the book is to watch the actions of the book's defenders. They haven't read it either, in any meaningful sense, and yet like the people in the fable they claim to see the clothing. After all, people of the highest virtue are able to see the Emperor's New Clothes, you see. And who wouldn't want to be a part of that group?

Remember when you were really young and 'grew out' of having pictures in your books?
Well Joyce has 'grown out' of the English language, the great genius of literature evolved past all boundries and greater a work that traps you.
Inescapably profound Inescapably brillant

This book is very entertaining, and has maddening pace, kind of like the Matrix. In fact this book is a lot like the Matrix. It's about as complicated as The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I take dumps more dense than this. Reading this book will take about and hour and a half, though it will only feel like 20 minutes. Think Curious George. I can't wait for the movie (I hope Spielberg directs it, and finishes the last sentence).

Joyce was quite understandably frustrated when his magnum opus, "Ulysses," did not immediately receive the critical attention he felt it warranted upon its publication in 1922.

Thus it was that the artist, while composing his next work, "Finnegan's Wake," got into the habit of periodically banging his head against the typewriter keys, a poignant expression, obviously, of the searing torment boiling within him.

Happily for us, the result of these repeated cranial collisions can be viewed in the contents of this volume.

Far and away the best thing about this book is the quality of the analysis it has spawned. The book itself is drivel; but the reactions to it form some of the most intelligent and enlightened reviews I have encountered. I have never sprinkled as many "helpful" votes within a single site as I have here, to both one-star and five-star appraisals alike.

Firstly, the book itself. I cannot subscribe to any of the academic apologias. This book took an interesting concept and stretched it well past the point of absurdity. Like the surrealist movement that ultimately ended up justifying paintings of Campbell's Soup cans, "Finnegan's Wake" takes stream-of-subconsciousness to such idiotic lengths that it becomes self-parody.

Yes, I have exhaustively analysed the book. I studied it many years ago under the tutelage of an infectiously enthusiastic English professor who dissected its every nuance. Puns, portmanteau constructs, auditory versus literary jabberwocky, dream-state evocation: we analysed all of these elements and more. And for a time, during my "intellectual" period, I pretended to admire it. Nowadays, age and--I like to think--wisdom compels honesty: this book is a self-indulgent conceit. Had anyone other than Joyce written it, it would never have been published, much less garnered all the notoriety it has enjoyed over the years.

The real value in "Finnegan's Wake" has been in the intelligent debate that it has fostered. By stringing together chaotically connected thought fragments, Joyce created the literary equivalent of a star-field: any resulting patterns are a tribute to the richness of the readers' imaginations and not the writer's.

Does Joyce's exercise constitute genius? Hardly. Artificial Intelligence research has produced numerous examples of similar jabberwocky constructs, some practically indistinguishable from "Finnegan's Wake". So what we have here is a sampling of the peculiarly human ability to impose order upon chaos. Some of these five-star reviews are testaments not to the meaningless jumble that is "Finnegan's Wake", but to the creative ingenuity of their authors and to the larger genius of the human imagination.

Joyce was not a prolific author, but what he did produce was some of the best writing ever conceived. "Portrait", "Ulysses", "Dubliners": each is a star in the literary firmament. It is natural to try finding a place for his last work in the same firmament, but "Finnegan's Wake" doesn't deserve such elevation. This novel was the product of a genius who in the end became so narcissistic and self-absorbed that he dared to pen a scatter-brained homage to his own ego. Would we dismiss this work as vapid nonsense by any other author, it would be dishonest to do otherwise just because that author's name is James Joyce.

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...

Let me preface this review with a disclaimer: Contrary to what some other negative reviewers of Finnegans Wake have done, I make no apologies to those who enjoyed the book for my ensuing critique thereof. I ask for the merit of this review not to be judged by my opinion of the book, but rather by the validity of my case, and its potential helpfulness to those who are interested in reading the book. Without further ado:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was my entry point to James Joyce's oeuvre, and it was a brilliant one. As an aspiring writer, I identified every step of the way with Stephen Dedalus' maturation, both as a person and as an author. Joyce's unforgiving treatment of his alter-ego's (i.e., Stephen's) flaws was refreshing, as far too many writers of autobiographical novels (I'm looking at you, Charles Dickens) present overly heroic versions of themselves as protagonists. I then moved on to Ulysses, which proved to be a serious test of endurance and willpower. What I understood of the book I enjoyed; what I didn't understand of it ensured I'd enjoy it even more the second, third, fourth, and who knows how many more times around.

Then came Finnegans Wake--I skipped Dubliners at the time, for some odd reason. To call it a "disappointment" would be like calling Bernie Madoff "dishonest": bluntly put, it was the most regrettable experience of my reading "career". I wanted to like the Wake--I swear, I really did. I wanted to brag about how I'd finished the book reputed as the most difficult ever written, and, to boot, ENJOYED it. But it was not to be. I did all I could, short of using a reader's guide, which would have felt like cheating (plus, I'm of the opinion that a book that doesn't make sense without a companion guide doesn't warrant the effort of reading it with one). I read the whole thing aloud to myself, to make sure I'd catch as many of the subtle phonetic easter-eggs Joyce crammed into the work as I could. I spent as many as five minutes on single pages, trying to make sense of it. I noticed textual in-jokes here and there, and paused in self-congratulation at being able to decode them. But all to no avail. The best part of reading the book was when I finished it.

I've heard all the arguments in favor of the book's merit. I've known people who profess to have enjoyed Finnegans Wake. I've heard what Harold Bloom's said about it. But it doesn't matter to me. The fact is, if nobody had told me that James Joyce wrote this book, I'd have scoffed at it and never given it a second thought--and quite frankly, I doubt this book would have ever been published in the first place if it hadn't been penned by one of the world's foremost writers. I was able to discern who the characters of the book were--HCE, ALP, et al.--and there were some portions of the book that seemed like vestiges of logic in a massive sea of insanity. I know how much work Joyce put into Finnegans Wake; I know how many people have praised it; I know that every bizarrely construed non-word and multilingual pun was carefully crafted and is not the gibberish it appears to be. But the fact is, this book made for a largely joyless reading experience, and thus I have no choice but to give it 1 star.

I won't deny that this book is the work of a genius--sadly, I'm convinced it's that particular genius' weakest effort. Only one person in the world knows all the secrets of the book, and that person, unluckily, died two years after he finished writing it. Perhaps if I knew the intended meaning underlying every single quirk of this book, I'd like it--I guess that's why Joyce considered Finnegans Wake to be his masterpiece, after all.

Which should be the only reason one would have this book in a collection.

Daferring on red hair moots the ramdelgerag! Cays hast ner eyed the entire lash from the libre, does get sidlelassinlunahack? And for ery' scholar of jits and wallyfins, dare may cieved a consciousable readament of peering quenth Labrynth. Hark! Vain! Rack! Finnegans Wake dost injoyafun for the kathweolasopkookoo. One glance may planner read and ner open this Rhodical magnumus.

If you understood what I just wrote then you may just enjoy this book.

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.

ignoring all rules in verbose drools of polysyllabic prolixity entwined with linguistic dexterity in a jolly gallimaufry of the recondite multiverses freeflowing in reflexive recursions to spiral and gyre and funnel and flow through the tenebrous chambers of the handsomely proportioned earwitness to the thunder each integumentary segment calls forth.

Will someone please, please tell me what the heck this man is talking about? This is the book for people who didn't find The Jaberwocky to have quite the necessary amount of pretentious pseudo-english garbage. Don't even bother trying to read this.

As one of the reviewers noted in his review, I too have given many postive marks to those who have given five-star reviews for this novel; because some reviewers have made very good arguments in defense of this novel. [I never give negative marks on anything, even if I don't like a review, but I do give plenty of positives] Therefore, before you begin to throw the bricks and sling your arrows at me, please let me try and explain why I gave this book such low marks. First of all, I have tried to read--or at least decipher "Finnegans Wake" on four different occasions. I see from some of the reviews that anyone who attempts to disagree with this novels merits gets pelted with negative marks. For those of you who enjoy this novel, good for you! I do not profess to be as knowledgeable as some of you may be on this books merits. But I DO KNOW WHAT I LIKE! And I did not like this novel.

I first tried reading "Finnegans Wake" when I was in High School [it was not required reading] because I heard so much about it that I wanted to read something challenging. And challenging was an understatement. Realizing I was young, I attempted it much later while in the military. As if military life were not frustrating enough. It was not until I entered college, where I was reguired to read the novel, that I did so with true earnest: Due to the fact that I had to write an essay on the novel. I did receive an A minus on the paper. However, to be honest, this was after profusely littering the paper with as much b***s***, that to me Joyce littered his novel with. My professor must have seen some great merit in this essay---at least I felt so at the time.

However, wanting to truly understand the novel, I decided to REALLY try and capture what Joyce was trying to write. This too led to my dislike of the novel. Not so much with the books difficulty [although that was a problem], but with the simple question: Is it really worth reading? My answer? No! For me a novel has to give me that quality of enjoyment that makes the journey a delightful one. It has to capture my soul! This novel never did capture my soul. Give me unabridged editions [the only ones I read] of "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas, "Les Miserables" by Hugo, "War and Peace" by Tolstoy [once is enough please] and more importantly, my favorite author, Dostoevsky, "Notes From the Underground," "Crime and Punishment," and "The Brothers Karamazov." These novels have given me something back in my life for the efforts that I put into reading them. They were profound and affected me deeply. They ALL gave me something in my life.

In conclusion, to those who find this novel worth the high praise it has garnered, I respectfully disagree. There are many great novels from which to choose to spend and evening, afternoon, or morning perusing. And while I do not look negatively on your opinions; if this book gives you enjoyment, then great for you. For me, however, the book gave me nothing. Nor do I wish to spend what little time we are alloted in our short life to spend it on this type of reading. That is my honest opinion. I am sure a 5 star review will give me many positive marks, but that is not why this review exists, or what I am about. This is just my honest opinion.

Today I am going to start reading two novels that I have been wanting to read for some time, but have put off until recently. "Growth of the Soil", by Knut Hamsun, and "The Master and Margarita," by Mikhail Bulgakov. I hear they are good novels; and after laboring over "Finnegans Wake" for too many hours in my life, I will begin to start on that reading list of mine. I'll let you know how these two novels work out. One thing I am pretty sure of, however, is that they will probably not frustrate me as much as "Finnegans Wake" did; and in fact, no other novel has been more of a disappointment to me than Joyce's so-called masterpiece.

Well, what can I say? This kind of writing would never make it past Mrs. Johnson, my 7th grade English and Grammar school teacher. I made many attempts at reading this gibberish. To those who like this book, kudos's to you few. I highly recommend this book as an anchor on night stands of insomniacs everywhere. I join the ranks of those who do not like this book. I'm sure there is something enriching in there, somewhere. Who was the editor? I know it was not Mrs. Johnson!
Jimmy Lair

If you are one of the 7 people who understand FW, please let me know.

For years, I have asked: what is so great about Finnegans Wake. Even the experts have given me only fragments of answers.

The truth is that Finnegans Wake is written by a genius for an audience of around 20 people.

I always thought it was odd that James Joyce had to invent words. The English language is rich enough that he should not have found the need to invent gibberish.

If you can honesty tell me what is so great about this book, I will change my rating of it. Until then, it gets one star, only because there is no zero star rating.

Real words, unlike what you'd find in this book, cannot describe what you find in here. This book is the bane of my existence. James Joyce must have self-inflicted mercury poisoning in order to write this. The only other plausible explanation is that he became severely mentally retarded from a lack of flow of oxygen to the brain. If you want to actually understand anything, you have to read explanations EVERY "sentence". This turns it into a f'n time vampire. It is terrible in every aspect - there are no plot, characters, situations, comedy, horror, storyline, or anything else that books usually consist of. If the author came back to life, became unretarded, and then read his own book again, he would instantly want to drown himself in Lake Michigan. I award him no stars and may God have mercy on his soul.

It's one thing to read from, another to ear to,
for the curiously cautiously
here's a reading worth raiding from
forget about meaning and remember the sounding
James Joyce read by Jim Norton
[...]

You will probably consider this novel to be difficult. I agree with anybody who thinks so. It is very difficult. It certainly is hard to grasp, but once you get into it, that is it. James Joyce stretched the language and brought the book to a far higher form of writing that is uncommon around. Uncommon in the sense that you have to get into it to love it. For easier, compelling reads, (...)

"What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridges-
maker was the first to rise taller through his beanstale than the
bluegum buaboababbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia;
went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was
barely in her tricklies; was well known to claud a conciliation
cap onto the esker of his hooth"

If I wrote this and attempted to pass this off as a novel, no one would ever read it. If they did, they would correctly assume that I am, in fact, a pompous erudite fool. And by the way, I know that there are a million academics rating this book that will come on here and tell me how completely wrong my point of view is. But guess what?--I don't care and I'll never actually read any of your responses. Save it for your poor students and old, bearded friends wearing tweed jackets with elbow patches.

To the rest of you (normal people)--stay away from this book.

Unbelievably complex book; possibly the last book you ever have to read & understand. Take 3 years to work on this masterpiece. A good grasp of Celtic and British history essential to its full appreciation. The story of creation, the theory of cultural evolution of civilization, the history & mythology of the Celtic people...what more could you possibly want?

I have always subscribed to the idea that a well-written novel is one that sucks you in, and you become unconscious of the fact that you are reading. To the extent that you are become unaware of the writer and his "style", the more successful the writer has become in conveying the "idea". A flashy, obtrusive or idiosyncratic style tends to obscure communication.
To be sure, Joyce's stream of consciousness is alien to me, polluted as it is with religion, Irish culture, whiskey and possibly, syphilitic encephalitis. But just as poetry derives it charms from, association and metaphor, it gains its power from the disciplines of rhyme and rhythm, and focus..
Joyce pulls the lint from his navel, eats it, and spreads the resulting effluent on paper. Finnegan's Wake thus may be of some interest to those interested in coprology, who have perhaps become accustomed to the smell.

The cow who dried up was an udder disaster....like this gibberish novel. Even JJ's best friends and critics called it drivel (his brother included). I guess after writing Ulysses, JJ felt somehow had to create something more mystic. Well, he certainly succeeded. I have a standing $1,000 bet with anyone and the challenge is that I will open 3 random pages of FW and have the reader explain, in detail, who the parties are, what the sentences are about and mean. I am quite confident than there is no one out there who can do that. Period. So much for a memorable reading experience.

Stream-of-conscious blather that only a psuedo-intellectual could appreciate. I can't imagine being the person who had to proof-read this drivel, I would sooner plunge my hand into a vat of boiling oil. If it were possible I would give this book zero stars. You'd be better off spending your money on some LSD and interpreting the meaning of the waves in your fingerprints.

My daughter just finished her first year as a literature major at an Ivy League school and we spoke about Finnegans Wake.

For years, I have asked English Lit experts what is the genius of Finnegans Wake. No one could give me a straight

The Emperor has no clothes. No one knows why this is great, save for some so called experts who extol this book.

I beg of anyone out there, please email me tell me why this is not drivel. You can reach me at [email protected]

After writing Ulysses, Joyce faced a problem: what to do next. In Ulysses, Joyce had taken the novel form to perhaps its outermost limits (even today, fancy writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, D.F. Wallace can only imitate Joyce, or try to). Joyce covered consciousness, time, love, memory, God, mythology, the daytime world. So he decided to write a book about the night, a dream world sort of place. If he had reached the limits of what language could accomplish in Ulysses, why, then he had to invent a new language. Which he tried to do. Pity it's a private language, all but completely inaccessible, little different from baby talk, when you pare away all the phony portmanteau nonsense. Finnegans Wake is narcissistic drivel. Highly accomplished, yes. But so what? Who has the time for this?

I can't understand why this book wasn't rated the greatest novel of the 20th century! My God! I read this book every night before I go to bed. The words flow easily across the page, and the characters are incredibly rich in development! The story itself is so engaging that whenever I read it, my hands literally begin to tremble in anticipation of what is going to happen next! Here is an excerpt from the book and one of the more famous passages from this MASTERPIECE OF MODERN LITERATURE!

"Orkman ribpop easily cross arrows. Flaunting wissam on narrow shoulders opens me. opens me. Pilly saw Roman do the tiger on ruskpappy for Flynn. Squiggles on canvas slapped brightly on Easter fippoon aiktart. Common man sees field sorry fart on apple."

How can you not enjoy such an illuminating example of prose? Of course this is only one of the many BRILLIANT passages found within this CLASSIC novel! I could give you some more examples which show the GREATNESS of Joyce's pen; however, I seriously believe you should invest wisely by purchasing your own edition of this GARGANTUAN work! I assure you that you will not be disappointed! Happy squiggles!!!

With this lit tall reave view I rue in all love Joyce is "Fink Against Wake." Poor Read errs, why do use still read that mess?! Be cause it is litterassure! Aye con cur! Joyce sad little skill lend less art. I ownly at hack him be cause tomb many read errs prays him. He is dead end gone. I am all I've! Your hear owes dead! Go back kenned lessen to what he rote. Then calm back hear end read this say gain. Come pair. There is no con test.

This book is bad, and I think it was intended to be so. Probably upset with the over analysis of Ulysses, Joyce must have set out to play a trick on the literary world. This book has no value except to make you laugh at how far some people would go to pretend that it could be interpreted. There are better wastes of ones time, for example staring at a blank wall.

One wonders how many of the positive (4 or 5 stars) reviewers here are either (1) intellectual poseurs who say they've read the book cover to cover but actually haven't read more than a little; or (2) if they have read it in its entirety, whether they have too much spare time on their hands.

One thing it is not (contrary to what some pretentious reviewers here would have you believe) is a "fun read" or "page turner".

Despite some glittering word play and demonstrations of great scholarship, Finnegan's wake is a hulking mess.

Finnegans Wake is a mess. If this were not written by James Joyce, would you call it a "literary classic"? No--it would belong in the discard pile with lots of red marks on it for lack of basic grammar and sentence structure.

There are good stream-of-consciousness novels out there. I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway from cover to cover and it is actually entertaining. Or, at the very least, the sentences actually flow together in the way people would actually speak them.

So Finnegans Wake is a dream-like mumbo jumbo. The question is, is there any purpose to it? Why should the reader spend time and effort deciphering the cryptic nonsense in order to figure out what the story actually is, when there are perfectly coherent novels out there that actually tell the story as it is?

For one thing, if the author needs to disguise the plot with a ton of fancy language, it just means the plot is too thin to be interesting on its own. Secondly, the English language is perfectly functional. So why break something that's functional to create something that's not?

Finnegan's Wake is regarded as one of the greatest novel's ever written, but in reality this so called novel is nothing to talk about. It's nothing then a pretentious word salad designed to impress English professors to show how cerebral and deep they are.

In a nutshell this so called book is a meaningless excuse for a novel, a modernist prank masquerading as genius to fool people into think it's meaningful and deep, when in reality it's nothing more than pretentious drivel.

It was mentioned in the movie "Enough" with Jennifer Lopez. Apparently it's among the most difficult reads in the English language, and after reading just the the store look inside excerpt, I can believe it. Great if you wanna impress friends, but I dunno if you want an actually engaging book.

This is garbage writing! I couldn't understand one sentence! Why would we ever read this book! This is some of the most uninteresting and confusing writing in our history of literature. sorry joyce, you're "deathbed" novel just didn't work out.

ye make a book, alas, how is life? Green Bay Packers. Sandwich? Baby. Eat the, President, lake.

Like that prose? That is James Joyce. The king of gibberish. I made it up. But when he does it, it is a classic. When I do gibberish, it is not. Why?

What the hell is going on with Finnegans Wake??? I don't know.

Joyce must be the genious of gibberish.

I don't get it.

This book is long. Long and pointless. Sure, it's fun to sit down and make up words, or compose stream-of-consciousness relayings of dreams we've had, but why would anyone want to read them?

And, anyway, any book with a quote on the back from Harold Bloom is not worth MY time, at the very least. That man is a menace, and so is James Joyce. Thinkers thinking about thinking. Not real people, not real thoughts, no significance, no soul. Pointless, long, and forgettable.

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.