“Finnegans Wake” by James Joyce is considered one of the most difficult works of the 20th century. A book club took 28 years to read it. However, other book clubs also need many years to complete the work.
Which book is it? “Finnegans Wake” is the last work of the Irish author James Joyce and was written between 1923 and 1939. The novel is among the most difficult to understand works of 20th-century literature, partly due to the language Joyce used: He created his own language by recombining English words or mixing them with other languages.
An American book club made it their mission to read “Finnegans Wake” together. They began in 1995 and completed the reading after 28 years in October 2023.
28 Years for a Single Book
What kind of club is this? Gerry Fialka, an experimental filmmaker from Venice, California, founded a book club in 1995 to read “Finnegans Wake” together with others. The English-language The Guardian spoke with Fialka upon the completion of the novel.
Every month, a group of between 10 and 30 people met at a local library to read 2 pages of the book each time. However, the goal was so ambitious that they eventually had to reduce it to a single page per month. Joyce’s novel has a total of 628 pages, which is how long the reading took.
Interestingly, the Californian reading group spent longer reading “Finnegans Wake” than Joyce did writing it: The author took 17 years to complete the 628-page experimental text.
Afterward, the club members discussed the words and debated meanings and broader themes. No one claimed to understand everything, but Fialka says the beauty of reading “Finnegans Wake” this way is that readers gain a faint sense of what Joyce might have meant just by going through the reading (via npr.org).
The Final Reading: For the reading of the last page, Fialka opened a Zoom meeting and asked the 15 participants to “take a conscious breath together” to support their efforts. He then had them recite a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti before the members took turns reading exactly two lines of the text.
However, the book is technically not finished, Fialka emphasizes, because the novel does not officially end:
We did not stop. The last sentence of the book ends in the middle of a sentence, and then it continues at the beginning of the book. It is cyclical. It never ends.
Meanwhile, the club has started from the beginning again. Fialka, who founded the group in his early 40s, is now 70 years old. After the second round, Fialka will be almost 100 years old. As of November 2023, they have already completed 3 pages of the novel.
Other Book Clubs Need Years for Perhaps the Most Difficult Work of the 20th Century
Are other book groups faster? No, the English-language The Guardian once investigated how long other book clubs spend with the work.
- The “Wake” group in Dublin, led by Sam Slote, a Joyce expert at Trinity College Dublin and one of the editors of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, consists of a dozen Joyce researchers. They estimate it will take about 15 years.
- In Zurich, a book club has read Joyce’s work three times over nearly 40 years and is currently in their fourth cycle. Their first reading took 11 years.
Slote, a Joyce specialist, explained that Joyce’s work lends itself to book clubs:
One must accept that no one truly understands the book, and this is precisely where the idea of communal reading can take hold.
Collaborative work can also help decipher Joyce’s numerous allusions, which range from references to 19th-century Irish politics to French literature to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
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