In 1939, Irish author James Joyce published “Finnegans Wake,” a piece of literature that defies comprehension.
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,” it begins, “from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
The book starts and ends with a sentence fragment, combines multiple languages and has no clear or linear plot.
It’s a work that’s so dense, one group that started in Austin has been working on it for more than a decade.
“We’re only reading one page at a time,” said Peter Quadrino, founder and organizer of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, TX.
Every other week, Quadrino hosts a Zoom call where people from around the world gather and attempt to understand one of the most infamous books in English literature.
The group spends the first 15 minutes of each meeting socializing. Then they all go around in a circle and each person reads two lines until they’re done with that week’s page.
After that, they spend about an hour and a half researching, annotating and trying to make sense of Joyce’s experimental prose.
“We used to read two pages per meeting,” said Quadrino. “Then at a certain point there was just so much going on in the pages and so much in the discussion that we had to lower it to one page per meeting.”
