One of the greatest English-language writers of the 20th century, the Dubliner James Joyce, wrote a novel that almost no reader of English can understand. It’s called Finnegans Wake.
It was published a few months before Great Britain declared war on Germany (September 3, 1939). As the world plunged into war, Joyce’s readers plunged into a book that presented no relief from bafflement. Throw open any page of the novel, let your eyes fall on the middle of the page, and your command of English, no matter how powerful it is, will be instantly dashed to pieces by a sentence like: “I was babbeing and yetaghain bubbering, bibbelboy, me marrues me shkewers me gnaas me fiet, tob tob tob beat it, solongopatom.”
The war eventually came to an end. But people to this day are lost in or still dealing with Joyce’s final book, Finnegans Wake. One such person happens to live in Seattle. His name is Neal Kosaly-Meyer. He is a composer and a pianist. And for the past seven years, he’s been performing memorized chapters of the novel at galleries and music halls around the city.
