Finnegan's Wake (Penguin Modern Classics)
by James Joyce
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Book Summary Information
Author: James JoyceEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09
ISBN: 014118311X
Number of pages: 688
Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK)
Book Reviews of Finnegan's Wake (Penguin Modern Classics)
Book Review: Wipe Your Own Glosses
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Finnegan's Wake (Penguin Modern Classics)
Follows a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author also wrote "Ulysses", "Dubliners" and "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man".Classics Books
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