‘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
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.

That amount of time “could well be a record”, said Sam Slote, a Joyce expert at Trinity College, Dublin, and one of the editors of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake. His own weekly Wake group in Dublin, which is made up of about a dozen Joyce scholars, is on track to read through the text in a brisk 15 years.

The California reading group spent longer reading Finnegans Wake than Joyce spent writing it: the 628-page experimental text took the author 17 years to complete, Slote said, including a four-year stretch of near-complete writer’s block.

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