Finnegans Wake: a musical reading sounds out a cryptic text

An online project has set James Joyce’s infamously difficult novel to 17 songs – thereby making its meaning clearer, it claims. And you can take part

Listen to a taster playlist of the book set to music below

Is Finnegans Wake the most difficult novel ever written? With 60 different languages featured in it, a plot with multiple layers, impossibly varied interpretations and a complex “multifractal structure” recently discovered by mathematicians, James Joyce’s classic novel is at best challenging – even more so than Ulysses. Coinciding with the Irish author’s 134th birthday, a group of academics is launching Waywords and Meansigns, a project that sets the entire book to music, unabridged, with musicians and readers collaborating.

It’s all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud

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