If readers were whitewater rafters, “Finnegans Wake,” the first segment of which appeared 75 years ago this year, would be their Urubamba, their Colorado, and their Yenisei merged into one seemingly impassable torrent. I won’t confess how many times I’ve assaulted those rapids, only to wash up, baffled and exhausted, on the bank. It isn’t just indolence, nor is it the fabled difficulty of the work, that blocks my way. There’s something intrinsically dizzying about the book. In Joyce’s pandemonium of words, the English language seems to undergo syllabic mitosis at every turn, as though its vocables were no longer fixed entities but nuclei of pure semantic latency.

By the displacement of a single letter, Joyce unhusks words hidden inside other words. “My wrists are wrusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it!” exclaims Anna Livia Plurabelle as she scrubs H.C. Earwicker’s knickers on the riverbank. But there’s the rub in her rubbing: We pause to winkle out the river names – Moldau, Dnieper, Ganges, perhaps also Rostov-na-Donu – and we are, if I may say so, knickerknackered by the double- or triple-whammies of the stratified puns. “Finnegans Wake” subverts our linear expectations with maniacal circularity. I’m easily distracted, and in this book every word distracts. I dawdle at “wrusty” and find it improved by that superfluous “w.” But then, almost simultaneously, mould, diapers, and gangrene collide in my mind like flotsam in a flood. Where is this rush – this wrush? – taking us? And that’s an easy passage.

The trick with “Finnegan,” I now believe, is not to read it at all; not, that is, on the page. A page of the “Wake” induces lexical vertigo, along with a mad urge to peel words and turn them inside out, like gloves with the stitchings laid bare. Bent over the printed text, you’ll either go crazy or become a professor, currying the filaments of Joyce’s extravagant lingo for ever further meanings, like nits on the teeth of a comb. Though I tend to flinch when told that something “must be read aloud” to be appreciated, I’m now convinced that listening to “Finnegans Wake” best reveals its quite loony magic.

The reading by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan (Naxos Modern Classics, four CDs, $45) opened my ears. Joyce himself recorded part of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section, and though his recording is incomparable, it is also scratchy and sometimes hard to hear (not to mention all too short). With Mr. Norton’s and Ms. Riordan’s performance, you’re caught up in the irresistible, and hilarious, momentum of the prose. The “Wake” is a long work; it has an epic sweep that snippets won’t satisfy. (The Naxos version is abridged, but still runs to more than five hours.) Joyce’s language displays astonishing variability, and if it isn’t always intelligible on first hearing, the enchantment of it never wavers.

In her recitation of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section, which concludes the first part of the book, Ms. Riordan is simply sublime. Joyce meant “Finnegans Wake” to be his book of the night, as “Ulysses” had been his teeming record of a single day, and in her reading you seem to hear the night itself, in its manifold voices, speaking to the accompaniment of surging and trickling and lapping waters as all the rivers of the world sing through the prose. Don’t linger to identify the Volga, the Yangtze or the Amazon. Simply listen and let it wash over you.

This section, for my money the most glorious prose Joyce ever composed, has also been reissued in the Faber Library, as it first appeared in 1930 (Faber & Faber, 35 pages, $20). The text isn’t Joyce’s final version (were he alive, he’d still be amending it), but the genius of the work is fully apparent. Ann Livia Plurabelle is the river Liffey as well as the aqueous mother of mankind. In another section Joyce apostrophizes her with a parody of the opening formula of the Qur’an and the Lord’s Prayer: “In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!” There follows a brimming three-page “polyhedron of scripture” in her praise; this, Anna Livia’s “untitled mamafesta,” echoes litanies to the Virgin Mary in scurrilous song titles and ribald one-liners yet manages to be both reverent and burlesque.

To hear “Finnegans Wake” read aloud is to experience the full force of its humor. It is the best-natured book of the 20th century. The humor isn’t only in the outlandish verbal hijinks but in the rhythms of the prose. These rhythms convey its quintessential Irishness; the cadences are scrupulously local but encompass us all in their swaggering parade. Take the opening of Anna Livia Plurabelle:

O

tell me all about

Anna Livia! I want to hear all

about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Ann Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talk tapes. And don’t butt me – hike! – when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me.

These are washerwomen scrubbing clothes on the riverbank and gossiping about Harvey Chimpden Earwicker, or H.C.E. (“Here Comes Everybody”), the reprobate protagonist. Their voices spring forth and mingle with the sounds of the water. To look for “meaning” is to miss the point of this, and the rest of the work. Samuel Beckett said it best when he noted that Joyce’s “writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”

An impossible ambition, of course. In his letters Flaubert once mused about the possibility of a novel that would be “pure style.” In “Finnegans Wake” Joyce comes closest to this bizarre ideal. There’s no plot to speak of. Anna Livia, Earwicker, their daughter Isobel, and their sons Shem and Shaun are disembodied voices; the blurry mutterings of sleepers overheard in the dark. Here the words drive the plot; the words are the plot. There are moments in this “meusic before her all cunniform letters” – don’t dally at the river Meuse or loiter lewdly over “cunni”! – when meaning ceases to matter, and we seem to be as close to things in their still and breathing strangeness as human language will allow us. Set free to cavort and riot impishly, to bamboozle and tease and bewitch us, these words shatter and take shape again like all the small drops of water, glitteringly distinct, that give the river its body even as they vanish.