Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Steven,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting the article. I have occasionally browsed FW. I agree that there is probably nothing anyone can do to make it readable in the same way other works are readable.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteAh no. But it is uniquely unreadable, and remarkably quotable, and the night imagery and the constant presence of Anna Livia Plurabelle and. . . I could go on. No, it is not readable. I do not recommend it even to the most ardent lovers of Ulysses, but I myself love it and have read it over and over and can't wait until these tomes become something I can afford. I seriously doubt whether I would notice any difference whatsoever in my reading. But one doesn't read Finnegans Wake for the same reason one reads many other books--one reads it to encounter the longest, most enjoyable poem and language game composed in something approximating English.
I love it but do not recommend it--an odd paradox, but you must have a certain kind of mind and a certain laxity of narrative sense. (And I don't mean that in the elitist sense of a "fine mind" or a highly intellectual way or reading. In fact, if anything I mean exactly the opposite--the mind of one who hasn't quite grown up and refuses to do so--one whose chief joy is making up words as you go along to express what the situation means--even if unintelligible to everyone else--the Humpty-Dumpty mind as opposed to the hard and fast school of one-word one-meaning.)
If one can read Nadja, Les Chants de Maldoror, and St-John Perse and make anything of them, enjoy them, then Finnegans Wake is a possibility. Perhaps I should post more on it--make my reputation as a blogger on being the one who says, "Anyone who really wants to do so can read Finnegans Wake and get something out of it. What they're likely to get, I can only speculate, but I hear the river running through the entire work--from bend of bay to swerve of shore. . .
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeletePost the first paragraph and see what happens?
Verification word: ingsber
That looks/sounds like it might actually be in FW.