Last Tuesday evening, about a dozen people gathered on Zoom for an unusual book club: For nearly three decades, it’s been exclusively devoted to reading a single text, out loud, page by page. The group is studying Finnegans Wake, the notoriously difficult-to-read novel by the Irish writer James Joyce.
In October, after 28 years, the group finally reached the final page. So last week, they looped back to the beginning to keep going.
“I thought, well, it’s the only way I'm going to read Finnegans Wake,” says Venice resident Gerry Fialka, who founded the club in 1995. “It will give me a chance to read it, but more so to engage the community.”
The group started in a Venice library, then moved to Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the years, its membership has ebbed and flowed, from about 30 to fewer than a dozen people at any given monthly meeting. Similar groups exist around the world, devoted to wrestling through this founding book.
It’s difficult to say what Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, is about. Wikipedia describes it as being written in “a largely idiosyncratic language which blends standard English with neologisms, portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to create a refracted effect.”
Fialka describes it as “almost like tripping on acid.”
“It is changing your sensory perception,” he says. “Because you're literally looking at words that don't make sense, and the reason you look at words is to make sense.”
Steve Kedrowski, a self-published novelist and teacher, joined the club around 2005.
“I'd read Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” he says, referring to two other Joyce novels. “I had never tried to tackle Finnegans Wake because I always heard it was unreadable.”
The idea of stumbling through it with a group sounded fun.
During last week’s meeting, club members took turns reading a couple of lines at a time, working their way through the novel’s first page. After reading it through twice, the discussion zig-zagged from drilling down on the meanings behind individual words to broader ideas and themes.
At one point, Fialka directed a question to member Nigel Donnelly.
“Nigel, do most Irish people care about reading Joyce?” he asked. “You grew up there.”
“No, not really,” Donnelly replied. “He’d be avoided I think in most cases.”
Near the end of the meeting, member Joseph Patwell confessed, “I've read this page maybe 100 times. And I understand very little of it. It’s lovely to hear, but to me has no meaning.”
In this club, that’s A-OK. As impenetrable as Finnegans Wake is, Fialka says, most of the club members experience flickers of understanding simply by plodding through it.
“You will have a revelation,” he said, “or what Joyce called ‘epiphanies in everydayness.’ In the midst of something that seems complex, when that flips into an aha moment, it's an amazing experience.”
And now he and others in his group can experience it all for a second time, though Fialka doesn’t think of returning to the beginning of the book as starting over.
“It never ended,” he explains, “because the book ends mid-sentence on page 628, and then it picks up at the beginning. You don't end Finnegans Wake.”