I preferred this to The Skeleton Key although it was harder to read, the page numbers did correspond with those of my Oxford Press copy of FW. The author channels the text like a spiritual medium from cover to cover demonstrating a passionate mastery of the text that is bewildering. In his quest to demonstrate some of the primary currents that flow through Joyce's most inaccessible masterpiece (which I am still crawling though page by page), Bishop touches on such themes as: the body of the dreamer as both a geography (Ireland and Europe in the 30s) and a dreamography with fascinating illustrations), the ideas Joyce gleaned from Vico's The New Science and the Egyptian Book(s) of the Dead, and the use of vision and hearing in FW. Incredibly erudite, Bishop's reading of Finnegans Wake is itself quite an undertaking.
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