Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
Finished it but took even longer than the usual 600 pager.
What a book. It took me at least 2 chapters to really encode my brain to work with it and resist the tugging to understand ‘what is happening’ at all times. My edition comes with some reader notes and scene guides which I think I’d probably have been lost without in the 2nd and 3rd book but I still managed to get a lot out of it. My favourite chapter was the séance, I think book III.3, had a very visceral sense of sound with Shaun voicing different people through telemechanical sounds, as if the four interrogators are trying to get him to connect to the truth through an unreliable dialup connection. At times I think the book feels the most like horror to me.
Ultimately, I think Ulysses is the better book, but they form a nice pair. Ulysses is also a lot more recommendable and generally a bit more human. The Wake feels a bit more abstract, the sum total of human consciousness but not as much in it that is directly relatable.
I am struck by how often people talk up Joyce’s humour. Like, it is clearly there but some readers seem to report literally ROFLing on every page which has never been my experience and I doubt is for any reader. We used to learn about jokes in Shakespeare plays at school and they make sense but aren’t really laugh out loud funny because of either subtlety or cultural distance. I suspect a similar thing happens with Joyce where people claim hilarity which is probably referring to more subtle humur. Like there’s 3 points in the entire book I laughed out loud, the rest is occasional smirks.
An aspect of the freedom of interpretation is how some misspellings or phrasings call to mind things the author could never intend. For example, one extract had me thinking about games as a service.
anti-sexuous, misoxenetic, gaasy pure, flesh and blood games,
Others are just fun to read, the meter takes you with it.
TAFF (who still senses that heavinscent houroines that enter-
trained him who they were sinuorivals from the sunny Espionia but
plied wopsy with his wallets in thatthack of the bustle Bakerloo,
(11.32), passing the uninational truthbosh in smoothing irony over
the multinotcheralled infructuosities of his grinner set). The rib,
the rib, the quean of oldbyrdes, Sinya Sonyavitches! Your
Rhoda Cockardes that are raday to embrace our ruddy inflamtry
world! In their ohosililesvienne biribarbebeway. Till they’ve
kinks in their tringers and boils on their taws. Whor dor the pene
lie, Mer Pencho? Ist dramhead countmortial or gonorrhal stab?
Mind your pughs and keaoghs, if you piggots, marsh! Do the
nut, dingbut! Be a dag! For zahur and zimmerminnes! Sing in
the chorias to the ethur:
I can definitely see myself returning to the book again but reading in a more jump-about way. As a whole piece it is without any rival and even when there were struggles with its meaning there are passages which feel like the best thing you ever read. I thought about it a lot when not reading it.
Diaspora – Greg Egan
Very good but a bit science-headed for me. I kinda feel like the book would be improved by adding some simple diagrams. Even with the clearest written descriptions, multidimensional settings and theory are very hard to communicate in writing alone. I’d even take some of it in the form of mathematical expressions if it meant I didn’t feel like some pages were just relating something scientific textbooks can better illustrate. If I hadn’t played https://4dtoys.com/ I think I’d be lost in some sections. This also occasionally leads to the problem of every character being a highly qualified scientist and nobody having much in the way of flaws beyond some occasional friction against each other. Everyone can sometimes feel a bit clean and viceless but it kinda comes with the setting. Overall, I enjoyed the escalating scale of the story and the way in which it oscillates between hope for the future and sheer terror at the scale of the universe. Curious to know if people think this is Egan’s best book or if others are highly worth reading.