'haven't made it past p. 83!

This is a work of constant study. After years of steering clear of it, this current audiobook moment in my life was an aha! moment with regard to this work. This novel was created to be listened to, and it can be great fun to do that. A euphonius, pleasant, amusing work to listen to. There's lots of parodic material to have a good time with. I have a general idea now of what the novel is about, but have no concrete overview. It took the man 17 years to write this preposterously ambitious novel, so I've become comfortable with it being a constant companion, like a favorite symphony or musical recording, to work on when the spirit moves me. I had on section 3 the other night, and have been through the entire text twice, but considered insights remain in the future after much further study.
Oh, I have one; after you get some feel of the wheel, it does feel like it was written by the man who wrote Ulysses, so if you have some understanding of how that book works, that will help you a bit with this. It's not a completely alien beast. ( )

Anyone struggling with this book, or those that aren't but want a different perspective, should listen to it with the book. Naxos has a wonderful full audio book. The experience is very much like listening to an extraordinary and complex piece of classical music with the score. I love the music and scores of Brian Ferneyhough, arguably some of the most complex classical music ever written, and whilst I am highly skilled in such music, it would take a lifetime to untangle and understand what he has written, but the oral and intellectual experience are intoxicating, and I get the same enjoyment with the Wake. Can I also recommend John Cage’s “Roaratorio” based on the Wake. ( )

I tried to read this more than once and never got far. It worked best just dipping into it here and there, but nevertheless it was just too much work, much as I liked everything else I read of Joyce. ( )

Earlier in my life, I read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, all by James Joyce. This year I decided to read Finnegans Wake, a novel notorious for its inaccessibility. Like The Cantos by Ezra Pound, it is a text many know, few read, and less understand.

While the Wake is difficult, this shouldn’t be seen as a deterrent to actually reading it. It is a singular creative artifact, overflowing with meaning. A cornucopia of languages, puns, and parody, the Wake will probably never be fully understood, at least not in any conventional sense.

Unlike my reading of Ulysses – a version heavily annotated – I decided to read the Wake without any guides, skeletons, and such. As noted Joyce scholar John Bishop states in the Penguin edition, “There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is ‘about’ anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, ‘readable’.” Perhaps reading the Wake isn’t about “getting it.” Without resorting to the trope, “All art is incomprehensible,” Bishop asserts the rather obvious point that the text will mean different things to different people. I’m a bit of a language nerd, collecting foreign language dictionaries, slang dictionaries, subculture- and/or industry-specific dictionaries (gay slang, soldier slang, etc.). The only real prerequisite for reading the Wake is a love for language. Language in and of itself. (Something I picked up reading Anthony Burgess and watching Monty Python.)

Conceived in a circular form – the last sentence of the novel begins the first sentence at the beginning of the novel – allows the reader to pick up and leave at any point. This circular form reinforces the works character as polyvocal, polysemic, and polymorphous.

Choice passages like:

“Male partly masking female. Man looking round, beastly expression, fishy eyes, paralleliped homoplatts, ghazometron pondus, exhibits rage.”

What does it mean? I don’t know. Not sure what Joyce meant either, although ghazometron sounds like a mashup of Arabic and Hebrew (ghazal = the poetic form + metron … could be based on Metatron the angel and/or the word metronome, the device that keeps the beat). Pondus relates to weight. Even within this sentence, chosen at random, meanings abound.

The Wake represents a gleeful effrontery against the reader’s desire to be told what a passage means. Meanings literally flood from the book, a logorrheaic gushing, and a smack to the face for those seeking to master a text. Like an ancient mystical text (The Zohar) or visionary art works (William Blake’s large-scale prophetic works), critics, specialists, and readers alike will be parsing and dissecting the work for years to come. While Samuel Beckett’s work plumbed the depths of the human experience through a merciless linguistic subtraction, the Wake represents the pinnacle of an encyclopedic intellect, the work of two decades, an orgy of obscurantist obfuscation.

Don’t think of the Wake as a literary Everest, an epic one slogs through to get an achievement badge. Read it because it is fun. Remember fun? See parsing the language and the multilingual puns not as an attempt to master the meaning, but as literary spelunking, exploring an infinite rabbit hole / Moebius strip / ouroboros. Finnegans Wake is a novel that encompasses everything, about the night and sleep and dreams written in a dream-language and embracing a punny dream-logic all its own. It is understandable only in the way dreams are. In the end, we will find meaning(s) in the text even Joyce never dreamed of.

https://driftlessareareview.com/2022/10/23/__trashed/ ( )

Ah, James Joyce! ( )

'We annew. Our shades of minglings mengle them and help help horizons. A flasch and, rasch, it shall come to pasch, as hearth by hearth leaps live.'
Finnegans Wake has been book of continuous inspiration over the two years that I spent reading it. I remember that when I started it, quite fresh after Ulysses , that I was both appalled and attracted by it. Appalled by the unashamed intellectualism, attracted by the churning depth of the writing. In one sentence Joyce can lift you along three millenniums, connected by certain myths or tales and throw you back in the corner of a pub, drunk and in your own vomit. In Joyce is connected the very high and low of human nature.
The 'Story'
Finnegans Wake is a tale of HCE, or Here Comes Everybody , who is a husband to ALP, or Anna Livia Plurabella . During the rambling of the story, there are references made to a certain sin HCE is supposed to have undergone in a park, with another woman. ALP writes a letter to HCE, which is written down by one of their sons Shem the Penman, and delivered by Shaun the Postman. They both fight for who will replace their dad in the end. The books is famously written so that the last line continues in the first line, suggesting a circular movement. The story is about a fall of sin, both in every day life and myths. It is about life itself, in all its protean, weird movements which we humans have to try and keep up with.

The style
The story is told in a very loose manner, which moves beyond stream of consciousness in the sense that one never gets as close to the characters as one does in Ulysses. Rather, the reader keeps a large distance throughout the story of the plot, always losing the thread one is following and ending up around other weird corners in Joyce's universe.
What is so genius about it?
The Wake is a book of genius in my opinion, because it is a book that celebrates life while respecting its mysteries. It is a book which is intended to be misread; there does not exist one right reading, it is about what the reader makes of it. In this sense, it is like life itself: always hiding its treasure right around the corner. The reader is allowed to suppose an ultimate intention, or truth, just as we try to do in real life, but just as in real life, what we get reflected back are always our own efforts and hopes. The Wake is a book which is open and closed at the same time, hiding and revealing. It reveals more than most books do, because when it does get close to a character, it absorbs it. We can read fragments of thoughts more personal than regular literature displays. However, it is also more closed, emphasizing questions of epistemology and truth. Meaning is always just out of reach: reading Finnegans Wake is a continuous reaching and stretching of the arms, never being able to finally grasp it. It is a humiliating experience, which threatens and stretches our modes of understanding.
The ultimate glory is that it is a book of empowerment . It is something that must be overcome and undergone at the same time. Spinoza readers might recognize that this how he looks at life: it something that overpowers and that can give us infinite power if we find a way to act in the right way. Joyce's book is a book of life in the Nietzschean and Spinozist way. It asks of us ultimate activity, while being passive. It asks of us to try and at the same time accept our own limits. Because there exists so heavy a burden before the reader, it has the power to open the reader's reality itself. It is a text, stretching far beyond the limits of its cover. It grabs and wrestles and opens and breathes into our lives. With Finnegans Wake Joyce wrote a book so rich, so dense, so wonderful and funny that he proves to have overcome himself.
( )

that some books you can read until you die, and hope to understand afterwards. ( )

Yesterday, in preparation for Neal Kosaly-Meyer’s performance of chapter 5 (a chapter a year, by heart), I read chapter 5. As it was late in the day, I read it fast, murmured out loud to myself, not fussing over meaning and the various obliquities and unpronounceabilities (see, Joyce makes you experience language differently!) in the text. This was a Revelation! I have always thought I had to read the Wake studiously, checking sources, researching allusions, and these are not unpleasurable things to do. I do them all the time, but whispering my way through Chapter 5, I realized that it was not necessary. Joyce’s language is so rich, that you stumble upon poetry and comedy at every turn. There are even narrative nuggets here and there if you pay attention. This was very freeing! And so, onward to Chapter 6 and Backward to the beginning....

a word of encouragement to the readers of finnegans wake: stay awake for the sunrise. it's worth it. ( )

Update:

So, I just asked a GR celebrity if Finnegans Wake is a good book and he said that's a question that can't be answered. My family's antiquarian book business is closing down in a few days. I notice that we have a lovely copy of this Joyce book, first edition, dust-jacket in great condition, which was a fair price at $5000AUD and is now $2500AUD - which as far as I can tell is a steal.

But nobody wants it. Which prompted the question....is it a good book? Not good enough is all I can say. At this rate I'm going to end up having to read it. :(

--------------------------------------
From much earlier....

Note that I have a 'better written than Harry Potter shelf'.

Praise the lord for Michael Chabon. Note only don't I have to read Joyce, I don't even have to not read him and review him.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/what-make-finnegans-wake/

Update:

So, I just asked a GR celebrity if Finnegans Wake is a good book and he said that's a question that can't be answered. My family's antiquarian book business is closing down in a few days. I notice that we have a lovely copy of this Joyce book, first edition, dust-jacket in great condition, which was a fair price at $5000AUD and is now $2500AUD - which as far as I can tell is a steal.

But nobody wants it. Which prompted the question....is it a good book? Not good enough is all I can say. At this rate I'm going to end up having to read it. :(

--------------------------------------
From much earlier....

Note that I have a 'better written than Harry Potter shelf'.

Praise the lord for Michael Chabon. Note only don't I have to read Joyce, I don't even have to not read him and review him.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/what-make-finnegans-wake/

This has got to be the best, most fantastic, wonderful book ever written to have absolutely freaking defeated me. Not only is the wordplay and freakishly brilliant alliteration such that I want to roll around in it like a dog in autumn leaves, but the language is also so dense and impenetrable I can BARELY get a sense of what the F*** is going on.

Is it brilliant? Yeah, I can see that much. I can also so see that it was specifically written to break modern literature scholars from their dependence on LSD and Heroin. Both used at the same time. And this is the "lite" version of the drug which is much more insidious because it is even MORE addictive and it happens to kill you in about thirty days after reading. It's a socially-transmitted Irish cancer. It's also a mudkiss written by a psychotic who throws readers into the abyss without a parachute. It was written by the Joker. You know, the one that just wanted to watch the world burn.

It's murdercock English. It's being peed on by pearlypets. It's joking around like a hearse on fire. It's a nappywink.


Honestly, I would NOT have DNF'd this at the midpoint if it wasn't so freaking dense. Or if I were completely drunk in a room full of other Irish foks shouting out random lines from this monstrosity. Or if I joined a cult, bringing this book with me to counteract the crazy by a more potent kind of crazy.

But I did none of these things. I was DEFEATED.

But I do it gracefully. I admit I was beaten by this madman. ( )

Why Finnegans Wake's Jokes Aren't Funny

This is an unusual review. It is an excerpt from a novel I'm working on. One character, Joachim, is telling another, Samuel, about Joyce's book. The opening lines describe my own engagement with the book, which has gone on now for nearly thirty years.

"So then I read Joyce,” Joachim told me, "not Ulysses, for heaven’s sake, but Finnegans Wake, I read that book all day most days for months, and then some days most months for years. I covered each page in notes, I read his letters, I bought books and books about the book, I read introductions, summaries, annotations, concordances, and indices, I read the pages he translated into French and Italian, I read his first scribbled ideas, really you can’t read them, but I read them, they are just pages of words, like ‘floods reveal,’ ‘why bridge things,’ ‘winding roads,’ ‘swollen stream,’ ‘spudfed pigs,’ ‘angel in the house,’ ‘thought himself sick,’ ‘doubtful points,’ ‘a dark spirit came in,’ ‘what answer did you get,’ ‘dear little girl in Boston, you fill a big hole in my heart,’ ‘amber route,’ ‘lying spirit in heaven / spirit lying in heaven,’ ‘pyjamas redden the bed,’ ‘deafness from a damp pillow,’ ‘not even churches are sacred,’ ‘glegg,’ ‘mental nerve,’ ‘gossipaceous,’ ‘inkpot upset foretold,’ ‘gloompourers,’ ‘wail of wind,’ ‘drip of noise,’ ‘better betray with pleasure,’ ‘scowl,’ ‘maniac,’ ‘semi demented,’ ‘deadened walls,’ ‘inspissated obscurities,’ ‘longueurs,’ ‘border on insane,’ ‘dark clouds and mud,’ ‘mouthless streams,’ ‘vertical rivers,’ ‘melodious cave,’ ‘where he ended his life.’ I read his drafts and typescripts, I read the Buffalo notebooks, those are notes he made when he was nearly blind, they look like they were written by a bear with a crayon. I read his proofs and galleys, I looked up every single one of his thousands of made-up words, ‘ournhisn,’ ‘dororrhea,’ ‘hogpew,’ ‘sossad,’ ‘henayearn,’ ‘pappap poppopcuddle,’ ‘commonknounest,’ ‘speleostoical,’ ‘inflorflorence,’ ‘megageg,’ ‘soswhitchoverswetch,’ ‘conflingent,’ ‘antiproresurrectionism,’ ‘dumpsydiddle,’ ‘ragingoo,’ ‘bombossities,’ I studied every single one of those invented words, they’re are supposed to be jokes, or not exactly jokes, but more like little chuckles, or delights, or just amusements, although many of them are puzzles, and in general they are meant to be entertainments, they are supposed to be brief moments of levity, or no, not levity, that’s an old-fashioned word, they are wee delights or mischievous pleasantries or drolleries or bonbons or whatever, you can tell he thought his invented words are infused with infectious glee. I did not laugh even once. That book has everything I am afraid of. It is written for no one, Samuel, because no one can ever sit back, after months and years reading and studying and annotating, after years and months struggling through the swarms of squeaking scholars, no one can ever sit back, close the back cover with a satisfying snap, and say, Okay, I get that. Finnegans Wake is everything I fear, it is an enormous mistake the size of an entire country, the size of a third of Joyce’s life. The book is only six hundred pages, that is half of Burton or a sixth of Proust, but it took Joyce seventeen years to write. It would be as if I had stopped writing when I got to page six hundred, and then gone back to the beginning and put the pages into a typewriter and typed over them, and did that over and again for seventeen years, until I had six hundred pages of thick black text with only a few legible words surviving among the language detritus and throngs of palimpsestic puns. The first drafts the Finnegans Wake are easy enough to read. They are as clear as you would expect from any ill-mannered modernist writer. But Joyce kept going back, pestering his sentences, scratching and pecking at them, inserting Danish words, Irish words, Serbo-Croatian words, medieval Latin words, pulling apart perfectly good lines and inserting the names of Babylonian gods, Siberian rivers, or Byzantine patriarchs, returning again and again, like a hyena at a carcass, it pulls off a strip of gristle and lopes off, but in a minute it’s back, slobbering for one more scrap. He asphyxiated his English with x’s and q’s from Basque, Albanian, and Chinese, he tied his own writing in knots, he twisted it hard by the wrists, and they were his own wrists he was twisting, I mean he wrote the book to begin with, and then he teased and tortured it, he crushed words into each other, he muddled, muddied, and meddled until his story was gasping for breath, until there was no air or light left in it and it was nearly extinct. The lines are beautiful, I admit that, but so is an old loaf of bread with a flower of bright pink mould, it’s not edible, it’s just not edible. ‘For we, we have taken our sheet upon her stones where we have hanged our hearts in her trees; and we list, as she bibs us, by the waters of babalong,’ I love that, I admit it, but it is primped. He patted poked and fiddled with his book, he rubbed and fondled it, he spat and polished it until it was coated in language bacteria. There is a character in the book, Shem, he’s a writer. He writes all the time, and he never finishes, just like Joyce. When Shem writes it’s like Joyce writing his book. There’s a page where Shem is sitting in his squalid apartment and he runs out of paper and ink. He shits into his hands, puts the shit in a bowl, pisses into the bowl, mixes up a black concoction, bakes it, dries it, and uses it as ink. He writes all over his own body, turning himself black, writing and writing until he records all of human history, just like the book Finnegans Wake. It is a soiled and blackened book, supposedly comic but actually not funny at all.”
“No, not especially funny.”
“So,” Joachim continued, “I spent several years reading, and I learned that the world’s longest and most complicated books are also the most nearly hopeless books. That is what I discovered. They are the most despairing, the most nearly insane, they are the closest to insanity. Joyce knew his book was written in shit, it was spoiled and getting worse and yet he kept going for seventeen years, plugging up the last beams of light, making it deliciously fetid. He knew what it means to labor by yourself, over the same manuscript, as your eyes get worse and your daughter’s insanity deepens and your reviews stay bad and your life spills out. He describes the reek of Shem’s apartment, stains on the floor and walls, bowl of shit ink, heaps of dirty underwear, discolored curtains, dried ejaculations, dregs of wine, gleet, that’s an unbelievable word to find in a book like Finnegans Wake, but there it is. Supposedly Shem is working on a letter, but really of course he is writing the book Finnegans Wake. Joyce says Shem explains things with a meticulousness that borders on the insane, just like Joyce, he never grasps the beauty of restraint, neither does Joyce, the balance of his mind was disturbed, well obviously, he hides in his book like a field mouse in a nest of colored ribbons, a sweet idea, he has immovable doubts about the sense of the whole, how could he not, or the sense of the strange words that run, wander, march, halt, walk, or stumble along the barriers of the lines, those too, he must have doubted each and every one and also all of them at once. Shem calls his writing a flood, a jungle, a relic, a ruin, a scrape, a crust, a heap of steaming refuse, a thicket, an avalanche. He looks at his book as a stranger and wonders who wrote it. That is not just a sentence to me, Samuel, I understand what it means. No one can have an experiences like that and be happy. If anyone laughs at something in Finnegans Wake they are forgetting why its author needed so desperately to laugh, how he needed hundreds and endless thousands of those little laughs, how each laugh was like a drowning man gulping another lungful of seawater. The book is everything I am afraid of, it is the diary of a man who becomes compost.”
“Thanks, I’ll skip it.”

"We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk's upset."

In “Finnegans Wake” by James Joyce

Joyce could really write. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is exquisite, and “Ulysses” is a masterpiece. I see Joyce as a product of his 'modernist' era, certainly, but a sincere one. He was reaching for something, a kind of synthesis of prose and poetry that came close to the true language of the mind. It's remarkable how much of Finnegans Wake is comprehensible, in spite of the fact that Joyce's words don't actually exist; we know what he means, or we can guess at it, which would be impossible if it was just gibberish. The question is whether it's worth the trouble. So much of what goes on in our minds is just noise, and really, who wants to read a transcription of mental static, no matter how impressive the act of having transcribed it? I've never finished Finnegans Wake, and I'm not sure whether that's my issue or Joyce's. To paraphrase Rossini talking about Wagner, Joyce's writing has some wonderful moments but some terrible quarter-hours! I got the idea that I was missing things, and hallucinating things of my own accord; I found it not very fruitful. Can't remember it that well, either, much like some of my own teenage years, then...On a sentence level is makes little sense - or if it does, thought it's so angular. On a wider level, structurally, it's like “The Divine Comedy” - Joyce created his own mythological cosmos - and typically for him he based it on a normal family. Or it reminds me of Ovid and his “Metamorphosis” or Blake's prophetic poems... it's that kind of work.

I agree that bits of it are sublime, but in my experience it takes real determination to get to them. It was the act of a very large ego to write something that assumed people would take the time to wallow in someone else's unconscious over an extended period. I think that life is short, the world full of difficult books and you need to be selective. I think I'd rather re-read “Middlemarch” or “Odysseus”; they're more comprehensible and I feel better reading them than I do with the Wake.

Ulysses certainly changed the English Language but "Finnegans Wake" didn't. A waste of time, a beautiful waste of time; it’s a case of Causabon's Key To All Mythologies with Guinness and Opera. ( )

Surprises and laughs on every page. What's not to like? ( )

Magnificent! This is truly superb, and surpasses Ulysses in its maturity and breadth. The best to say of this is as little as possible. Language - as the grammatically written/the phonetically spoken/ the culturally literate * illiterate * dialect * and categorical - is so spellbinding that the word bursts forth into the infinite plethora of (mis)understanding that makes up the whole of this novel. To read Finnegans Wake is not to come out of it knowing something and to try and understand what is WRITTEN is what I would consider to be the wrong way to take it. To judge it on its "erudition" is to bastardize it. One enters in as oneself, and leaves without a self. The language of life is broken down by the diaspora of meaning and the meaning of meaning ad infinitum - whence we are finally united at the "end" with Anna Livia's soliloquy. The best way to describe this book to someone else is simply to say of H.C.E. as he says of himself: Here Comes Everybody. ( )

"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."

Ok this is not a normal book, I guess I have to read it another again.
Is more crude than Ulysses, but still gave me a good reading time. ( )

Having read ten pages of Finnegan's Wake a day since January 1, I am now done, surprisingly not because I gave up but because I got to page 628 in my copy and that's the end, although it goes back to the beginning, so I guess I'm supposed to start again? I'm not going to, not least of all because I have a migraine right now and won't even remember typing this tomorrow.
I said it was like reading white noise way back at the beginning. I haven't varied in that. Sometimes it seemed okay. Sometimes I had an idea of what was going on. The whole ending eight pages I read today put me in the mood of the ending pages of Infinite Jest, on a beach, an awakening, or a wakening, or does it really matter? I don't really understand what I was reading and I kind of wish I'd spent my time doing something else.
Now and then I liked the rhythm. Like listening to modern classical music like Stravinsky or theremins. Or sigur ros. But really, I like pop music and I'm always going to choose to read books with discernible plots over Finnegan's Wake. ( )

Confessional: I was doomed right from the start. I have been calling this book Finnegan's Wake. That should tell you something...when I can't even get the title right. I have read a lot of reviews of Finnegans Wake. Lots of advice on how to even read the thing. When you have more reviews suggesting how to read a book rather than what the book was actually about, that should tell you something. In all honesty, I have no clue what it was about. But, I'm not alone. Tons of other people have been scratching their heads, too. But, that's not to say they aren't without advice: I tried reading it aloud, as many suggested. I tried not taking it seriously, as others promised would help. I tried drinking with each chapter and even that didn't make the going any easier. It's much like the lyrics to Phish. I don't understand a jiboo so I don't care for the song. End of story. ( )

A book to swim in and to read aloud in the bath. There are some good jokes; a fair bit of bawdy. It comes out of the mud of sleep. If you read it in the hope of setting down the meaning of it in a box in your skull you may as well not begin. ( )

This is the only book in the Modern Library list I didn't finish. No book should need a roadmap to read. I can understand having to research parts of a book (e.g. Dom Casmurro, where I wasn't familiar with the culture and consequently missed a lot on my first reading) but this book is unintelligible.

I'd love to say it's unreadable, but that would only mean that I couldn't read it. I'd like to say it's worthless, but that would only mean that I find no worth in it. There are many who have found it very worthwhile, who have painstakingly read and devoured its many secrets, following each clue, reading each scholarly commentary on each line, and experienced the joy of unraveling a tiny piece of the great puzzle Joyce left behind.

I am not one of those people, and have come to realize that I never will be.

Most authors enter into a contract of sorts with their readers, unspoken yet nearly always there. "I will meet you halfway," says the author. "I will spend effort to communicate to you, and you will spend effort to understand that which I have communicated." Because after all, it is the arrogance of authorship to assume that anyone will ever want to expend that effort simply to understand what you have to impart. (And yes, I'm fully aware that this applies equally well to this review!) When the message is of high value, or the language that communicates it of surpassing beauty, the author can require more of the reader, because the reader will want to expend more effort.

And therein lies my dislike of Finnegan's Wake. Of Joyce in general, actually, but most sharply of Finnegan's Wake. So far from expending effort to communicate, Joyce has expended hideous force to cloak his meaning, to bury it under layers of twisted, tortured prose. If I thought that what lay within were important, or that the journey itself was an attractive one, perhaps I would supply the effort to dig it up. But I don't. To me, it stands for everything that is wrong with literary fiction--or rather, it is an unwelcome stain on literary fiction that ought to be removed.

But that's just me. Your mileage may vary. ( )

The problem with Finn Egan's Splashy Fest-o-the-Dye Inn is muchly how there is to admire and lake, and how much to make and add lyre that nary a chary chance haven't a nanobreadth's posse and abillybongabitty in all of onrushininginfinity to Die Cifre.

It really, really helps if you can read bits of this aloud, and if you don't fuss too much about understanding everything absolutely. If you can find a recording of Joyce reading...it helps even more. This is a book to submerge yourself within. Don't fret about it the first time through. ( )