Joyce JamesABAA
Joyce JamesABAA
FINNEGANS WAKE
194573534New York: The Viking Press 1945. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. Fourth printing. Hailed by Anthony Burgess as "a great comic vision one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page" this brilliantly inventive novel was Joyce's final work. The book is in one sense the story of a publican in Chapelizod near Dublin his wife and their three children; but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker Mrs. Anna Livia Plurabelle and Kevin Jerry and Isabel are every family of mankind. The motive idea of the novel inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico is that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. Languages merge: Anna Livia has "vlossyhair"--wlosy being Polish for "hair"; "a bad of wind" blows--bad being Persian for "wind." Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear. On another level the protagonists are the city of Dublin and the River Liffey standing as representatives of the history of Ireland and by extension of all human history. As he had in his earlier work Ulysses 1922 Joyce drew upon an encyclopedic range of literary works. His strange polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words is intended to convey not only the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also the interweaving of Irish language and mythology with the languages and mythologies of many other cultures. Octavo. Original blue cloth binding with gilt titles. The dust jacket is toned along the spine with some mild edgewear including a small chip to the rear panel and tape reinforcement to each end of the spine; otherwise very good. The Viking Press hardcover books
johnson rare books & archives · États-Unis100,00 $US≈ 84,61 €
