\'Finnegans Wake\' Follows Tocqueville Onto Chinese Best-Seller List

James Joyce’s fiendishly difficult novel “Finnegans Wake” has been called many things since it first began appearing in portions in 1924, including “the most colossal leg-pull in literature,” “the work of a psychopath,” and “the chief ironic epic of our time.”

Now, it can add another designation: best seller in China.

A new translation of the novel has sold out its initial print run of 8,000 since it appeared on Dec. 25, thanks in part to an unusual billboard campaign in major Chinese cities, the Associated Press reported. In Shanghai, where the book was advertised on 16 billboards, sales were second only to a new biography of Deng Xiaoping in the “good books” category, according to the Shanghai News and Publishing Bureau.

The book’s surprise success has drawn some clucking from Chinese observers (how do you say “cofee table trophy” in Mandarin). But at a panel on Tuesday, the translator, Dai Congrong of Fudan University, who spent nearly 10 years wrestling with Joyce’s runaway sentences and knotty coinages, confessed that even she didn’t fully understand the book. “I would not be faithful to the original intent of the novel if my translation made it easy to comprehend,” she said.

Earlier this year, Tocqueville’s “The Old Regime and the French Revolution” became a best seller in China, buoyed by reports that senior Communist Party officials had asked party members to read the book to gain insight into the country’s challenges.

The more puzzling vogue for Joyce, whose “Ulysses” sold more than 85,000 copies when it was first published in Chinese translation in 1994, may reflect an interest in avant-garde writers once dismissed or banned as “decadent,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Global Shanghai: 1850-2010.”

“I’ve been intrigued over the years, for example, of how popular translations of works by Roland Barthes have been in China, admittedly within a niche audience of intellectuals,” Mr. Wasserstrom said via email. “Judging from the print runs I’ve seen of some of his books, which sold in the tens of thousands, perhaps sometimes reaching the hundreds of thousands, it may be that some of his titles, such as ‘Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse,’ sold more copies in Chinese than in Frech and English combined.”