A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake Book

I scarcely know how to review this book because I scarcely know what it is. What it isn't is a reader's guide, which title suggests that it might be an authoritative atlas detailing the geography of its object, which is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Rather this small but densely detailed book seems more like a reader's diary, partly a probationary and supposed summary of the Wake, itself at turns tentative, sometimes doubtful, tired, bored, perhaps careless, lapsing into casual commentary retelling Tindall's own frustrations and joys with the Wake. To she or he who insists on the brute-force, head-banging method of working her or his way cold through the compendious codex that is the Wake without any roadmaps close at hand, I think an assumption that reading Tindall would constitute some kind of a cheat is mistaken. It's more like a source of comradely moral support from someone who's been there before you and who shares your pain. That's it: it's like the difference between retaining the services of a red-cheeked Sherpa to ascend some Alpine summit with you versus blind bushwhacking up, up. Either way you still have to climb the darned mountain yourself, and one way you may be less likely to find yourself dashed to pieces over the edge of a dicey crag somewhere along the lonely way.

I daresay I nearly regard Tindall's book as an indispensable companion to be kept close by when one is laboring to read . . . to plod boldly or recklessly or simply madly through . . . Finnegans Wake. "Nearly" inasmuch as Tindall is at least as indispensable a companion as are many others who allege the same claim, though this "guide" is friendlier than most. Never pretending to explain what the Wake is "about", we find here Tindall's own views of and responses to the Wake: this book is "about" Tindall reading the Wake far more than it is about the Wake itself, which is fitting since the Wake is about little or nothing more than the Wake: a book about itself as a book. An excellent approach is to read a chapter in the Wake, and then read the corresponding chapter in Tindall to consider his speculations about what you've already read. He is not really technical, and he will always provoke more thinking on your part rather than simply recasting and spoon feeding Joyce back to you "in simple words."

As it's an old guide or narrative journal (1969) we might well expect newer and more apt baedekers may be found. This may be the case, but of the various books and articles I've read which revisit this same subject over and over (I've read many and will continue to read more because, in spite of what I've said here, I do judge Finnegans Wake to be worth the work it demands of the reader), it is Tindall that seems most amiable and welcoming to me.

This may be the most distilled expository writing, if it is exposition, that I've ever encountered. I always take notes on any book I read which is related to James Joyce and/or his works. To hit the high points in Tindall, one might as well highlight its contents from cover to cover, which hardly seems worth the effort. As the contents parallel Finnegans Wake exactly, it's always easy to quickly locate any specific chapter of interest. Tindall also uses extensive citations of chapter, page and line number in the Wake, although here and there he jumps around a little within a chapter. This, however, is never any more disconcerting than is Joyce's own discursive tendencies within the Wake which are of course legion.