A book club organized by director Gerry Fialka in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles finished reading Irish writer James Joyce's novel “Finnegans Wake” after 28 years. The author wrote the book of 628 pages over 17 years.
Pravilamag.ru writes about this with reference to The Guardian.
Literature lovers started reading the novel in 1995 and finished it in 2023.
On average, 10 to 30 people attended club meetings. At first, they managed to discuss two pages of text in one meeting, but then the discussions became longer and more meaningful, so the amount of reading was reduced to one page.
Fialka was 42 years old when the club was founded, but now he is 70. He believes that reading Joyce’s novel, to which he devoted almost half of his life, is not something exceptional.
At the same time, he called the words that the reading of the book was completed erroneous. “We're not finished. The last sentence is interrupted in the middle and takes you to the beginning of the book. It is cyclical, it never ends”, - the director noted.
According to the director, in November, book club members returned to page three of the work. “There won’t be a next book. We will only read one book. Always”, - added Fialka.
James Joyce spent almost two decades working on “Finnegans Wake”. The novel features complex language that uses the author's neologisms, puns, and references to words from 80 different languages. Soon after the publication of the novel, Joyce died without leaving comments about his work.
Could you devote 28 years to reading one book?