Pre-Reading

Before I get my hands dirty with the words on the page lets pre-read. (Side note: the water is not flowing in my apartment so my hands are actually already dirty but the back of the book does say it will "conjure up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dreams," which leads me to believe dirty hands are a must, or at least an added bonus.)

Anyway... there are many copies of this "dazzlingly inventive" novel out there but I happened to purchase the one pictured here. If anyone cares, and so I don't get the Modern Language Association (or James) after me, here is the official works cited entry for this edition:

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

The Cover: Looks stormy, suggests some unrest, whose is unclear... I am guessing my own. The upper most part of the cloudy sky is brighter, lighter, and thinner in its cloud cover than the lower half of the cover. I feel the image's movement from clear to shadowed/light to dark/calm to stormy does not bode well. For what I am not sure, but in general I am not optimistic - Penguin Modern Classics is laying the pathetic fallacy on thick with this cover. Yikes, I would not want to be caught under this sky; the clouds at the bottom look like the after math of a newly erupted volcano - science projects aside, hot lava raining from the clouds = never good.

The Title: Finnegans Wake. First things first, the lack of punctuation is unsettling. How many Finnegans have died here? How many Finnegans are water skiing? How many Finnegans are being roused from restful (despite the cover) sleep? Stay tuned.