The Wake is reviewed by so many people who haven't read it!

1. How can anyone familiar with Joseph Campbell's "Wings of Art" or "Skeleton Key", or even John Bishop's "Joyce's Book of the Dark", suggest that the Wake is not great art?

The greatest novelist of the 20th century did not spend 17 of his most creative years on a prank. Joyce had a flair for foreign languages, regarded Catholicism as "a beautiful lie", had at his disposal the collective wisdom of East and West, was EXTREMELY well read, gifted in music, delighted in wordplay, extensively researched the psychology of sleep, and was notoriously autobiographical in his literary productions...

Joyce describes a night's dream in both biographical (Freudian) and archetypal (Jungian) terms: brother against brother conflict, inevitable haunting guilt ("this municipal sin business"), raging lust percolating through "the fury and the mire of human veins", chrysalis-like psychological dependence on (temporal and ecclesiastical) authority, ultimate redemption through love, inevitable death...These situations characterize both human history and tomorrow morning's news.

And so, the Wake is OUR dream: each of us is the poor harried protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, subjected to the cold patrician ridicule of the Four Customers and Twelve Jurymen and burdened by guilt and the misplaced faith of our personal and collective innocence.

Those with little patience for Joyce's presentation are not willing to reassess what a book should convey or else lack a herculean desire for wordplay. In defence of detractors, knowledge of at least one foreign language probably helps, as does general knowledge of comparative religion and mythology, Vico's historical cycles, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, alchemy, Biblical tales, childrens' games, the history of English literature, etc...

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to approaching the Wake is that many readers come in bad faith, unwilling to believe that an order is there, hidden in the obscure labyrinth of protean wordplay.

If you want to turn the lead of the Wake into gold, then you must be a modern-day alchemist. And do not expect to complete the Great Work without much meditation and effort.

A lot of people say that 'Finnegans Wake' is a worthless book because they don't understand it. They're right, of course--nobody fully understands this book. That's the whole point.

'Finnegans Wake' does not tell a story; it plunges the reader into it. The reader becomes the dreamer-- things are slightly out of focus, the real and the unreal mix freely, words and thoughts blur and merge together, everything has multiple connotations, and it is both beautiful and baffling. However, its not simply unstructured chaos-- there is a "plotline" which seeks to examine the relationships between members of a family through the dreams of H.C.E (the central character and father) and his wife. But Joyce extends the "plot" far beyond the specific characters, so (like 'Ulysses') 'F.W.' becomes timeless.

Speaking of Ulysses, I think many people (I, in some ways, was one of them) are upset when they realize that F.W. is entirely different, because Ulysses is so amazingly beautiful and perfect. Many reviewers here ask why Joyce didn't write more of the gorgeous prose-poetry of 'Portrait...' and Ulysses. Here's why: Joyce was genius. And geniuses never hold still for very long. Ulysses proves Joyce as a literary master. F.W. proves Joyce to be a master of ideas, art, and language itself. Comparing Joyce's previous work with F.W. is like comparing apples to oranges, as his aims and motives are entirely different. 'Portrait' and 'Ulysses' are both literary masterpieces, while F.W. is simply a masterpiece (though it may perhaps fail as "literature" because it isn't meant to be-- that probably won't make any sense to those who have not read it). The structure, ideas, and concepts Joyce puts forth allows F.W. to transcend the medium of a book; it really belongs on its own seperate shelf at the library or in a museum.

Bottom line: 'Finnegans Wake' is a work of art. Those who dismiss it because it is confusing as well as those who try to analyze the meaning of every word are missing the point. Its beauty lies in its confusion, double-meanings, and wordplay. Yes, it is difficult, but reading F.W. is an experience that no other book compares to. It is beautiful. It is chaotic. It is magnificent.

I've just reached the end ... or is it the beginning? It's taken me six months, with Anthony Burgess' 'Here Comes Everybody' providing a basic and unsatisfactory commentary on this nightmare of a book. I can't really recommend anybody to read this unless you know exactly what you're letting yourself in for ... unlike Ulysses, which I believe everybody should attempt at some point in their lives. So why have I given it 5 stars? Because it simply had to be written.

Without the Wake, twentieth century fiction would have been simply an extension of the nineteenth century. This book is what sets us apart. Don't believe the people who tell you it's a joke - a genius like Joyce doesn't spend 15 years, resign himself to penury when a "Ulysses Lite" could have made him a rich man, and ultimately ruin his eyesight all for nothing more than the literary equivalent of a whoopee cushion. There are deep things here, it's just that they're buried so deep that it's mostly not worth the effort of mining them. But again, I've given it 5 stars because this book is like a nail bomb in a library (shhhhh!) - it destroyed everyone's perception of what could ever constitute literature. If the Wake can be created, anything is possible. The Wake gave the green light to everyone's wildest imaginings and bizarre method of telling it - after all, whatever you write it won't be as difficult or as slow or as mad or as painful as this work.

Don't let anybody tell you that there is an easy way into this book. Whichever way you approach it, however many primers and explanations you read, nothing will prepare you for 650 pages of dense dream-imagery written in polyglottal puns through which you grasp at anything that makes the slightest sense (and I mean slightest). The basic story of a publican dreaming over the repercussions of being caught urinating in a public park by two soldiers and then being accused of indecent exposure is by the by and of little import, because it is so thoroughly buried beneath hundreds of layers of Irish, oedipal and religious history, myth and gossip and the minutiae of everyday life transfigured by dream, that it would be easy to miss (and if you did, it wouldn't be a problem anyway - this is hardly narrative-driven). There are moments of comedy, but they're few and far between. The publican becomes the man-myth-mountain Finnegan, who represents Ireland, his forgiving and defending wife becomes Anna Livia Plurabella, the river Liffy and mother nature herself - reading the book is a battle that's impossible to win and you ultimately simply surrender yourself to the flow, the cycle of life which, like water taken from the sea to clouds to rain to rivers to sea to clouds .... takes you from the end to flow back to the beginning without even a full stop to halt things. I wondered whether it would make more sense the second time round, then decided that I didn't really care to find out.

So, be glad that you don't have to read this book, but you should all definitely celebrate that it was written.