Finnegan's Nightmare !!

 

Of late I have been ploughing through James Joyce's four classic works..... Dubliners , A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses and the unfathomable Finnegans Wake. It took Joyce 17 years to write the latter .......... dying two years after its publication 1939. I might add in passing that should you meet up with someone who says he's reading Finnegans Wake for the fun of it and really enjoing it ..... he's lying !!........ or maybe a masochist !  Joyce's highly idiosyncratic language stoking  a "stream of consciousness "  flow of thought over 600 pages leaves the reader perplex ........ maybe even questioning why the literary world would accord such importance to this unconventional work ?????   

Opening paragraph :

 riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend  
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs. 
    Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen- 
core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy 
isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor 
had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse 
to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper 
all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to 
tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a 
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in 
vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot 
peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory 
end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface

Final paragraphe and end of book :

'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, 
tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush 
to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us 
then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thous- 
endsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a 
long the

 

N.B. You will notice that he book opens with the action already in progress........ and seemingly ends abruptly .... not completed ! However , upon closer scrutiny one discovers that the last line is , in reality , the part of the initial sentence in the opening paragraph which is missing. I believe that Joyce is trying to convey the cyclicity of life ...maybe his notion of a true 360 ....... that every ending is in some way a new beginning .... and so on and so forth ! And who knows..... perhaps therein lies the genius of this bizarre Irish author ?