رمان Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language.^[1][2] Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams.^[3] Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public

Plot summary

Finnegans Wake comprises 17 chapters, divided into four Books. Book I contains 8 chapters, both Books II and III contain 4, and Book IV consists of only one short chapter. The chapters appear without titles, and while Joyce never provided possible chapter titles as he had done for Ulysses, he did title various sections published separately (see Publication history below). The standard critical practice, however, is to indicate book number in Roman numerals, and chapter title in Arabic, so that III.2, for example, indicates the second chapter of the third book.

Given the book's fluid and changeable approach to plot and characters, a definitive, critically agreed-upon plot synopsis remains elusive (see Critical response and themes: Difficulties of plot summary below). As such, the following synopsis attempts to summarise events in the book which find general, although inevitably not universal, consensus among critics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake

After Ulysses, Joyce spend nearly the remainder of his life working on his final masterpiece, a book he kept veiled in secrecy, referring to it only as “Work In Progress.” As the years wore on, a few installments were published periodically in various literary magazines, and the results both excited and alarmed his friends and supporters. Something very weird was going on in Joyce’s brain, and it was clear that his next book would be as far away from Ulysses as that epic novel was from Portrait.
In that, at least, they were not disappointed. Purely in terms of literary technique, Finnegans Wake is probably the most astonishing – and controversial – book ever written. Completed in 1939 after seventeen years of labor, it was received with a mix of reactions ranging from bafflement to delight to open hostility. Many critics initially dismissed it as a waste of paper, a tangled web of nonsense and gibberish without plot, without content, without meaning. More than a few even questioned Joyce’s very sanity! And yet, today, whole careers have been dedicated to studying Finnegans Wake, and its many adherents past and present approach it with something close to awe. Fans of the Wake have called the book an unequaled masterpiece, a cultural artifact, a unique event, a cosmic joke; it has even half-jokingly been referred to as a near-sentient artificial intelligence. There is some mystical quality to Finnegans Wake that remains suspended between the sublimity of poetry and the mystery of religion – even quotations taken from its pages are cited in a Biblical fashion.

So, then – what’s the big deal?

http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/joyce_works_fw.html