[Image: Alfred Benjamin/Courtesy of Gerry Fialka]
For nearly 30 years, Gerry Fialka, a Venice Beach experimental filmmaker and self-proclaimed “antiquarian ne’er-do-well”, has been leading a book club that reads exactly one book.
And not just any book: Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s glorious fever dream of 628 pages, which is widely known as the literary equivalent of a psychedelic maze.
This marathon kicked off in 1995 at a local library, with 10 to 30 brave souls showing up to crack open the chaos, The Guardian reported. At first, they tackled two pages a month. Then one. Eventually, it took them 28 years to hit the final page, longer than it took Joyce to write the thing (17 years, including four of straight-up existential dread and writer’s block).
“That amount of time ‘could well be a record,’” said Sam Slote, a Joyce scholar at Trinity College Dublin, who co-edited How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake.
Slote’s own Wake group – yes, there are indeed many more – is cruising through it in just 15 years. Speed demons.
Fialka, who was in his 40s when he started, is now 70. And reaching the end of the book?
“I don’t want to lie, it wasn’t like I saw God. It wasn’t a big deal.”
Finnegans Wake makes Ulysses look like beach reading. It’s got no clear setting, no obvious plot, and the characters are, well, debated. It’s a linguistic salad tossed with 80 languages, puns, and what often looks like typos.
“There’s a kind of visionary quality to it,” said Bruce Woodside, a retired Disney animator and longtime member. “It’s 628 pages of things that look like typographic errors.”
Fialka doesn’t just call this a book club; it’s “a performance art piece,” “a living organism,” “a hootenanny,” and “a choir.” That’s the vibe.
In the early days, it was “kind of chaotic,” said Woodside. “A lot of commentary on it was gibberish.” Honestly, so was the book. He bailed for about 20 years, dabbled in a Proust group (which hilariously pivoted to Finnegans Wake), then returned post-retirement. The progress in his absence went from chapter one to chapter fifteen.
Peter Quadrino, who joined the LA group in the late 2000s, used to drive three hours from San Diego to attend.
“If you’re really interested in Finnegans Wake, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you.”
Joyce, who described his ideal reader as “suffering from an ideal insomnia,” pretty much demanded that readers devote their entire lives to him. Mission accepted.
When Quadrino moved to Austin, he started his own Wake group, now halfway through the book, on track to finish in a breezy 24 years.
According to Fialka, there are at least 52 Wake groups worldwide. Slote thinks it’s more. New York’s group is “really argumentative,” Quadrino said. “They’re always yelling at each other.” Austin’s, meanwhile, is more “Yes, and.”
Zurich gang, meanwhile, has gone through the book three times since 1984 and is “Benevolent,” says Sabrina Alonso. But also “competitive and contentious.” No one’s just casually flipping pages here.
Before the pandemic, the LA group met in a marina-side library, surrounded by yachts and literary masochists. “People that were very intelligent and a little odd,” recalled library manager Winona Phillabaum.
For the grand finale last October, Fialka kicked off the Zoom session with a “cosmic beginning,” a group breath, and a Ferlinghetti chant, and had each of the 15 attendees read exactly two lines of the final page. Art.
Despite the media hype, Fialka insists they haven’t “finished” the book.
“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.”
Naturally, they restarted in November. From page three. Why page three? Who knows. It’s Wake.
“There is no next book,” Fialka said. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”
Quadrino, who has a regular corporate job, says his Wake group is “the most fulfilling thing in my life.” And what does reading Finnegans Wake feel like?
“It really just feels like my brain just took a shower,” he said. “It’s so refreshing.”
[Source: The Guardian]
