Riverrun to Livvy

Book excerpt: "Finnegans Wake" is the most deliberately obscure and difficult work in literature. Readers are over their heads and struggling for shore by the second sentence. The "Wake" is often described as unreadable, and that's not entirely unfair given the book's setting in the dark night of the subconscious and dreams where strange shapes shift and merge in a multitude of motifs and the fact that it's written in mixture of many of the world's languages now known as Wakese. "Finnegans Wake" refers to itself as a "nightmaze," something readers translate as nightmare. But what seems at first sight as meaningless, actually has more meanings than can be imagined, and what appears as unreadable requires only a radically new look at what words can be made to do. "Riverrun to Livvy" is a literary layman's attempt to enlighten Joyce's "book of the dark" for a wider audience, inviting those who want to be "well letterread" on a journey into the twilight zone of literature. The first page of "Finnegans Wake" has been compared to the first second of the Big Bang, containing as it does all the elemental materials that compose the complete creation. Through a close reading of the "Wake's" first page, "Riverrun to Livvy" prepares readers to tackle the remaining 627 pages with a greater degree of insight and understanding. It's been said that no one can be considered truly educated without having read at least one page of "Finnegans Wake." "Riverrun to LIvvy" dares readers not only to pick up the gauntlet by reading one page but to boldly go where few readers have gone before, all the way through literature's most terrifying text.