“My second starless inscrutable hour”
—Beckett, Whoroscope
SINCE I CANNOT sleep, I will spend the night with my nocturnal language. I amuse myself by imagining I'm a critic, a specialist in critical fiction. And I also imagine that I've spent half my life reading in a 1939 Faber & Faber edition, taking only cautious sips, of course, because Joyce's last novel certainly can't be read in one go—rather, you should open it at random and immerse yourself in its fascinating plurality, ambiguity, and ludic richness. Whenever I approach , I do so in the knowledge that what lies before me is the very densest of tapestries; at the same time, I worry that as a reader I will once again have a sense, first, of being on the
