In 1995, a reading club began reading James Joyce’s most difficult book. 28 years later it is finally finished

More than a quarter of a century has taken Gerry Fialka, a Californian experimental filmmaker, in bringing a very ambitious purpose: a reading club of ‘Finnegans Wake‘, James Joyce’s book that is famous not only for his extraordinary literary quality, but for the difficulty involved in his pages.

Literary nightmare. ‘Finnegans Wake ‘was published by deliveries from 1924, and was only edited as a book fifteen years later, when its title was also revealed. Since its first edition, the hostility of critics and readers was won by Your difficultywhich sometimes seems to be written in An invented language (in fact, mix words of seventy languages), and with which Joyce seeks to reproduce the way in which memories are ordered and reproducedwith words of multiple meanings and that try to challenge literary conventions at all times.

28 years. From this monumental fuck (‘Finnegans Wake’ is the closest that literature has been to generate a completely new means of expression), Fialka congregated every month in a local library to a group of between ten and thirty people. Your mission: comment in each session two pages of the book. The purpose was so ambitious that they ended up having to reduce it to a single page a month. They began in 1995 and 28 years later, in November 2023, they managed to finish reading full ‘Finnegans Wake’.

Why get into this authentic scrub? The Guardian He spoke with Fialka when the reading came to an end, and some of his usual people commented on the appeal they had found in the monumental task. Bruce Woodsis, a 74 -year -old Disney retired animator, says that although “there are 628 pages of things that look like typographic errors,” he has not stopped rereading the novel since his adolescence, and that he finds in it “something of visionary.” Woodsis allowed himself to leave the club for two decades to return to him when he found no other to analyze it so intelligently. At that time, the club had only advanced fifteen chapters.

A special club … With such a special purpose and novel, it is clear that we do not talk about a club to use. Fialka himself defines him more as “a Performance Artistic that a reading club “, and also speaks of the club as” a living organism. “The group ended up finding a purpose despite a few initial months of chaos and gallimaties comparable to the sensations that the book itself awakened. The curious thing is that the interpretations of the work themselves are all valid, because Joyce died not long after publishing it: he could not explain it.

… for a special book. Sam Slote, One of the greatest experts In Joyce of the world, he affirms that “we must accept that no one will understand it, and that is where the idea of ​​community reading enters.” After all, Joyce himself affirmed that “the demand I make to my reader is that I dedicate all his life to read my works.” Fialka and his people seem to follow their indications, although they are not the only ones: Slote states that there are more than fifty reading groups of ‘Finnegans Wake’ throughout the world.

Other clubs. Some of them seem to be trapped in an eternal literary return: the ‘Finnegans Wake’ club of Zurich has read it three times in forty years. One of them lasted eleven. And when they end, they start again, something that the book itself helps: the last sentence is interrupted in the middle and recover on the first page. Of course, Fialka himself, who is already seventy years old, has had no choice but to start again: in November last year they began their second reading of ‘Finnegans Wake’.

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