FINNEGANS WAKE - JAMES JOYCE

Well,at least I’ll never need to call another book “difficult” again. Usually when someone calls a book difficult they mean some combination of, it’s long, the plot is confusing, the vocabulary is obscure, it’s hard to tell what it’s “about,” but this novel is on another level and is confusing on a word-to-word basis. Joyce really went nuts and fully indulge his propensity for puns and wordplay. There are almost no standard words or spellings to be found. Here are four words in a row from a page picked at random, “Digteter! Grundtsagar! Swop beef!” to give you a little hint of the flavor and tenor. If the writing of others, like Hemmingway or some such, gets referred to as lean, and stripped down, this language is explosive expansive and almost fermented, every word is a 9 level-pun, in several languages that you can sit and think about by itself for a few minutes. It’s insane he thought of 600 pages worth of these words and strung them together. It’s the most stoned book I’ve ever read, reading it gives you that wonderful, deeply stoned feeling where you’re noticing strange connections and punning and thinking about how weird certain words or ideas are. It seems a very good book to get obsessed over and to continue to reread, there is, in fact, ample secondary literature and online theories and whatnot about the book. I didn’t read any of that stuff yet, I wanted to go in as “pure” as possible to see what I could get out of it on my own. I’m very interested to dive into some of these secondary materials and see what other people think of it. I know I missed an enormous portion of it by not knowing enough about Irish history/language/culture, as well as things about Dublin, specifically. It’s very, very Irish and some of it clearly is meant to be read in or to replicate an Irish accent. The plot, as far as I could discern it, flickered in and out, with major, major portions of the book being totally obscure to me on story or plot level. I’m interested to see what other people have made of it. But, at the end of the day, the whole thing is so strange and wonderful, you can just open it and read any passage and marvel at how one person was able to do this. Not since reading the Solar Cycle books have I had such a clear feeling that this was a work I’m going to keep thinking about and rereading and chipping away at for the rest of my life.