Stats for nerds
9recommend
90mentions
81people
2010–2026years
12% recommend80% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?
Listening to Joyce read it aloud: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M8kFqiv8Vww&pp=ygUcam95Y2UgcmV....
I had so much trouble trying to read him before understanding the intended pacing. It's more poetry than prose.
- This was my experience, too. A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake by Joseph Campbell helped me understand the overall themes of the book, and hearing Joyce read it helped me appreciate the language and the rhythm of the words. I found it more approachable once I saw it as a story told in wild poetic dream sequence imagery.
- >He sold a copy of “Finnegans Wake” to Johnny Depp
This is one of the most fascinating books that I know of. I'm pretty well convinced that the world population of people who have read more than the very beginning and very end probably numbers roughly the count of my fingers and toes combined. Although I think many people
I also think the the only person who ever really understood the book was James Joyce himself. Fluency in multiple languages down to idiomatic expressions and deep etymology seem like strict requirements if you have never occupied the meatspace between Joyce's ears.
Any small portion seems somewhat comprehensible in its highly local environment, and a bit funny or witty in how it's written. But then it breaks down when attempting to connect that piece to the wider whole. And it all makes me feel like I'm reading extremely familiar words whose meaning I can't quite remember.
In refreshing my memory about it before commenting here it made me laugh to see that even the best Wikipedia can say about what goes on in the book is that readers have mostly reach a consensus (but only a consensus!) about normally trivial matter of fact such as the cast of characters, a little less so the plot, but that many other important details amount to poorly mapped terrain.
And because I was born with the usual amount of fingers andntoes, if I met a random person in passing, and they claimed to have read the book completely, I would look at them with as much belief as if they had said "I'm a very powerful leader of one of the G20 nations". Actually I might believe the G20 claim a bit more because I would consider it less likely for someone to make a claim like that when it could so easily be proven false if it was not true.
If I had not encountered the book long ago then I might believe it to be the output of an extremely oddly trained gpt-3 model. I don't mean that to be an insult to the book, it's just the best comparison I can think of to characterize it's contents in modern terms.
This is how fascinating Finnegan's Wake is as a literary work.
- For anyone struggling with Joyce, I recommend Finnegan's Wake. You are guaranteed to find Ulysses easier to read after this.
- On the contrary, I find Finnegan's Wake easier because it's more "fun". It's filled with silly word-play and funny sounds, and I don't feel compelled to try to make any particular meaning out of it or find a coherent story inside it, though if I do find one it's a nice surprise.
Reading Ulysses, on the other hand, I know there is a story there, so when I lose the thread I get a bit frustrated. It's an absolutely gorgeous experience, of course, but one riddled with such frustration. I'm not sure if maybe reading an outline of the story first would help, so that I have the general idea in my head before going into it?
- My favorite way to read Finnegan's Wake is to get some friends and perhaps some drinks, have everyone pick a random spot from the book and read it out loud.
The book is a circle so it doesn't really have a proper beginning, and the way the narratives are intermeshed to the point that they are incomprehensible means that the narrative is secondary, so concepts such as beginning and middle don't really matter anyway.
It is the language and wordplay of the book that is the enjoyable part. If you sit there by yourself and read it silently, it's mostly a boring academic exercise. When you read it out loud the playfulness and humor of the book comes through. There is one part that is written such that if you read it aloud you sound like a drunken irishman, and one part which is simultaneously a description of a pantry (or perhaps a grocery) and an erotic scene. The main thing I think people miss about the book is how funny it is!
