'It never ends': the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

‘It never ends’: the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake

The group in Venice, California, started the difficult James Joyce book in 1995. They reached its final page in October

Lois Beckett in Los Angeles
@loisbeckett
Sun 12 Nov 2023 08.00 EST

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years.
…

Fialka emphasises that media reports saying his group has “finished” the book are wrong. “We didn’t end. The last sentence of the book ends midsentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclical. It never ends.”

This November, they started back on page three.

“There is no next book,” Fialka told me. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”

[Ponietz]

1. Cult

[SalamanderSleeps]

5. Perhaps, if you visited Dublin on Bloomsday you might change your mind.

Just because people like to gather to solve a puzzle does not make them members of a cult.

Both, Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses are thick as pea soup, but packed with vitamins.

http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

8. WTF

As the article correctly stated, Finnegan's Wake is notorious as one of the all-time most difficult books to read, especially if you weren't Irish ca 1920s-1930s. It's so loaded with obscure slang, puns and references that you need an annotated guide bigger than the book to get through it all.

Now throw onto the pile how it's 656 pages of such reading, and it makes sense that it would take that long to get through a page or two every month.

Do you call every uni literature department a cult because many professors in it have devoted entire careers to analysing one book? Because that's what they do. It's what my stepfather did with Bleak House by Charles Dickens--an entire 30+ year lit prof career studying and teasing out the nuances and meanings of it.

He wasn't in a cult. That was his life's work.

Bloody hell, what is *wrong* with people who call intensive study of something worthwhile a cult?

[Ponietz]

11. Sarcasm

Chill out, it’s Sunday. Everyone to their holy book of choice.
I’m not a Joycean fundamentalist.

[txwhitedove]

2. Good article, posted earlier this morning.

[John1956PA]

3. James Joyce envisioned the text as inscribed on the edge of a disc.

No starting point, no ending point. Only continuity.

[ggma]

4. Was it worth it?

Would be my first question.

Second would be "Did you do it for the book or for the group? Meaning the experience of meeting with this particular group of people became more the reason than what was going on in the book.

It sounds/feels like a social experiment. Not a good or bad thing to me. Probably a touchstone for some of the folks participating.

gg

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

9. Have you read it?

Because that will answer the question.

It's an insanely tough read, even for people with half a clue about what Joyce was trying to do.

[ggma]

10. No, I have not. My questions had nothing to do with the book.

Forgive me for asking questions.

gg

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

6. Crossposted from dupe thread

Am I the only one who clicked on this...

And expected to see that the people got to the 'end' then flipped back to the 'beginning'... because the book's 'opening' finishes the sentence at the 'end?'

And then they did the loop over and over again for 17 years?

[cez]

7. How difficult is it?

The meme: