Bloomsday: Launching of the book "La Orden del Finnegans"

book launch

With the renowned Spanish writers: Eduardo Lago, Enrique Vila-Matas, Antonio Soler, Jordi Soler, Malcolm Otero and José Antonio Garriga Vela and with an introduction by award-winning Irish novelist, poet and playwright Dermot Healy

Midway between humour and solemnity, between the most rigorous of disciplines and the most playful of spirits, a society was born with the sole purpose of venerating James Joyce’s Ulysses. And thus its members formed La Orden del Finnegans (“The Order of Finnegans”), which takes its name from the pub in Dalkey and not the Joycean and inscrutable work of the same name. The Order has very few golden rules and its members seemingly have a healthy drive to oust one another from the group. The slogan “Thank you. How grand we are this morning!”, the closing extract from the sixth chapter of Ulysses, adorns their distinguished coat of arms. These illustrious and comic gents convene on the 16th June every year in Dublin and add new commitments and rules to the Order. This they do with the thinly-veiled hope that one of them will slip up, and they will at last be able to follow Brendan Behan’s maxim, according to which the order of the day for any Irish republican organisation is first and foremost that of split. One of the decrees set in stone by the Order on Bloomsday last was the creation of this collective book. It looks as if the members’perverse desire for the self-destruction of the group, may not, alas, be as easy as first thought.

To date, the members of the Order are Eduardo Lago, Enrique Vila-Matas, Antonio Soler, Jordi Soler, Malcolm Otero, and José Antonio Garriga Vela.