NP - Finnegans Wake

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Thanks for your "self-promo", Bekah. And congratulations from me too!

For this non-native English speaker, Finnegans Wake is a bit too much.
Quite a bit too much, actually. This wonderfully aural flood or
portmanteau words, puns, macaronic words etc: I get the feeling of
being excluded. I'm not saying that it is not difficult for you native
speakers too, but at least you are given a fairer chance... I do admire
the book, but from a distance that feels unbridgeable.


Heikki

On Mon, 19 Dec 2011, Bekah wrote:

> 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/
>