Serious, yet enjoyable Western canon literature

[Fregly]

The endurance test of all Joycean endurance tests is Finnegans Wake. I got through it but it took me the better part of two years with a lot of subsidiary critical/explanatory reading to go with it.

What I realized toward the end is that it's a book (novel isn't quite right) that can really only be re-read. You need to read it once in order to be able to go back and read it again, because it doesn't proceed by way of plot or even character, but by way of resonances and similarities and repetitions. Which is why the end of the book flows right back into the beginning.

It's an immensely frustrating but also very funny book that, if nothing else, will change the way you think about narrative and language and meaning. Enjoyable? Not really enjoyable, but definitely rewarding.

Probably should be treated as dense poetry more than prose. I am too impatient and its an awful lot. With the Dubliners I was taken aback by the beauty of the prose; So I connect with the art of it without needing sources to navigate.

 

[REK2575]

'The Wake' could be considered a very (very) long prose poem, but what I think it really is, is a dream text written in a dream language that Joyce created sui generis. I don't think the book actually depicts one person's dream (this is still a bone of contention among critics), but rather, the text puts you yourself, the reader, in a kind of dreamlike state of receptivity. I've never read any other book that reproduces something so close to the actual experience of dreaming.

And, if you try reading it when you're tired, it absolutely WILL put you to sleep.

 

[posvibes]

I have a great affection for the humanism as exemplified in the essays of Montaigne. Timeless.

 

[okok]

bloom got a book for your title