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by: Anthony Burgess
List Price: $13.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.16 You Save: $2.79 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780393004458
ISBN: 0393004457
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2000-06
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Sales Rank: 193132
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Arguing that 'the appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke,' Burgess provides a readable, accessible guide. 'Burgess has written a study of the most brilliant and humane of twentieth-century humanists'--Philip Toynbee, The Observer.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Super
Burgess is very smart, and he's probably a better scholar of Joyce than writer himself. This book has great insight into Ulysses which I enjoyed learning after reading Ulysses for myself, but the real treasure is the chapters about Finnegan's Wake, which makes some sense after reading this assessment. You'll at least have some idea as to the purpose and scope and arc of Finnegan, whereas otherwise, really what are you going to do with it? Besides impress people by leaving it in your bathroom or ... Read More
Rating:  - Good, lucid, helpful companion to Ulysses
Having read Joyce's works numerous times, I found Burgess's book provides a good bit of clarity to the tougher parts of Ulysses and an interesting exegesis of Joyce's work in general. Burgess's knowledge of the material is impressive and his enthusiasm for Joyce is infectious. I believe this book would be as helpful to one with little Joyce experience as Harry Blamire's Bloomsday book, but it is more sohisticated than the author lets on.
One of Burgess's main theses is that Joyce meant ... Read More
Rating: - A student reads a master- teacher
Burgess is a novelist of tremendous linguistic energy and inventiveness, one who searches out many worlds, scholarly and not. His career path seems much more ' foxlike' and scattered than does the hedgehog - like career in Joyce which seems to go increasingly toward the realization of one great system in literature. In this study of the work of Joyce he tells the life- story but concentrates more on introducing the common reader to Joyce's two large tomes, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. He writes with skill ... Read More
Rating:  - Burgess is not the best
To my mind, Burgess is one of the least interesting commentators on Joyce. (Don't get me started on what a poor linguist he is--"Mouthful of Air," for example, is terrible.) He rarely gets beyond the obvious, at least not without getting it wrong. Rather than spending time reading Burgess, I would recommend that those interested in understanding Joyce turn instead to Richard Ellmann, Hugh Kenner, and Stuart Gilbert--all of whom are superior critics.
Rating: - One Great Mind Parses Another
If you are looking for a fairly short, easy to digest introductory guide to Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, this is it. Anthony Burgess, in addition to being a witty novelist and critic, also had the chutzpah to publish an abridged version of Finnegan's Wake, so you know he knows his stuff! This is not a page by page explication of Joyce's complex works, ala Gifford or Gilbert, but more like a defense for the intelligent reader who may be wondering if these novels are worth the time.
It is ... Read More
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