I had a brief introduction to James Joyce by reading "Araby" ions ago in high school, and was looking to become more acquainted with his works. This collection performed by Gabriel Byrne was a joy to listen to...who better to hear it from than a Dubliner and a great actor to boot?! Although I was debating whether or not it was better to read his works directly before listening to any interpretation, film or audio alike, I don`t regret it. In fact, I think it will help me appreciate Joyce more when I go back to read the works featured. The chamber music as well left me thinking of another time and place, adding a nice backdrop for the dialogue.

Listening through the 'James Joyce Collection' is pleasure itself. The four cassettes offer the best of Joyce's shorter works (short parts of 'The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', short stories from 'The Dubliners' and poems from 'Chamber Music'). Even those who find Joyces's big works difficult will have an excellent time listening to these pieces of work. The short stories and poems are enchanting as they portray Joyce's Dublin and Dubliners, the stories are of a riveting kind. Byrne's sensitive, lively performance renders them all the more enjoyable. The gentle brogue of the Irish actor gives you an additional touch of authenticity. The 'James Joyce Collection' is well worth buying if you're yearning for an intense auditive and literary experience.

The James Joyce Audio Collection is a captivating and enjoyable set of Joyce's best works, read by Joyce himself and three other wonderful performers. The Joyce readings are amazingly remastered, and it is an "epiphany" to listen to a writer like Joyce to read from "Ulysses," his most inspired and personal work. Other highlights of the collection include Cyril Cusack's spirited readings from Joyce's "Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man" This passionate performance brings Joyce's prose to dazzling life and it is an unforgettable experience. This collection is a great way to experience Joyce's literature as it was meant to be; lyrical and vibrant.

There are so many confliciting reviews, I just had to read this book and write this review.

I knew the author, many years ago in Europe. Although we did not know each other before the war in our native Budapest, we were in the same camp. We are about the same age. I knew her then -- and her family. Betty [her American name] was a young girl, whose idealized life was torn apart. Her love for Richie kept her hopes alive as much as her dear Mother kept her body alive... and perhaps her faith kept her soul alive. She was ill in the camps, perhaps often delirious. Many of us were -- with death, sickness and hunger as our constant companions.

I can't blame her for her obsession with her first love -- I am sure her maturity was arrested at the same time she was taken away. So, she got older, but remained 15 for many many years. You cannot imagine the horrors we endured -- Schindler's list is a "Disney-like" version of our experience.

All Holocaust survivors are deeply damaged souls. We are not "normal" in any sense of the word. Luckily, in later life, Betty finally learned what true love is, and her {also deeply traumatized} husband stuck with her -- through her troubled life and even now... even as she painted such a unneccessarily cruel and negative portrait of him in her book... he must be a very sad and very special man.

This book will not win any great awards. It is just one story -- one about a very spoiled, self-centered and foolish girl who is REAL. She did live the life she described -- I know that for certain -- and she had the nerve to admit it to the world. Don't criticize her, understand her.

When most people think of war or the Holocaust, they probably don't immediately realize the very unique, personal stories that play out against the backdrop of the larger conflict. This book tells several such stories from the point of view of a young woman who was lucky enough to survive the worst kind of horror man can create. The pages not only describe interesting events from the Eastern European campaign of World War 2, but they contain a love story that operates on many different levels. People of the present generation may find the story in its totality hard to fathom, believe or empathize with, but the days lived by the author were during a different time when life was simultaneously cheap and valuable. Betty Schimmel is an incredible woman, and if her husband, Otto, wasn't Jewish, I think he could qualify for Sainthood. Buy this book. You'll learn something important while being deeply touched.

Reading this book changed my life and helped me learn to cherish the liberties and love in my life. To See You Again : A True Story of Love in a Time of War is a valuable historical account that shares what it was like to live through an ordinary day in an extraorinarily horrific time.I couldn't put this book down. It was enlightening to read an honest and graphic account of life in the war torn city of Budapest as well as accounts of life in the Ghetto, concentration camps and a death march. The love story encapsulated in this book is enthralling, sweet and touching. This book teaches the reader that life, love, and faith have the power to overcome hatred and horror. Betty Schimmel was a bit self serving at times but anyone with a spirit and sense of survival as strong as hers is truly a important person. This is a wonderful book.

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.