Fritz Senn
Even more about Joyce
fiction
328pp (63,200 words)
»The best book about Joyce I’ve ever read.«
Wolfgang Hildesheimer about NICHTS GEGEN JOYCE
Joyce, so it is often said, is difficult. Fritz Senn, a doyen of Joyce research and director of the James Joyce Foundation Zürich, doesn’t deny it. With his cheerful scholarship, which does without footnotes and the rest of the academic apparatus, he nevertheless encourages the reader to cast off his or her timidity in the face of the great Irishman. In his elegant, subtle essays Senn opens up for the reader, without lecturing, the wealth of facets, the complex construction and sophisticated comedy of Joyce’s work. Patiently he unravels tricky passages and tracks down the polyglot associations which Joyce, moving between Dublin, Trieste, Paris and Zürich, conjures up with his linguistic experiments.
As a result Fritz Senn provides all curious and adventurous readers with a unique introduction to the work of perhaps the most famous author of literary modernism.
Reviews
»Fritz Senn understands the art of delightful transfer of knowledge. (...) Light-handed brilliance.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»A unique combination of modesty, acumen and polished essay writing.«
Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung
»Senn's numerous publications on Joyce are impressive above all because of his accuracy, expertise, sensitivity and his clear, unpretentious language. (...) Senn succeeds in dispelling readers' anxiety of a difficult authors, and to show in demonstrating the pleasure of immersing in his texts. There has never been a kinder encouragement.«
Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag
»Elegant and with unobtrusive wit. (…) Senn explains in a highly competent way the nuances and secrets of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake being tied to any dogmata. His book is a masterpiece of secondary literature about Joyce and it reads with intellectual pleasure.«
Denkbilder
»Fritz Senn arouses your curiosity of reading Joyce and the fun of putting things together, the guessing and feeling for meaning.«
Stuttgarter Zeitung
»In an intelligently chatting way Senn introduces the world of the Irishman that is furnished with allusions and curious turns, with language acrobatics, linguistic and mental crossroads and dead ends. He does this in such an appealingly modest way that one becomes brave and is looking forward to reading the Ulysses with pleasure.«
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