Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, significant for an experimental style and its resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English languageабэжэ Written in Paris over a period of 17 years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items andаврюг neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.