Because what would I do next? Finishing Finnegans Wake felt like the end of a long, literary marriage and I instinctively understood what that meant: a bad case of post break-up blues. But now I realised there was part of me that didn’t want to read that final page. For seventeen years I had been religious about sticking to the set day and time – the last Sunday of every month – no matter what. So I scheduled our final reading for 2 February, 2021. James Joyce received the first copy of Finnegans Wake in his hands on 30 January, 1939, just in time for his 57 th birthday on 2 February.
In a sense we never really expected to arrive at the famous last words: A way a lone a last a loved a long theĪnd then it happened: page 628 was within reach. ‘We’ll be dead before we get to the end!’ we often joked. My Finnegans Wake Reading Group started in July 2004.
In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right. James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it.
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