A book club in Venice, California started reading Finnegan's Wake in 1995. They have just finished it.
Whilst it may be 600 pages long, most readers would get through a tome that length in a few weeks or months. However, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake - regarded as one of literature’s most difficult works - is best approached as a long-term commitment. As Gerry Fialka's book club discovered.
“People think they’re reading a book; they’re not,” Fialka told The Times. “They’re breathing and living together as human beings in a room, looking at printed matter and figuring out what printed matter does to us.”
Talking about Joyce with the group has been “the most fulfilling thing in my life,” Peter Quadrino told the Washington Post. At one point, he was regularly driving three hours from San Diego to participate in the monthly gatherings.
Readers met monthly to discuss a page or two - sometimes just a couple of lines - continuing at this pace for years, then decades. As history marched on, club members came and went, seven presidents were elected, and Zoom became helpful; but Gerry's club never stopped chipping away at the book. They read the final page in October, 28 years after their first meeting. Gerry was 42 when they started. He's now 70.
Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake over the course of 17 years. The text, which blurs the boundaries between reality and dreams, pulls from more than 60 languages. Published in 1939, it has been confounding scholars and casual readers alike ever since.
Fialka, however, isn’t particularly interested in endings. Looking ahead, the group’s meetings will continue. “There is no next book,” he tells the Observer. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”
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