Book Review: Finnegans Wake

“Finnegans Wake,” I can tell you what it is all about in a nutshell; I mean people have been trying for seventy-years to figure it out, it’s obvious, so very, very obvious: first of all you have to be Irish, like me to understand it, it is a drunkard writing down his memoirs in a half daze when he comes home from the bar.  James Joyce, outlined this in “Dubliners,” one need only look at Mr. Farrington, in “Counterparts,” where the narrator says (Joyce):  “…his head was not clear and his mind wandered away to the glare and rattle…he struggled on with his copy…Blast it! …He longed to execrate aloud, to bring his fist down on something violently. He was so enraged that he wrote Bernard Bernard instead of Bernard Bodley…” We see in Finnegans Wake, this same fellow, Mr. Farrington, hard at work on Mr. Joyce’s manuscript. Realizing he spent seventeen years on this project, it is sad to say—too bad he didn’t take a lesson from Mr. Farrington’s boss Mr. Alleyne; he should have gone back to writing Chamber Music, poems, or those poems in that little booklet called: “Penyeach,” which I think, Mr. Farrington penned the name, yet they read so charmingly.

       Let me quote a sentence from Finnegans Wake, and then you’ll understand why the book has not sold well, and never will, but first let me say this: I do realize  the book was written in what is called stream of conscious, and it really goes beyond that.  It is of a family, and the father or husband, is sleeping, I guess, and he has two sons, I guess, and a daughter, I guess, and a wife that would like him to wakeup I guess, and go for a walk I guess, and I do realize that there is possible a dream going on here, and he has created his own language here, in all 600-plus pages, and that the essence of the book is not the plot, theme or insight, because it hasn’t any, so it must be the rhythm of nonsense that it is weaved out of. So with this understanding let me quote a readable sentence? “Otherways wesways like that provost scoffing bedoneen the jebel and the jpysian sea. Cropherb the crunch-bracken shall decide.” Now realizing the man is sleeping, the father, let’s not use character names, since each character has a thousand names—different names on different pages to include the wife and the twin boys: I repeat, the person sleeping, is dreaming, or half  sleeping, and I think is dreaming.  Dreams are not like this, although they are chaotic, they are not as hideous, nor do they talk at night in such a way (Joyce uses this, or infers it is Night Talk; that day talk or thinking is different than the night, I think in Mr. Joyce’s world, night really means drunk talking and thinking…) as he writes them out here, in sentences as you’ve already read, it only gets more confusing, and you have to lean his language. To read and understand one whole page takes your entire mind and soul, and good decipherment, is it worth the trip—no!  

       On another note, this is no reconstruction of night of the soul talk or a dream state, so Joyce would have one believe. Incidentally, there is a letter that seems to swing from one section of the book to the next; it’s like a wiggly tooth, good for nothing, not sure why it is even there. And his puns were expensive for book that makes no sense. Perhaps it is better to relate the book to his family, than to anything else.