A novel approach

SOMERVILLE -- It's a quiet night at The Thirsty Scholar, an Irish pub and dating bar on Beacon Street. A handful of bored-looking guys sit at the bar, watching a hockey game on the TV, and a few couples and small groups chat quietly at scattered tables. But in what Irish pubs call ''the snug," an alcove off the dimly lit main room, conversation is animated, laughter frequent, and there are more books than bottles on the table. The Boston-area ''Finnegans Wake" Reading Group is in session.

The 10-year-old group, which meets weekly, is carefully making its way -- word by word, line by line, and page by page -- through James Joyce's famously difficult final work. The book is 628 pages long, and they're now on Page 251.

''The 'Wake' is an enigma, but something new comes out each time we meet," says Erik Jespersen of Somerville, a multimedia consultant and a composer who is an original member of the group.

There is no agreement on what ''Finnegans Wake" is really about, and its language, much of it invented by Joyce, is so convoluted and peculiar that most people find it unreadable. For true Joyceans, however, the challenge is its own reward, and Jespersen doesn't consider the group's pace -- usually a page or less each meeting -- unduly slow.

''After all, it took Joyce 17 years to write it," he notes.

The title is a reference to a popular comic song of Joyce's day about a hard-drinking hod carrier named Tim Finnegan who falls from a ladder, cracks his skull, and is presumed dead until, at his riotous wake, whiskey gets splashed on the corpse, which miraculously revives. It can also be read as ''Finn Again Wakes," an allusion to Finn MacCool, the warrior giant of Irish mythology who sleeps in a cave deep beneath the earth but will awake to save Ireland in her hour of greatest need.

The book is full of puns and riddles (''punns and reedles" to Joyce), words derived from more than 60 languages and dialects, and a lot of Shakespearean and classical allusions, along with references to popular songs, old jokes, and children's games. There are many humorous plays on words. St. Paul's First Epistle to the Hebrews, for instance, becomes ''farced epistol to the highbruws." In one chapter there are more than 100 references to rivers around the world including one in ''New Hunshire" called ''The Merrymake."

''I really enjoy the wordplay and the analyzing that we do," says Richard Cosma, 64, of Framingham, an early member of the group. Cosma's copy of the ''Wake" is a ragged paperback with the date he started reading it penciled on the flyleaf: May 9, 1997. An engineer at a pharmaceutical company, he says he also likes that the book group's far-ranging discussions are ''180 degrees from what I do during the day."

Because of its density, Joyceans recommend reading it aloud and in a group with diverse backgrounds and knowledge, in order to get the most out of it. The sentence rhythms sometimes mimic songs, for one thing, and while a scholar might identify a Sanskrit word an avid fisherman would be the one to recognize the name of an obscure trout fly, an enthusiastic gardener an exotic plant.

The pages the local group has most recently been reading include allusions to a prepubescent playground game in which boys try to guess the color of girls' underwear, apparent references to Galileo (''Galilleotto" ) and Machiavelli (''Smachiavelluti"), and a typical Joyce rewriting of a famous Shakespearian line: ''For a burning would is come to dance inane."

Joel Reisman, a Veterans Administration statistician from Newton, thinks too many ''Finnegans Wake" readers get caught up in the details of its language and miss the narrative sweep of the book. ''Every passage has its ambiguities, but this is still a story," he says.

And not all of it is barely comprehensible. 'About once a chapter Joyce writes clearly and lyrically and I love that," says Todd Sjoblom of Brookline, a computer programmer with a doctorate in linguistics.

The group attracts serious readers. Sjoblom belongs to two other reading groups, and Cosma says he's usually working on three books at a time. He was initially drawn to the ''Finnegans Wake" group, he recalls, ''because I'd read almost everything else."

Reisman joined the group only last December but has no problem keeping up. ''The book is cyclical, so you can start anywhere," he says. Uniquely structured, ''Finnegans Wake" begins with the last half of a sentence and ends with the first half of the same sentence. Joyce described it as ''a Book of Doublends Jined."

There are usually four or five people at a meeting, says Jespersen, ''but we've had as many as 10." The group is currently all male, mostly in their 40s, but has included a few women.

The group seems to be the only one of its kind meeting regularly in Massachusetts, possibly in all of New England. The Finnegans Wake Society of New York, founded before World War II, has links on its website to reading groups in Belgium, Switzerland, and Ireland but only to nine others in the United States outside of New York and Boston, most affiliated with colleges or universities.

The New York society meets monthly at the Gotham Book Mart, a Manhattan literary landmark. ''We usually get 20 to 30 people," says society president Murray Gross, a retired attorney. The society has been working on its present reading for more than eight years, Gross says, and is now on page 295. ''When we're finished we'll start all over again and get it right," he jokes.

Cosma says his group likes to meet in pubs since Joyce spent a lot of time in them, and in Cambridge or Somerville because they feel less conspicuous there. ''We come from all around Boston, but this is a Cambridge kind of thing."

The first meetings were in an Irish restaurant and bar near Porter Square in Cambridge actually called Finnegans Wake. ''It was really wonderful to be reading ''Finnegans Wake" in Finnegans Wake," remembers Jespersen. When Finnegans Wake closed, replaced by an Asian fusion restaurant, the book group had to move on -- and on. ''It was hard to find a bar that would put up with people who were there to read, not drink," Cosma says. Lighting was also a problem. ''One place was really dark to make it more romantic," he recalls, ''and we had to tip the waitress to bring us a stronger bulb so we could see what we were reading."

The Thirsty Scholar, where they now meet every Tuesday night from 7 to 9, has been more accommodating. The snug has adjustable lighting, and the management lets the group keep a large dictionary, essential for finding the meaning of Joyce's many arcane words, on a shelf by the bar. ''You know you're dealing with hard-core Joyce guys when they keep a dictionary in their pub!" Cosma says.

Since the ''Wake" is a book that has no real beginning or end, the group doesn't anticipate ever dissolving. Asked if he thought it possible that 10 years from now the same people would still be meeting in a pub to deconstruct ''Finnegans Wake," Sjoblom thought a moment and then smiled. ''If not us," he said, ''people very like us will be."