Finnegan's Wake. Heard of it?

[WolfenMachine]

[WolfenMachine]

So my friend calls me up yesterday and says he wants to pick up a copy of a book called Finnegan’s Wake. He says its a THICK book that “weighs 50 pounds” and that he tried reading it when he was younger. He wished he had it now so he could try reading it again, now that he’s older and more intelligent.

I had NEVER heard of it, so I went to Amazon and sure enough, you can read snippits of the book. My friend says, “By reading the back exerpt, you would think it’s a very interesting, well written book with a good layout and amusing concept” true, after reading the back of the book, *I* wanted to go read it. Its supposed to be written like a dream; where you catch bits and blurbs, you get a feeling, a taste, a sense of mood…but it’s not linear like a movie. It seems to be that way, as I can only catch a word or two here and there. But, despite the RAVE reviews it gets….its a bunch of nonsense jibberish! We laughed about it for an hour.

Finnegan’s Wake-Inside and back cover exerpts

The first paragraph makes a bit of sense, but try going to page 9 (on the website, it says pages 1-14 that you can look at, type in the #9)

[SPark]

I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never read it.

[dragonmedley]

If I recall, James Joyce wrote weird stuff in general. I think he wrote Ulysses, one of the only (if not the only) books written in the second person.

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[Pamela]

I’ve never read it but I listen to Irish music (ie The Clancy Brothers, Makem and Clancy) and there is a classic Irish song called Finnegan’s Wake that is based on the book. One of them introduces it as James Joyce seeing “the entire cycle of life, death and rebirth” in whiskey. Basically a guy falls off a ladder, dies, is laid out for the wake, a fight breaks out, whiskey falls on him and, tah dah!, he comes back to life. The song is great – can’t say anything about the book.

[Author]

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