num_pages: 628
description: Having done the longest day in literature with his monumental Ulysses, James Joyce set himself even greater challenges for his next book — the night."A nocturnal state...That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream." The work, which would exhaust two decades of his life and the odd resources of some sixty languages, culminated in the 1939 publication of Joyce's final and most revolutionary masterpiece, 
  Finnegans Wake
.A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this "book of Doublends Jined" is as remarkable for its prose as for its circular structure. Written in a fantastic dream language, forged from polyglot puns and portmanteau words, the 
  Wake
 features some of Joyce's most brilliant inventive work. Sixty years after its original publication, it remains, in Anthony Burgess's words, "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page."
language: English
title: Finnegans Wake
titlecomplete: Finnegans Wake (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
genres: 20th Century, Literature, Classics, Literary Fiction, Irish Literature, Novels, Fiction, Ireland, Unfinished, Classic Literature
ratings_count: 12688
places: Dublin, Ireland
publisher: Penguin Classics