As he was finishing Finnegans Wake, Joyce proclaimed, “I have discovered I can do anything with language I want.” Indeed, with his last book, which took him seventeen years to write, Joyce takes literary modernism to new territories by harvesting from as many as eighty different languages to create a wordscape that is both precise and impressionistic, a work that is intellectual, avant-garde, but also sad, funny, earthy and brimming with humanity.
This edition includes an introduction by Dr Sam Slote of Trinity College Dublin.
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Reading Finnegans Wake offers a pleasure that derives from its curious mixture of lyricism, humour, and the sense it offers of decoding a diabolic conundrum.
John Lanchester
Literary Review
