“Finnegan’s Wake,” James Joyce’s phantasmagorical 1939 novel, is considered the hardest book to read in Western canon. Joyce uses made-up languages, and words with more than 100 letters. Joyce said he was writing about a dream state.
Others, including Marshall McLuhan, who told us “the medium is the message,” call him a prophet, alerting us to how media from books to TV rewires our brains.
Some book clubs run from “Finnegan’s Wake.” But we speak to Gerry Fialkas, whose group read it line-by-line every month for 28 years. And when they finished they started it over again.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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