A river runs through a sleeping mind, carrying with it every language, every myth, every joke and funeral and drunken song that human beings have ever produced, all of it folded into sentences that dissolve and reconstitute like matter itself. Joyce spent seventeen years writing this book, pushing English to its absolute breaking point and then past it, weaving dozens of languages into a single liquid prose that must be read aloud and savoured like poetry to be understood at all. If Ulysses was his daytime epic, this is the nightwork, a dream of all history turning in Vico's great wheel. There are reading groups that have taken twenty years on a single pass. It is funny, profound, and nearly endless in its levels of meaning, and it remains the most difficult book ever written.