Book club reads 28 years on a Joyce novel
James Joyce spent 17 years writing his novel "Finnegans Wake", and it took a reading group from California 28 years to work their way through the complicated novel. Nevertheless, there is "no next book" for the reading group.
The novel "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce is not only one of the most famous texts in literary history, but also one of the most difficult. In 1995, Gerry Fialka founded a book club in Venice, California, with just one goal: to read "Finnegans Wake" from cover to cover. Now, 28 years later, the participants have done it, as the Guardian reports.
The time span "could well be a record", says Sam Slote, James Joyce expert at Trinity College in Dublin. His own weekly "Wake" group of around a dozen Joyce scholars is well on the way to reading the text in a brisk 15 years.
Between 10 and 30 people took part in the monthly meetings of the Californian club, which were first held in a public library and then via video chat. At the beginning, they read two pages together per meeting, later only one. At 28 years old, the group has now taken longer to read "Finnegans Wake" than Joyce took to write it: the author worked for 17 years to complete the 600 to 700 pages of the experimental text, depending on the edition. That includes four years of writer's block.
Fialka, now 70 years old, reports on his reading experience: "I won't lie, it wasn't as if I had seen God. (...) It wasn't a big deal." Another participant, on the other hand, confesses that the reading was "the most fulfilling thing in my life": "It really feels like my brain has just taken a shower. It's so refreshing."
Nobody understands the book
The novel "Finnegans Wake", published in 1939, is considered to be extremely complicated. Even specialist knowledge doesn't help, says Joyce expert Slote. "You have to come to terms with the fact that nobody really understands the book, and that's where the idea of collaborative reading comes in," he said. The difficulty of the novel makes reading it a kind of democratic experience. Teamwork could help decipher Joyce's numerous allusions, which range from references to 19th century Irish politics, French literature and popular drinking songs to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. According to Fialka, his reading group is in this case "more of a performance art piece than a book club".
Linguistically, the text is a mixture of newly invented words, puns and allusions that refer to around 80 different languages. One participant in the Venice group says they are "things that look like typos".
The Californian book club is not the only group involved with "Finnegans Wake". According to one list, there are said to be at least 52 active reading groups on Joyce's work. In Zurich, for example, a club was founded in 1984 that has already read the book in its entirety three times in almost 40 years and is currently taking part for the fourth time. The first reading took a brisk eleven years.
And what will happen now with the book club in Venice? Fialka emphasizes that it would be wrong to say that they have "finished" the book. "We haven't stopped. The last sentence of the book ends mid-sentence and then it continues at the beginning of the book. It's cyclical. It never ends." The members plan to start again from the beginning in November. "There is no next book," Fialka revealed to the Guardian: "We only read one book. Forever."
The Californian book club's achievement of reading "Finnegans Wake" over 28 years has attracted international attention, with media outlets like the Guardian reporting on their accomplishment.
Despite being based in California, the book club's following for "Finnegans Wake" extends beyond the state, as there are reportedly over 50 active reading groups worldwide focused on James Joyce's complex novel.
Source: www.ntv.de
