Finnegans Wake

[Otto]

What to Make of Finnegans Wake?
July 12, 2012
Michael Chabon

(...)
I got my first real glimpse of that beast in the Burger Chef
restaurant that used to occupy the basement of the Cathedral of
Learning, at the University of Pittsburgh, in my senior year, when a
classmate in Josephine O’Brien Schaefer’s Ulysses seminar tossed a
paperback copy across our table and dared me to open it to any page
and make head or tail of what I found there. At that moment I was
feeling surprisingly equal to the challenge. Under the captaincy of
Professor Schaefer I had sailed undiscouraged between the wandering
rocks of Ulysses, clear through the book’s later chapters, in which
sense and intention lay in ambush and rained flaming arrows of
rhetoric on us as we rowed madly past them. So it was with a traveled
optimism that I accepted my friend’s throw-down that morning, opened
the book to its first page, and wondered, as readers around the world
have done since 1939, at the problem posed by its first sentence, with
its beautiful first word. A word unprecedented, enigmatically
uncapitalized, with a faintly Tolkienesque echo, to my nerdish ear, of
Rivendell and Rohirrim.1 Indented and dangling, mid-page,
mid-sentence, a sentence twisting like an inchworm from its filament:

    riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of
bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth
Castle & Environs.

So: a river, running past Eden or some Eden analogue, swerving and
bending as it made its way to Howth Castle and its surroundings, i.e.,
Dublin on the Liffey, a city whose geography I knew well enough by now
to be able to recognize at once the name of Howth, the castle hill on
whose slopes Leopold Bloom had proposed to Miss Marion Tweedy. Maybe,
I considered—having played Mr. Antrobus, a modern Adam, in my high
school’s production of The Skin of Our Teeth—in this book Joyce did
for the story of Adam and Eve what Ulysses did for the Odyssey,
transposing it to contemporary Dublin to ironize the indignities and
intricacies of twentieth-century life and consciousness.
(...)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/what-make-finnegans-wake/