Comments on: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan http://www.dystel.com/blog/2015/06/stately-plump-buck-mulligan/ Mon, 26 Jun 2017 15:15:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.15 By: Rachel S. http://www.dystel.com/blog/2015/06/stately-plump-buck-mulligan/comment-page-1/#comment-41499 Wed, 10 Jun 2015 16:01:13 +0000 http://www.dystel.com/?p=11489#comment-41499 Hah! I have done exactly the same (except I threw Finnegan’s Wake across the room when I realized it started in the middle of the same sentence it ended with).

]]> By: Stephen Kozeniewski http://www.dystel.com/blog/2015/06/stately-plump-buck-mulligan/comment-page-1/#comment-41488 Sat, 06 Jun 2015 02:10:44 +0000 http://www.dystel.com/?p=11489#comment-41488 In 2013 I vowed to read all the books on the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century List. During my first trip to the library I decided I’d better just jump in with both feet and grab one of the three Joyces on the list. I remembered hearing somewhere that ULYSSES was an immensely difficult read, so I decided to start with something a bit simpler, so I grabbed the next one down, a slender tome called FINNEGANS WAKE.

I’m still unclear as to whether FW was the greatest literary prank ever pulled or the greatest novel ever written. It’s definitely one or the other, but whichever it is, it’s the reading equivalent of scaling Mount Everest. WAR AND PEACE may be long, but at least it’s written in prose. I remember having kind of the opposite experience of how you described reading ULYSSES here: every time I actually understood a sentence, or got a reference, I felt immensely relieved, because 99 44/100 % of the time I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

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