Customer Reviews

The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Arcturus Books, 126)

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Atherton's book is "absotively" wonderful. Appreciating the Wake certainly requires this book. Numerous linguistic influences on Joyce from various authors are catalogued. Particularly interesting is the lengthy analysis of Lewis Carroll's literary influence on Joyce:

1. Carroll is presumably the undisputed inventor of the portmanteau word - a word packed with multiple meanings. Carroll was content to have dual meaning but Joyce packed as many meanings as possible into his words.

2. Carroll (like Joyce) worked with successive alterations of one letter in a word - meat, meet, mate, maze, etc. Sections of the Wake which obliquely referenced Carroll would routinely incorporate this technique.

3. Alice served as an alterego for Joyce's heroine ALP, where "Wonderlawn" is code for the Garden of Eden.

In short, Joyce found much in Carroll's work that (in the case of the portmanteau word, to his surprise) neatly "dovetallied" with his own "work in progress". The Books at the Wake is a fascinating and well-written collection of many more such analyses (Shakespeare, Blake, Vico, etc.).

Atherton's book helped me begin to understand Joyce's "copy/paste" style. His preface provides an excellent philosphical framework within which the Wake can be understood. His chapters that follow explain in great detail how Joyce used the works of Vico, Swift, and the world's sacred books to construct his masterpiece. Atherton goes on to cite and explain hundreds of Joyce's literary references in Finnegans Wake. This is a good book for any James Joyce fan.

I have been checking the first edition of this book out of my library for months, and am delighted to see a paperback edition in print. It's one of the indispensible guides to the Wake, and I'm glad to see it readily available.

It scares me to think how many hours of

combat the author had to handle to bring

Joyce's hermetic book into daylight.

I am very happy to have click in the "Buy button."

Thanks to the author and, as usual, Amazon.