For a lad still a tad, who had passed through and adapted himself to three linguistic environments — Manhattan, southern France, London, and then back to Manhattan — in three years, this came as music to the ears. That Joycean play with language, in a form accessible even to a sprat like me, heightened my consciousness in relation to the spoken and written word by making the very act of reading — not the experience of following a story line, but the savoring of language itself, its slipperiness and mutabiity, its multivalent possibilities — fun. […]