When I picked up Stan Gebler Davies' biography of Joyce, I knew I was in for a bad time from the first paragraph of the preface, which calls Finnegans Wake the "apotheosis of the crossword puzzle" and means it derogatorily. Later, he elaborates on that by calling the novel "a gigantic multilingual crossword puzzle, the theme Resurrection (either by whiskey or divine agency) and the language built on puns." Sure, but you say that like it's a bad thing!
Finnegans Wake is indeed a dense amalgam of puns and coinages that's nearly impossible to understand (the phrase that provides the title of this puzzle series, for example, is a combnation of "Christmas parcel" and "crossword puzzle"), but a crossword puzzle seems like a singularly inapt analogy to me. A crossword puzzle is too orderly, too decipherable, to be a symbol for Finnegans Wake. Most crossword puzzles are, anyway. This here puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) isn't really solvable. At least, if it's solvable, it's only solvable in the sense that Finnegans Wake is readable. Maybe you'll be able to solve it, but certainly not in one or two sittings. Maybe you'll come up with a solution that isn't the same as mine, but that works just as well. Maybe (probably) you'll just hit "reveal grid" and read through the solution PDF for an explanation of the answers.
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