NP - Finnegans Wake

[Mark Kohut]

I salute you, Bekah!....Dear Non-Readers, I finished it..Yeah!
 
You're a better man or woman than I am..

From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2011 8:07 AM
Subject: NP - Finnegans Wake

Self-promo time, I suppose.  I just finished FW  yesterday.  It took me 7 months with about 10 weeks off for a vacation.  I read a very little bit at a time - maybe 1 or 2 pages -  two or three times a day -  it became like a little meditational for me.  It's so disjointed that this method worked and I can't really think of any other book which is so language oriented you honestly don't have to follow along with any idea, theme or  plot.  Maybe the Bible. ? 

I enjoyed it muchly.  It's very rich in it's own way but it sounds like a bunch of gobbeldy gook at first.  For me it was like a very thick Irish brogue with an abundance of word-play and phonetic spellings from a narrator who is sleeping and maybe half drunk to boot.  The narrative clears up and then fogs over again like the narrator/protagonist is going into deeper sleep and then coming back out of it and so on with his language just flowing on like a river - stream of SUBconsciousness.  Here's a clip of how it does that (page 409/Penguin): 

Goodbye now, Shaun replied, with a voice pure as a church-mode, in 
echo rightdainty, with a good catlick tug at his coco-moss candylock, 
a foretaste in time of his cabbageous brain's curlyflower. Athiacaro! 
Comb his tar odd gee sing your mower.  O meeow? Greet thee Good? How 
are them columbuses! Lard have mustard on them! Fatiguing, very 
fatiguing. Hobos horn-knees and the corveeture of my spine. Poumeerme! 
My heaviest crux and dairy lot it is, with a bed as hard as the 
thinkamuddles of the Greeks and a board as bare as a Roman altar.

Bekah
http://beckylindroos.wordpress.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20111219/cdf7af14/attachment.html>