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Finnegans Wake
(Paperback, 1982)
Other Editions...
Author: James Joyce
James Joyce's last work (1939), and by far most difficult (if not impenetrable) novel, is a long, go...
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LIST PRICE
$16.95
Save 89%
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Details
Synopsis
James Joyce's last work (1939), and by far most difficult (if not impenetrable) novel, is a long, gorgeous flow of words that has been described by some critics as the dreaming life of a man named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Others believe that the dreamer is actually Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's ULYSSES. According to Joyce himself, FINNEGANS WAKE does nothing less than tell the history of humankind by means of the story of an "everyman" and his family, in particular his sons. In FINNEGANS WAKE, Joyce indulged his fondness for wordplay and puns, virtually creating his own version of the English language not only with new meanings for familiar words but with words he made up. The result is a polyphonic, oddly lyrical, often humorous and bawdy work of genius that opens up new vistas into language, consciousness, and the ever-inventive creative mind of James Joyce. During the 1920s and '30s, when he was writing his novel, Joyce always carried a notebook with him in which he compulsively jotted down ideas for his book. Critical study of these fascinating documents, many of them semi-coherent scribbles, and of the various drafts for the novel, is a major industry for Joyce scholars. The book's title--which is correctly rendered without an apostrophe--is both an allusion to the familiar Irish song "Finnegan's Wake" about the hod-carrier who rises from the dead (just one of the novel's many musical/religious allusions), and an exhortation to the Irish (the Finnegans) to wake up to what Joyce considered the destructive reality of their heritage--as he himself did by becoming an expatriate, returning to his native land only in his books.
| Size | | Height: | 7.5 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 15.2 oz |
Industry Reviews
"As one tortures one's way through 'Finnegan's Wake', an impression grows that Joyce has lost his hold on human life. Obsessed by a spaceless and timeless void, he has outrun himself. We begin to feel that his very freedom to say anything has become a compulsion to say nothing."
Books - Alfred Kazin (05/21/1939)
"How in two thousand words or less, is one to review a book which even a cursory examination shows to be unprecedented, a book of considerable length by a thoughtful and tremendously equipped man who has spent sixteen years writing it?...Even if [the reader] does not understand all that is on any one page he will find sentences lovely in their freshness and their beauty and sentences that one can chuckle over for months. We have novels that give us greatly a three dimensional world: here is a narrative that gives a new dimension."
New York Times Book Review - Padraic Colum (05/07/1939)
"One of Joyce's most earnest commentators, Eugene Jolas, declares that his master wants nothing less than to 'hammer out a verbal vision that destroys space and time.' In a sense, the attempt is successful, but since time, space, and the individual are the loci, as it were, of human interest, Joyce is forced to forgo all attempts at appealing to our sensibilities. Even if you could understand 'Finnegans Wake', you would not be moved by it. A god, talking in his sleep, might have written it. The only attitude a god could well have toward human affairs is irony, and dehumanized irony seems to me the keynote of every one of these strange pages....Can any reader who, like myself, is neither linguist nor polyhistor get anything out of such a book except a feeling of savage frustration? Not much, I think, but something."
Clifton Fadiman (05/06/1939)
"The "Wake reminds one of the unfinished obelisk which lies on its side at Assum, yet it has passages of unearthly beauty (particularly the last page) and huge comic scenes."
"The Modern Movement" - Cyril Connolly
"Joyce enforces the way in which 'Finnegans Wake' is to be read. He conceived the reading to be a lifetime project, the book remaining always there, like the landscape surrounding the reader's home or the buildings bounding the reader's apartment. The book remains problematic, unexhausted....The strangeness of his project is an essential part of it, almost its point. The fabric falls apart, certainly, but where it hangs together we are privileged to encounter a world made new."
Essay: "After Joyce" - Donald Barthelme (01/01/1964)
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Other Editions
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Paperback, 1999 - $4.74 Save 77%
Audio, 1996 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Hardcover, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Hardcover, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Hardcover, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
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Paperback, 1975 - $4.99
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1977 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1975 - $15.75
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Book, 1978 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
Audio, 2003 - Not in stock. Add to Wish List
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