The book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake | Hacker News Reader

The book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake

theguardian.com

39 pointsgscott19 comments

If anyone is curious I found a website hosting a version of this book with a lot of apparatus to help you read this beast, actually seems pretty interesting...

https://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm

Imagine spending years of your life wading through something offensively unreadable written by somebody who left nothing to explain it. But enough about our codebase, cool article!

At least they read the book.

I know book clubs all over the planet that have been stuck on the same book for thousands of years, and most of them haven’t made any serious effort to actually READ that book - they just cherry-pick the parts that support or can be twisted to support their own worldview.

I've never been able to approach this book in text. I did listen to an abridged audiobook performance of Finnegan's Wake, and enjoyed it in the same way I suppose I would enjoy listening to a foreign language poetry recital.

I wonder why people try to read this book when it's not really comprehensible?

Why do people spend their entire lives studying the Bible looking for 'meaning'? It's the same thing: academic pursuit/something to do and, frankly, there is nothing at all wrong w/that.

People who study the Bible that way (myself included) believe the book is inspired by God himself, so that makes sense to me. But nobody believes that about Finnegan's Wake, as far as I know.

If you believe in God, and God made everything, it's thanks to God Finnegans Wake exists.

Couldn't agree more - or at least, whatever is good and true in Finnegan's Wake is thanks to God

Why do people like Gravity’s Rainbow…

Sometimes art is hard to understand and sometimes it’s good art because it’s deliberately hard to understand to make you think…

And other times it’s just incomprehensible garbage that someone managed to sell and everyone is too embarrassed to admit it’s terrible.

Yeah that's basically what I'm wondering - if it takes 30 years to understand a book can it really belong to the first category instead of the second? Hard to believe..

They're not the same. Gravity's Rainbow is downright lucid compared to Finnegan's Wake. Given Joyce was known to be something of a troll, as we would say today, I would not put it past him to have written Finnegan's Wake as a prank.

I’m not trying to ascribe merit or judge either Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow… I’m trying to highlight the fact that the line between good art and bad art is subjective, blurry, and sometimes pointless.

The fact an artist can be a bit of a troll sometimes adds to their work… just look at the partially shredded Banksy and how it was still worth lots of money since it was clearly the artist’s intention to have it shred… I’d argue that the shredded pieces would probably have retained just as much value if it had fully shredded since it would have been relatively easy to reassemble…as it’s a known artwork not unknown dense text.

Still, Gravity's Rainbow has at least a semblance of a plot here and there, and distinct characters with motivations that have some kind of logic to them. Finnegan's Wake, far as I can tell, does not.

I also wonder if the fact that I found Gravity's Rainbow much easier going has to do with the fact that the culture I grew up in is much more like the one Pynchon grew up in (northeastern USA, mid-to-late-20th century) as opposed to Joyce's origin in early-20th-century Ireland. It's not _that_ much of a difference in terms of years, but I don't think I need to tell you that the 20th century was, as a rule, a very busy and chaotic time.

It's an interesting point about trollery being part of the art--I guess you could classify it as one of the performing arts like dance or theater. Maybe its closest relative is stand-up comedy.

Gravity's Rainbow is completely understandable right up until you put the book down for a second.

>Why do people like Gravity’s Rainbow…

Having read Gravity's Rainbow I have come to the conclusion that there is a non-zero chance that every single person who claims to have liked Gravity's Rainbow is lying.

I read it 30 years ago as a self-righteous macho flex. Now that I am older and wiser I regret the time I wasted on it.

I would have been better served reading the Yellow Pages from cover to cover.

Only a true Pynchon fan would harbor that degree of resentment.

I’ve heard these kinds of books (Finnegan’s Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Anatomy of Melancholy) described as a “core dump” by Brian Moriarty (the Infocom game developer). They are books where the authors seemingly put together everything they have in their head into a single work.

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