Tamara’s Reviews > Finnegans Wake > Status Update

3.1

Narrated by a Shaun-obsessed donkey who gives him plenty of rope to hang himself.

Includes 2 thunderwords, a bug orgy, Shaun’s Tarrare-esque diet (he devours, amongst other things, 40 flights of stairs), a host of insults about Shem and the letter (“an infant sailing eggshells on the floor of a wet day would have more sabby” and “he’s weird, to tell you, and middayevil down to his vegetable soul”).

2.4

MaMaLuJo, also known as the four old heladies or shehusbands, reminisce about their days spent “prostituent behind Trinity College” (tag urself) while watching Trustan and Usolde, who “by the light of the moon … longed to be spoon.”

“As I was going to burrymecarott we fell in with a lout by the name of Peebles” is extra funny in this rhyme-heavy chapter because it subverts aural expectations.

2.3

Full of falls and kings and thunderings, “written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.” Pub stories about the captain, the tailor, and the general turn into patricide: “Knock knock. War’s where! Which war? The Twwinns.”

JJ, that crazy sohn of a blitzh, presciently suggests we “split an atam,” predicting the literal atom bomb in “abnihilisation of the etym.”

2.2

A mythametical section full of reprodictive triagonals (namely the diagram) and madornaments (homework with annotations from all 3 kids).

The Broken Social Sceneification of "sleep in the water, drug at the fire, shake the dust off and dream your one [park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about meee]"

“Though a day be as dense as a decade" just about sums it all up!

2.1

The unmerried unhappitents of Chapelizod “psing a psalm of psexpeans” (HCE and ALP’s kids stage a play) filled with children’s games, nursery rhymes cadences, dancing in circles, and justickulations. Though circumveiloped by obscuritads, there are cychological undertones, as the games are just a Fication for Glugg, Chuff, and Isa to explore their bourgeoning sexual drives. Generational patterns repeat.

1.8

A young woman and an old one washing literal and airing figurative dirty laundry on opposite river banks.

“Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more […] when the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end!”

1.6

References to surfaces, angles, shapes abound: are the collideorscape, primomobilisk, isocelating biangle, helixtrolysis, etsitaraw etcicero “too dimensional for you?”

Tag urself I’m “heavengendered, chaosfoeted, earthborn” and “disghosted.”

This section as “a period of pure lyricism”:
“Shades began to glidder along the banks […] she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one.”

1.5

Very iconic academic satire exploring the “chaosmos of Allah” and full of ethiquethical philophosy from thinkers like Caprimustimus and Fruedened.

Schwrites this one for the bisexycles, lesbiels, hetarosexuals, and even “meeter’s cat’s wife’s half beeter’s meeter.”

“It Was Me Egged Him on to the Stork Exchange and Lent My Dutiful Face to His Customs” is the original stonks meme.

1.4

Mr Jams Jarred is cooking up some creamclotted sherriness of cinnamon syllabub!

HCE is getting “(sic!)“ and “(sicker!)” and “rich in death anticipated” while bleeding “nonfatal mammalian blood” in “self defience.”

I am having “ould lanxiety” and learning about the Celtic tree alphabet called Ogham: “The war is in words and the wood is the world.”

“It was life but was it fair?”

1.3

Revenants, ghosts, specters… Tag urself I’m “Artist, Unworthy of the Homely Protestant Religion”

“Silence was in thy faustive halls, O Truiga, when thy green woods went dry but there will be sounds of manymirth on the night’s ear ringing”

“Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.”