2023-11-23 04:17:09
A reading club in California recently completed their first reading of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, a difficult book that has taken them 28 years to read.
The writer “James Joyce” once said that his request from the reader is “to devote his whole life to reading his works,” and this is what the members of the reading club actually did, if they spent the past 28 years of their lives deciphering the novel “Finnegan’s Wake”, trying To discover its many secrets.
Finnegan’s Wake is one of the most complex novels ever written, a mixture of reinvented words, puns, and allusions, and references in some 80 languages.
Jerry Fialka, a filmmaker from Venice, California, has been hosting the California Book Club, which has been dedicated to reading this novel since 1995. Between 10 and 30 people attend monthly meetings at a local library to read a couple of pages from the book and discuss their opinions on its meaning.
However, they eventually had to slow down the pace of reading to just one page per meeting, to give themselves more time for discussion, which made it take them 28 years to read the book just once.
Interestingly, it took book club readers longer to finish Finnegan’s Wake than it took James Joyce to write it (17 years), including four years of almost complete writing cessation. The author died shortly following its publication, so he did not have time to explain what he wrote, or at least give some explanations to the readers, leaving it up to the readers to decipher this literary puzzle.
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