Andrea Ucini
FINNEGANS WAKE has a reputation for being one of the most difficult novels in the English language. Written by James Joyce over 17 years, it blends invented words with real phrases in grammar-defying constructions. The final line ends mid-sentence – only for you to realise that the words that should come next are the ones at the book’s beginning. Some say it is Joyce’s attempt at recreating a dream. Others claim that it contains no meaning at all.
It might seem odd, then, that a nonsense word from this most ungraspable of books should have given its name to a particle…
