After only 30 years—or as Joyce might have said, “a blink in the wink of eternity,” or as Gardel put it in his tango, “life is a breath, twenty years is nothing”—the most persistent reading group in the Western Hemisphere has achieved what was thought possible only under the combined effects of masochism, cookies, and excessive coffee consumption: finishing Finnegans Wake.
Armed with etymological dictionaries, dream maps, and a patience that would make Penelope blush, this Californian club embarked in 1995 on reading the most obscurely brilliant text of the 20th century. Their method was simple: one page a month, a break to cry, debate, and pretend they understood again. And yesterday, finally, they closed the book. They literally closed it and looked at each other.
During these three decades, members of the group have aged, moved, been reincarnated, and yet they persisted. Some believe that the text gave them unique cognitive abilities; others simply developed a supernatural ability to detect when a sentence had no subject, verb, or complements.
One club member said, “It’s been like trying to decipher the feverish dream of a polyglot.” Another added, “We probably understand less English now than we did before we started,” while another confessed that she was still not sure whether Finnegans Wake was a novel, a joke, or a coded recipe for seafood soup.
Bookish & Co. congratulates this group on their literary feat, their superhuman patience, and their existential courage. Now, with Beowulf on the horizon (and no subtitles), the club plans to relax.
