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Finnegans Wake
Author: James Joyce
Genre: Novel
Plot Overview: Extracts of the work appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, and it was published in its entirety as Finnegans Wake in 1939. 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, 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. Purchase? |
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Lord Of The Flies
Author: William Golding
Genre: Allegorical Novel
Plot Overview: The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures. Purchase? |
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A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Author: James Joyce
Genre: Autobiographical
Plot Overview: Joyce's bildungsroman--his first novel--traces the development of Stephen Daedalus, Joyce's alter ego. In order to pursue his artistic calling, Stephen, like Joyce, must reject his family, religion, and native land. At the end of the novel, Stephen is about to forsake Dublin for Paris. Joyce, in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, was an early practitioner of the stream-of-consciousness technique, by means of which Stephen's interior life and growing self-awareness are rendered directly, so that the reader has access not only to his conscious thoughts but to his unconscious as well. Purchase? |
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Remembrance Of Things Past
Author: Marcel Proust
Genre: Modernist
Plot Overview: Marcel Proust whiled away the first half of his life as a self-conscious aesthete and social climber. The second half he spent in the creation of the mighty roman-fleuve that is Remembrance of Things Past, memorializing his own dandyism and parvenu hijinks even as he revealed their essential hollowness. Proust begins, of course, at the beginning--with the earliest childhood perceptions and sorrows. Then, over several thousand pages, he retraces the course of his own adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters. Who else has ever decanted life into such ornate, knowing, wrought-iron sentences? Who has subjected love to such merciless microscopy, discriminating between the tiniest variations of desire and self-delusion? Who else has produced a grief-stricken record of time's erosion that can also make you laugh for entire pages? The answer to all these questions is: nobody. Purchase? |
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Ulysses
Author: James Joyce
Genre: Novel
Plot Overview: This revised volume follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934. Purchase? |
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