Finnegans Wake in James Joyce Reading Group

May 12, 2012 Aloha marked it as to-read-this-month · review of another edition

Shelves: a-own, a-ebooks, z-joyce-james, genre-post-modern, c-top-10-most-difficult-books, 2015-and-14-james-joyce

Finnegan's Wake forum (Thanks, Nathan!): https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

Finnegan's Wake audio available for free at UbuWeb to listen to as you read along with the book. Highly recommend for non-Irish folks like me:
http://ubu.com/sound/joyce_fw.html

Anna Livia Plurabelle:
http://www.geoffwilkins.net/fragments...

James Joyce reading Finnegan's Wake. Animation but I think it's his voice:
http://youtu.be/nxId5Zftchs

THUNDERCLAPS:
From The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake:

1. The First Thunderclap ...more

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Sep 04, 2017 Tracy Reilly rated it really liked it · review of another edition

So it's tempting to say I didn't understand a word of these 628 pages, but that wouldn't quite be true. Amazingly, much of it came together in the last 10 pages as various people said goodbye to Finnegan, Irish style. I said to myself, of course, this is a wake! a testimonial to a man subterraneally leaving earth, reaching to the great white???? and all he leaves in his wake.. excuse the pun, but this is Joyce, afterall, the master word player. Plus, he's "waking" up from sleep--we all are.

And o So it's tempting to say I didn't understand a word of these 628 pages, but that wouldn't quite be true. Amazingly, much of it came together in the last 10 pages as various people said goodbye to Finnegan, Irish style. I said to myself, of course, this is a wake! a testimonial to a man subterraneally leaving earth, reaching to the great white???? and all he leaves in his wake.. excuse the pun, but this is Joyce, afterall, the master word player. Plus, he's "waking" up from sleep--we all are.

And of course he stands in our place explaining all the name play and changes--we are all Adam and Adam's sons and Anna Plurabelle (Many belles? Can't be an accident--there are no accidents in Joyce's neologisms, although at times it seems so). She is the river-mother-lover we all go back to, at the end and beginning of time, which is why that ending that returns to the beginning makes perfect sense and brought tears to my eyes.

For people who think this thing would be an arduous chore--it's really not that bad if you try not to overthink it and just flow with the poetry of the river of words. I finished the last 30 pages like water this morning without a break--a page can read really fast if you follow its own crazy logic and don't try to figure out what's going on!!

During a break in reading this, I was at my daughter's house (she is a reader like me and has a crazy collection). She had the Ellman Joyce bio, and that really, peripherally, helped me get a handle on this and Joyce in general. The bio was pretty straightforward--not flowery or poetic or analytical, at least not the section I read about his early years...It just made me realize a lot of what Joyce is about is recording his Dublin life, its people, its language, but just keeps approaching it in increasingly subliminal levels--some of the crazy spelling, word play, is something like phonetic Dublinese, that gift of the gab and Blarney the Irish are known for--go there, it's true.

While I was reading, I kept coming across phrases, band names, respellings of cliches,internet memes--I thought, was Joyce really the first to use that idea? Or did all these people read him and steal his idea? Or is it some Jungian universal connection. I wish I could think of an idea for an example but there were hundreds. Uh, "Mazzy" ? I think? is a really weak example. Maybe I'll edit this later and give examples, but that was what made this enjoyable on a sort of purely sentient level--just little globules of words and phrases strung together in mellifluous beads.

Here's some: Quark. Unfact. Ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter. gifs a gross if we are. “Suck it yourself, sugarstick!” antipop. Shades of Dylan Thomas: "the nameform that whets the wits that conveys contacts that sweetens sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dog death that bitches birth that entails the ensuances of existentiality"...Television kills. windowdisks. to ginger up the tourist trade. your birthwrong was. beast of boredom. static babel. evermore. the keys to dreamland.

Maybe some of those haven't been copied. Yet.

and in the end the "plot" makes satisfying sense. ...more

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May 23, 2013 Garrett Cash rated it it was ok

Shelves: classics, rubbish, humor, bizarre, irish-lit, modernism

Drivel. Exceedingly brilliant drivel, though drivel nonetheless.
The one aspect that I truly enjoyed was Joyce's fantastic puns and silly portmanteau words. If there's one thing I learned from this book, it is that the amount of words you can make sound like others is endless. I am admittedly in awe of Joyce, I couldn't write a slew of wildly confusing things that appear to be completely indecipherable if I tried. I did have Joseph Campbell's "Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake" helping me out a bit ...more

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