I couldn’t do it.
Or… maybe I could do it, if I got one pomegranate martini per reading.
It’s taken awhile – 13 years to be exact – but the “Finnegans Wake’’ Reading Group has finally finished James Joyce’s famously long and difficult novel. Formed by serious fans of the Irish writer, the group has been meeting weekly to read a page or so of the convoluted work of comic fiction. The uncommon exercise, which began at the Thirsty Scholar in Cambridge, concluded this week at the Corrib in Brighton. Published in 1939, “Finnegans Wake’’ begins with the last half of a sentence and ends with the first half of the same sentence. To mark the end of the marathon reading, the group’s members raised their glasses and ritually chanted the entire completed sentence.
Here are the initial and final phrases united:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.