A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake

🔖 Of all the great books in modern literature, none is more demanding of the reader than Joyce's masterpiece, "Finnegans Wake", and none offers richer rewards to the kind of exegetical criticism William York Tindall provides in "A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake". Professor Tindall is acknowledged as one of the great Joycean scholars. He is the author or editor of four other books on Joyce. Over the past thirty years he has been studying and teaching "Finnegans Wake" - learn­ing from as well as instructing a steady stream of graduate students, many of whom have become leading Joycean scholars themselves. This book is the fruit of those thirty years - a close, page by page analysis of the Wake, which opens up the many hermetic meanings throughout the work. Professor Tindall reveals unexpected depths in "Finnegans Wake", and shallows too - for the Wake is a fantastical collection of sur­face puns, allusions, and word plays using a dozen languages - "a verbal brilliance like nothing before or since." Professor Tindall writes: "Finnegans Wake" is one of the few great books of our time. I think it is also one of the funniest. My intention is to help those puzzled by the book to see that it is less formidable than it seems, and to see the fun."