James Joyce had
completed Finnegans Wake (FW) in 1939 at Paris 17 years after the publication of Ulysses. FW is a
sad, impressive and funny story of five family members who were worried, quarreled
each other and sought in vain the origin (god?) at the coordinate axes of ‘time’
and ‘space’ in a night world of Dublin.
This book How/Why/What to Read FW contains the interviews by the author (editor of the Abiko Annual) to famous Joyceans about how, why and what to read FW.
Basic questions are; 1) Can you read through from beginning to end? 2) Is there a plot in it? 3) Are there too much sexual matters? 4) Is the book worth to read for 21st century. This book also shows the author’s studies on the final monologue of ALP, the most beautiful, poetic part in FW.
In the interviews, Fritz Senn said, “FW is antidote to dogmatism. It may also teach that all is vanity, but somehow must go on." Sam Slote said, "In fact, being wrong about FW is more enjoyable than being right about many other things.”
After the interviews, the author (Tatsuo
Hamada) had successfully translated all FW to Japanese as a practice to read
it. And then he compiled and published Poetic
Reading/understanding FW (a kind of Shorter FW) in Japanese at the same
time of this book.
