Rating  - Hysterically sad and tragically funny
I'm a big fan of David Foster Wallace, a once-in-a-generation artist who, unfortunately for the rest of us, recently committed suicide. His death hit me surprisingly hard, considering I'd never met the man. As a personal tribute, I picked up his masterpiece again for a third read.
It's a sprawling work of genius, hysterically sad and tragically funny, about the pursuit of happiness and the difficulties of communication. Set in a near future world where the years are corporate-sponsored and America handles its garbage by catapulting it onto land we forced Canada to accept as a "gift," the novel is too big and brilliant to be summed up. All I can say is that if the length (1079 pages) and complexity (scores of characters, 100 pages of footnotes, deeply recursive language) don't scare you, then reading it can change the way you think about fiction. It's not everybody's taste, but it thoroughly blows my mind.
Rest in peace, brother.
Rating - Possibly the best book ever written.
In any case, that's what I tell people who ask me which book is my favorite: this happens more often than you'd think, as I work in a bookstore.
I first read Infinite Jest in the middle of high school: it was assigned reading for one of my classes [an optional class, but I'd thought the book was interesting, and the teacher who taught that class had given me a hearty recommendation]. I read it during every waking moment I could, straight through, for three weeks: flipping back and forth between footnotes and endnotes, starving, wanting more, no matter what the cost, really. Yes ... I, unlike many people here, read Infinite Jest straight through, pretty much without taking a breather. [I continued going to classes, and I did between 5 and 10 minutes of homework a night. And I ate, very, very quickly.] And what this book gives you ... DFW uses the omniscient narrator throughout the story to guide you through its' different tones, from sadness to happiness and back again. The book is extremely funny. One part in particular [the Eschaton part] had me laughing nearly the entire time. The book has countless characters and none of them vfeel contrived or flat in any way: they're all fleshed out, somehow, ancillary scene stacking on top of each other, everything described so perfectly it makes your eyes pop out of your head and your mind revolt [or try to pretend to be like him]. The things DFW can do with a sentence are incredible. Perhaps part of what made this book resonate so strongly to me is that I, at the time I was reading it, was a tennis player in high school who has been ... thinking about philosophical doggerel most of my life. Everything seemed so ... relatable. It was as though the book was written for me and me alone, and after I read it once I started flipping through to odd places and read from there. I can pick up the story thread from pretty much any place in the book, now, and know where I am. The world is so consistent and brilliantly written, and the characters express the depths of emotion, and the things that happen aren't just things oddly thrown into the world to make his characters do stuff: they're important, they all show things about the characters that they're in. The book is over a thousand pages, and every sentence feels important.
This review is far worse than the book. For a while I've refrained from posting a review because it would have such a lack of eloquence ... I can't really think straight when it comes to this book. I've owned it for four years, and ordered another copy just so that I could loan the first out to people [as I'd been loaning the first copy out to people anyways, but it wasn't getting back to me]. The narrator here is alive: and he is showing you. He is showing you the world, and all you have to do is listen for a while.
From DFW's oft-quoted Kenyon College commencement speech:
'There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"'
This book tells you what water is.
Rating  - Great book; arrived in shoddy condition
Of course this is an excellent book for anyone familiar with David Foster Wallace...my only gripe is that (like many other times) book arrived in the mail looking like it had been kicked around and stomped on before it got to my door. Book appears to be in far-from-new condition. This is a battle I have fought with Amazon many times (although I rolled the dice and ordered Genesis 1970-1975 and had to admit it was in excellent and new condition but only after I had sent an e-mail after ordering it to be sure it arrived in new and not beat-up condition).
Rating - Beyond Belief
What a wonderful, terrible, brilliant, horrible, frustrating, fascinating story. Jesus wept. It's also heart-felt, humorous, whimsical, and a masterpiece. Jesus smiled.
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Customer Reviews for Back Bay Books,0316066524,9780316066525,0316066524,813.083 |
