How does Veeky Forums feel about this novel?

Most stories are written to be linear, but Finnegan's Wake is quite the exception. It starts mid-sentence, and the book is rather confusing afterward, and then it ends with the first half of the sentence that was in the beginning. The story itself is like a river, constantly rushing, and the book ends up being a radial form. A true work of art.

one of the more meticulously crafted books

it's great if you're into scat

as in shit or singing?

take a fucking guess

i mean the book is gibberish soooooo

truly hilarious. some of the funniest shit i've experienced

He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur.

Finnegans Wake is like Duchamp's Fountain or Andy Warhol's 6-hour film of someone sleeping. They were important at the time for challenging people's definition of art, but under no circumstances is it something that should be revisited, or, God forbid, have any influence on living artists.

I really feel bad for the people who think FW is literal gibberish. These intellectual peons can only fathom immediate gratification. The mental world they inhabit must be so small and boring. If you spend more than 30 seconds with the book, it's clearly not gibberish.

just say thunder nigga, the fuck all this gay shit there for anyway?

Novel? More like a sink ride down level five literary rapids in the overflowing stream of consciousness that was Joyce's genius.

>Comparing Joyce to autistic, untalented "artists"
Please don't. Joyce put more effort into FW than they did in their entire lives combined

do i need to read anything before wake? finished ulysses recently

Guarantee you haven't read more than 3 pages of FW, mate.

rivers never run in circles though. that makes no sense.

Why should that matter if the result is equally shitty?

>inb4 go back to reading YA

Yes, because Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Austen, Dickens, Proust, Hawthorne, and Melville are the same as Twilight.

Nor have I watched more than 5 seconds of Andy Warhol's "Sleep."

Unreadable

The greeks

Start with the entire western canon.

I like word puzzles but it seems like too much effort for me to personally go through it and slowly, deliberately decode it. I'd rather reread Les Miserables or play tennis.

The context is that you need to read it with the entire Western Canon shoved up your ass

THIS

STAY WAKE Veeky Forums

Lit is fucking dead. You got plebs on here questioning the greatness of Joyce's masterpiece.. THE masterpiece of the written word. Get a fucking job you assclowns.

Go to bed Tao

If I don't get the goddamn pasta in this thread I'm going to be mighty fucking disappointed with you, Veeky Forums.

Joyce was a deeply boring provincial hack of a writer.

This is real? Wow, Joyce is a hack.

I'll stick to Melville, Shakespeare, and the KJV.

Yeah, I actually read the whole thing because I had to. I was entering a prestigious PhD program and focusing on Joyce because I loved Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses. To my shame, though, I'd never read the Wake. I'd never even tried, as hard as that was to admit. It was this huge blind spot and area of vulnerability for me. Whenever it'd come up with my colleagues I'd just smile and nod, smile and nod, hoping they wouldn't ask me anything specific about it. "The musicality of it," somebody would say, and I'd say, "Oh God, yes, it's like Beethoven." Finally, though, I had to dive into it, and let me tell you it was tough going. Joseph Campbell's guide helped a lot. Reading it out loud helped. I listened to other people read it, read online commentaries. Eventually it started to make some sort of sense. It was like I was learning to read for the first time again, and in a way this was enjoyable. I got better at reading the book. Soon I was reading entire paragraphs without trouble, getting the puns, laughing at the jokes. I could sort of follow the story, it was like a blurry picture resolving into clarity, or like I was drunk and I was sobering up, I could actually understand it. As I became more and more adept at reading the Wake, I began putting myself to the test, initiating conversations with my colleagues about it, but specific passages this time, specific parts of the book. You can probably guess what happened. After a number of these conversations it became blindingly obvious that I understood the book a lot better than they did, they who I thought were the experts. It eventually became sort of embarrassing for them and I stopped trying to talk about it. And at the end of the day I would pack my things, catch the bus home, and settle into my apartment to read the Wake. It had surpassed all of Joyce's other works in my estimation. Ulysses, the book months earlier I would've named as my favorite of all time, the best book ever written, was now #2 to the Wake. So majestic, so ambitious, so wide-ranging, erudite, glorious, incredible was it that I couldn't believe that it was the work of one man. Best of all, the heart of it isn't complicated at all. What did I get from the Wake, what are its lessons? First of all, be yourself. Second of all, put one foot in front of the other. And lastly, just do it for crying out loud, time's a wastin'!

Good lad!

ive read the greeks and 90% of the canon, am i ready?

here's your (you)

Unless this is some shitty pasta please enlighten me, a humble plebeian, by summarizing the plot and clarifying no more than 3 relevant insights that you got from the novel.

t. never read it

It's not a novel. Neither is Ulysses. They're books.

This pleases me. Have a (You).

Same way I feel about all Joyce minus a few short stories in Dubliners..

Utter wank.

>you could've written Wake
>because Joyce wrote it first you will never be famous
this is the malice of the author
by claiming ideas for his own, he robs future generations of the ability to discover