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Who could review such a book? Not even Joyce himself we wager. The “pftpchure” of Finnegan, Erse solid man, is as weird a bit of verbal construction as one could imagine. The psychiatrist gets a lot of these “pftpchures” but few on so colossal a scale and none printed beautifully on fine paper and bound in sturdy boards. The average run of hospital effusions is along the white edge of the Herald or Tribune and the meaning rarely as lucid, although we would defy even Joyce himself to tell us the meaning of (bababadalgharaghlakam and so on for a line or two of the same fanciful construction).
And imagine 628 pages of this written in Paris between the years 1922-1939—Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freeman's manor, lived in the broadest way imaginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before jorlman judges had given us numbers or Helveticus committed deuteronomy (one yesterday he sternely stuck his tete in a tub for to watsch the future of his fates but ere he swiftly took it out again, by the might of moses, the very water was eviparated and all the guennesses had met their exodus so that ought to show you what a peulschanjarchy chap he was!). In fact the more we read the more juicy he becomes.
Some literary critics have pronounced this a great work. So be it. It cannot be read except here and there in snatches and yet there is some coherence that psychiatrists—at least a few—can master.
If one were to be confined to a padded or any kind of a cell, take it along. It could change the whole outlook and inlook on the world. It is rare and, as said, juicy. So we will let it go at that. “Degustibus.”