Caution:- Long review ahead.

I finally understand what the word 'tedium' means. Interestingly enough I have neither associated this particular term with books making use of the much revered and equally feared stream-of-consciousness as a narrative device nor with hefty tomes worth more than 1000 pages.

But getting through even 1 page of DFW's writing requires a Herculean effort on the reader's part. Wallace commands your undivided attention and let's say if you are demanding the luxury of a split second of thinking something unrelated in the middle of a page and then coming back to that same point in a page, resuming reading and achieving your former state of involvement with the story right away, you couldn't be asking for more.

Wallace's writing doesn't allow you breaks or breathers. His style is a modified form of stream of consciousness, one can say, where the endless stream of interior monologue combines with minutiae of character descriptions, frequent and abrupt digressions and everything else imaginable in excruciating detail. And once you lose the elusive thread connecting all the dots, you are doomed.

But even then, reading him is such a whole lot of fun. It's a challenging exercize where all your mental faculties are working at their full potential and strained to the extreme lest they miss out on that one crucial sentence amidst a sea of unnecessary details, that helps you understand what the narrative is about or what Wallace really wants you to know.

Mister Squishy

My first reactions to Mister Squishy bordered on impatient irritation:-

"Dude, stop showing off! I get that you are some kind of genius to be able to document everything with such painstaking precision."
"What in the world is this about anyway?"
"Lord please make this story end already."

That I happened to be reading this way past midnight, also fuelled my annoyance to a certain degree. But it's a good thing I plowed on stubbornly refusing to let Wallace get the better of me and put me to sleep.
And finally it all clicked together.
I began to see the point in plodding through a mind-boggling volume of corporate jargon and specifics of everything starting from variations in one particular character's sexual fantasies to the alignment of cakes kept on a tray in a conference room.

Mister Squishy is a less-than-flattering commentary on corporate America and accurately highlights the mind-numbing boredom that entails a white-collar, corporate job in the most indirect manner possible. It has an undercurrent of Wallace's typical dry humour running throughout which aids the reader in tiding over some of the ceaseless monotony of the detailing of the most trivial things.
I give this 3/5.

The Soul Is Not A Smithy

This is a pure gem of a short story. But then again you have to wait patiently to peel off all the layering of digressions to get to the core of the story. A young primary school student day-dreams in panels, each one of them described in vivid details, and remains oblivious to a major crisis unfolding before his very eyes in his Civics class. But in retrospect what seems to affect him the most is not the memory of this one terrifying incident (of his teacher's supposed demonic possession) but the tragedy of surviving the day-to-day ennui of adult life.
I am probably not explaining this well but this short story seemed more like an exercize in story-telling than anything else since its metafictive qualities are way too obvious to be ignored.

3.5/5

I have just one bone to pick with this though - Sanjay Rabindranath is not a correct Indian name. Rabindranath is a name and not a surname(as per my knowledge). And I'm a little disappointed with Wallace for creating another stereotypical Indian character, albeit an unimportant one. (Not EVERY Indian boy is a nerd with glasses who likes nothing better than studying. Humph!)

Incarnations of Burned Children

This story came as a pleasant shock. It displays Wallace's incredible range as a writer. It is lyrical, agonizing, has some of his most exquisite prose (sans the insane detailing and abhorrent barrage of tough sounding words) and deals with a theme like parenthood which is so not your typical Wallace subject.
This is hands down my favorite story of the lot and worth being read and re-read.

5/5

Another Pioneer

A wonderful parable rife with symbolism and allusions to human foibles, but half concealed behind a mountain of Latin phrases and incomprehensible words which put my Kindle dictionary to shame.
I am going to make a list of the words here just to give the prospective reader an idea -

thanatophilic
puericratic
oneirically
epitatic
peripeteiac
paenistic
thanatotic
phlogistive
extrorse
.....and so on

(oh look even GR spellcheck thinks these words do not exist)

4/5

Good Old Neon

A semi (or wholly?) autobiographical story which reminded me of Wallace's suicide again and again. I loved the protagonist's voice (even though he is kind of a douche, really) and not even once did his ramblings bother me here, which goes to show how deftly Wallace handled the narration.
The ending left me spell-bound.

5/5

Oblivion

A brilliant short story revolving around the dynamics of human relationships which appear to be normal on the surface but reveal complexities just beneath it and inter-familial troubles. But again this contains a generous sprinkling of unheard of words which are precisely there to make you feel a little stupid. But I almost did not mind.
This one has a bit of a cliched ending.

4/5

The Suffering Channel

By far the longest short story of the lot and this could also qualify as a novella. From what I could glean from this, it appears to be DFW's attempt at parodying the inner workings of media houses and revealing that thin line separating 'actual' news from pure bullshit being relayed under the pseudonym of news. Also you can take the word 'shit' literally here.
(Don't get what I mean? Read the damn book.)

4/5

(I have left out reviewing one story here because that did not make much of an impression on me.)

After finishing this book, I am experiencing a mad urge to laugh loudly at the burst of pride I felt for my own vocabulary at one point of time.
Reading DFW is a tiresome experience but it is also immensely rewarding and I simply cannot wait to learn more from him now.


P.S.:- A big thank you to Garima for linking me to DFW's now stuff-of-legends Kenyon commencement address. A reading of that speech full of amazing new insights helped dispel some of the negative sentiments I seemed to have developed in the earlier stage of my acquaintance with Wallace's writing.

http://www.diavazontas.blogspot.gr/20...

"The heir apparent to Thomas Pynchon*", λέει η κριτική των Times στο πίσω μέρος του paperback που έχω στα χέρια μου. Κι αν και οι γνώσεις μου για τον Pynchon είναι πολύ περιορισμένες, μιας και οι πρόσφατες προσπάθειες μου με το «Ουράνιο τόξο της βαρύτητας» δεν ξεπέρασαν ποτέ την 50η σελίδα, νιώθω πως ο κριτικός των Times έχει τα δίκια του. Μιλάμε κι εδώ για μια γραφή δύσκολη και συνειρμική, που καθώς προχωρά βυθίζεται στις λεπτομέρειες, με μια αίσθηση σπιράλ που μαζεύεται αντί να απλώνεται για να φτάσεις στο κέντρο, ένα κέντρο που δεν είναι σχεδόν ποτέ το αναμενόμενο.
Στις ιστορίες που περικλείονται στο “Oblivion” ξεπηδούν θέματα όπως η ζωή και ο θάνατος, οι βασικοί φόβοι και οι προσποιήσεις, το ψέμα στον ίδιο μας τον εαυτό για να αντέξει.

Η πρώτη ιστορία «Mr. Squishy» είναι ένα στριφνό σε πολλά σημεία κείμενο γεμάτο τεχνικές λεπτομέρειες, αφορά σε ένα γκρουπ «δοκιμαστών» για καινούργια προϊόντα που δοκιμάζει ένα σνακ σοκολάτας και τον μεσολαβητή της διαφημιστικής εταιρείας. Ταυτόχρονα, μια σκοτεινή φιγούρα προσπαθεί να αναρριχηθεί με βεντούζες στο κτίριο.

Στο «The soul is not a Smithy», ένα παιδί που ξέρει πολύ καλά να ονειροπολεί, μας εξηγεί πως μέσα από το χάζι στο παράθυρο εν ώρα μαθήματος, όπου εκτυλίσσονταν ένα σωρό ιστορίες, κατάφερε να καταλήξει όμηρος του καθηγητή του που παθαίνει ένα μικρό ψυχωτικό επεισόδιο.

Στο φρικιαστικό «Incarnations of burnt children» ένα νήπιο καίγεται με νερό από την κατσαρόλα κι οι γονείς του προσπαθούν να το βοηθήσουν.

Στο «Another Pioneer» ένα χαρισματικό παιδί γεννιέται σε μια άγρια φυλή. Στην αρχή η φυλή το βάζει σε ένα βάθρο και το ρωτά κι έτσι προοδεύουν όλοι μαζί. Μέχρι το παιδί να φτάσει στην έκρηξη της ήβης και να συνειδητοποιήσει πιο βαθιά πράγματα.

Το «Good old neon» είναι ο μονόλογος στον ψυχαναλυτή του ενός ανθρώπου που πιστεύει πως είναι μια απάτη, πως όλα στη ζωή του γίνονται για να καταφέρει να πείσει τους άλλους πως είναι καλός. Και το χειρότερο, πως συνήθως τα καταφέρνει.

Στο “Philosophy and the mirror of nature” ο αφηγητής μας εξηγεί πως δυο πλαστικές εγχειρίσεις άφησαν τη μάνα μου με μια έκφραση συνεχούς παγωμένου τρόμου στο πρόσωπο.

Το “Oblivion” αφορά σε έναν υπέρ το δέον αναλυτικό αφηγητή που μπαίνει σε ένα καυγά με την επί χρόνια γυναίκα του. Αυτή ισχυρίζεται πως ροχαλίζει, αυτός πως εκείνη το φαντάζεται όσο κοιμάται, ενώ ο ίδιος δεν έχει καταφέρει ακόμα να κοιμηθεί.

Και τέλος «The suffering channel”, όπου ένας δημοσιογράφος σε ένα περιοδικό στυλ, ανακαλύπτει έναν τύπο που μπορεί με τα σκατά του να φτιάχνει έργα τέχνης. Και την πεινασμένη για δημοσιότητα γυναίκα του.

Δεν θα προσποιηθώ πως το ταξίδι στις ιστορίες του Wallace ήταν εύκολο. Το βράδυ που διάβασα την ιστορία με το νήπιο δεν κατάφερα να κοιμηθώ, συχνά θυσίασα το πρωινό μου γράψιμο για να διαβάσω την ώρα που έχω περισσότερη διαύγεια. Ούτε θα πω πως μου άρεσαν όλες. Η πρώτη ας πούμε με άφησε με μια γλυφή αίσθηση, σα να μου υποσχέθηκαν νερό κι έπειτα να με έκλεψαν και να με άφησαν διψασμένη. Όμως ο David Foster Wallace κατάφερε να μπει με ένα μόνο βιβλίο στο πάνθεο των συγγραφέων που με σημάδεψαν.


* Πώς ένας πεθαμένος είναι ο κληρονόμος ενός ζωντανού είναι άλλου παπά Ευαγγέλιο. Και μια ειρωνεία αντάξια και των δύο τους.

"Oblivion", David Foster Wallace, Abacus, 2004, pg.329


Υ.Γ. Στα ελληνικά μεταφράστηκε "Αμερικάνικη Λήθη", το αμερικάνικο του πράγματος ειλικρινά αδυνατώ να το κατανοήσω....

“Might there ever be any questions you yourself wish to ask?”

“Consciousness is nature’s nightmare"

In the first two short stories DFW gave voice to the consequences born from living in the pressure cooker of boredom and routine. Following that was the theme of self-awareness and the powers it gives us along with the suffering that follows.

---

Challenges throughout the book ranged from having to keep track of three or more story lines at once to dealing with names like Ellen Bactrain. Is it pronounced Bass-Train or Back-train? (For the first half of the story I was pronouncing it Bacitracin like the ointment) Every time she was mentioned it was by her full name and that kept tripping me up. I’m convinced DFW did this on purpose to troll his readers.

“The American experience…the paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities.

The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance…this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance…it was everywhere, at the root of everything—of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular…it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with inchoate awareness that untold millions of people felt the same way—and that the celebrities themselves did not.”

‘The management of insignificance’ and the behaviors which grow from it was something I always thought about but could never verbalize so eloquently. He should’ve added Road Rage to that list.

Great book: 4.5 stars rounded up.

If nothing else, this book really made me think. Maybe even over-think. This book invites it. There is a lot to mull over in each of these stories, and DFW is very rarely direct about anything, preferring to leave clues along the way.

I think it’s interesting that each story has its own specific vocabulary and/or verbal tics from Mister Squishy's ad agency lingo to Oblivion’s strange use of latin/pace/'air-quotes' to Suffering Channel’s magazine-speak; it’s almost as if the characters in one story would find it impossible to cross over and talk with the characters of any other story--they live in a modern/urban world that is also strangely provincial, where everybody is cut off from everybody else because of the level of specialization and in-your-own-headedness.

The only other thing I can say about this book as a collection is that DFW is very much concerned with the demoralizing aspects of modern society--from corporate culture’s obliteration of the personal (Mr. Squishy) to the reality-show aspect of pop culture and the vulture-like commercialization of every inch of genuine human feeling (Suffering Channel). What isn’t always consistent is how he sees a way out of this bleak view. In some stories I see brief moments of light, of transcendence despite the conditions, but mostly I feel oppressed and saddened by it. Not that DFW really has to provide solutions, but I wonder if he really did provide glimpses of ‘the answer’ but that it is so hidden in the complexities of each story that I have not been able to see it. These stories are filled with so much minutiae that it seems entirely too easy to just be buried by that alone, which is also similar to the lives many of these characters lead. They don’t reflect often because they are not allowed to. They are drowning in their own set of strange, often trivial particulars, and given no time to reflect.

My apologies ahead of time for the amount of detail (on a story-by-story basis) that I’ve included. It goes almost without saying that SPOILERS is the name of the game from here on out, so consider yourself warned. Here goes:

Mister Squishy 5/5: this story totally won me over. The way DFW progresses his story so organically as to be unnoticeable and the way he understands so clearly the sadness (and inherently, the dark humor also) of the inner workings of the modern corporate machine just devastates me. I have a friend who tells me of her days at work which reminds me of some of the passages in here (p44-45 in my hardback copy) and make me doubly glad that I work for the public library, and not the private sector. Just this whole thing about turning numbers around and not really doing anything concrete but fudging it so that it appears to be what the client wants... but work is work, right? no, it has consequences on a personal level: we see this corporate mentality affect the main character’s inner psyche: his current feeling of helplessness and disillusionment is contrasted with his younger self’s feeling of becoming someone important and making a change; this all really resonates but by resonates I mean devastates me. The story’s conclusion was so ambiguous that I still wasn’t sure what I was to make of certain things #1. who is the first person “I” character that pops up only twice that I can remember (once in a footnote) and #2 what exactly was the man scaling the skyscraper doing, (although later he inflates with a mask on, so I am guessing maybe he is the mr. squishy mascot? with an m-16?) and #3 the stuff about the two different types of poison that can be injected into the cakes... I suspect all of these things have something to do with manipulating the faciliators, but I’m not sure exactly the details, which is fine by me, but really makes me wonder if I’m a particularly dim reader or if it was meant to be ambiguous.

The Soul is Not a Smithy 4/5: have you ever tried to read a short story and not think of it as a short story, but as a novel? It usually doesn’t work, because a short story is like an arrow traveling to its destination, very one-minded, distilling a moment in time... it’s pretty easy to tell from a few pages whether it’s from a short story or from a novel, usually, just by the way it is written and how the narrative unfolds. But DFW manages to make stories that read like novels, with endless digressions and parallel elements working at the same time. Also novel-like is the mutliple level of meanings you can put onto it. On the literal level it is a horrific event that happened in a classroom. But what is the story really about?

One thing that was funny/odd was how shocked I became at the story within the story: the one the narrator was making up in his daydreams. I found myself being horrified by it and then I caught myself thinking “it’s okay, it’s just a story this kid daydreamed, it’s not even real.” then I caught myself thinking “wait a minute, NONE of this is real, even this kid is made up, in a story by DFW”. It was a very subtle way to be meta, I think, and one of the few times when some kinda ‘meta’ device by an author didn’t feel heavy handed, (though I’m not even sure if it’s a device, as that implies intention, whereas here it just feels like something weird I felt when I read it) partly because it arrives so organically. So on one level, I think this story is about the idea of fictions... this daydream and the movie (The Exorcist, interesting choice considering the idea that the substitute teacher in the real story seems to be possessed) happening side by side, and later: the narrator’s Kafka-esque nightmares about adult life based on his father’s ennui.

Secondly, I think the story is about adult life more than about a child’s life, as the narrator is already grown up and is retelling it from memory: also the details about the father and the parents in the daydream provide such a complete picture of adult frustration, so that the incomprehensible event of the substitute teacher’s behavior (even though it is never explained or given the empathy of a backstory into the substitute teacher’s inner life) seems to be totally understandable by conjecture. I feel like DFW is constantly revolving around the theme that modern life, with all its conveniences, makes the practical problems of being alive and staying alive increasingly easy, but makes feeling alive increasingly difficult. Emotionally, spiritually, we are demoralized, made to act like machines, our passions, individuality, quirks ignored or pushed to the background as distractions or, worse, undesirable traits.

That said, I did have a small problem with this story in that I had a hard time believing a 9 year old boy, however observant he is about his father’s somber behavior at home, can come up with such a Kafka-esque vision of bureaucracy without ever having visited his father’s workplace or having any frame of reference in the adult world. The terror of this world being something completely foreign to children (I believe) makes it seem all the more out of place, and because the story of the father is so central to the big message of the story, I felt it was less subtle, less organic than I expected it to be, especially since the first story was developed so organically. Then again, it really is a small flaw, not even a flaw in the story perhaps, but maybe a flaw in my ability to believe in the power of the subconscious mind of a 9 year old. Like any good novel, this short story leaves me with questions: 1. what is this story’s relationship to the future grown-up adult lives of the pupils, referenced throughout, particularly the armed services 2. why does DFW choose to end on a less-than-climactic passage, essentially about a school play, was it to make you feel like things are going back to normal in the school? 3. or was it to slyly name-drop Ruth Simmons in the last paragraph thus making you wonder if the daydream was real or not; also, wtf? this seems like a cheap move...

Incarnations of Burned Children 3/5: very short, intense; escalating language; made me breathe faster.

Another Pioneer 3/5: In the beginning you have art that mirrored reality, taking as its goal to reproduce likenesses in a literal sense. Science also believed in absolute answers, with Newton’s formulas supposedly being able to be drawn out into infinity to predict anything so far as we had the formula and the computational power. But ah, Modernism comes along and now instead of straight answers we have questions, we have doubt, we have art that tries to attack the viewer’s own assumptions. We have discursive rants (a la DFW). We have stories with ambiguous endings. Likewise in science we know that there are things we cannot know. We know that an electron can seemingly be at two places at the same time. Chaos theory tells us that it is impossible to predict things past a certain level. Is this story an allegory for modernism? It’s a fun allegory, and it was enjoyable beyond an intellectual exercise. But it didn’t go far beyond that enjoyable-ness into a kind of emotional connection as some of the other stories in this collection do.

Good Old Neon 2/5: This story didn’t work for me, mostly because I found the voice annoying (and perhaps it was intentionally so). But it didn’t help that I’ve thought most of these same thoughts before, so it made me annoyed with myself (or that part of myself), most of all. I think everyone probably has these thoughts to some level, i.e. am I a fraud? It comes out of not only life being hard but also out of our increasingly web 2.0 sharing your life/everything is a performance/appearances count more than what’s actually there/what should I write in the ABOUT ME section of my profile?/oh, i’m gonna give this book 4 stars so everyone will think I ‘get’ DFW but then I’m gonna say I hate people who jump on the DFW bandwagon therefore people will think I’m smarter than the average DFW fanboy. I really don’t think like this as often as the narrator of the story, but there is an element of it that is unavoidable for me, being an innate overthinker living in the year 2011.

I find that thinking about it just makes me more crazy though, it’s SO CIRCULAR. So should I think about it more, in the hopes of figuring out a way out of it? The whole problem, though, is overthinking, so thinking about overthinking is only going to compound the problem. The opposite problem: ignoring it, isn’t going to work either because then it could come out unexpectedly and devastate you. Perhaps the answer is to acknowledge that it’s true, that appearances are a huge part of your life, and that despite this, it does not make you a complete fraud, and that everybody feels like a fraud, and that perhaps just keeping up appearances will somehow make the act itself genuine, not completely genuine (what is?), but something within the doing or the intending to do. You just have to trust yourself, that you are capable of being genuine despite what any of the crazy thoughts in your head lead you to believe; it comes down to self esteem.

I’m not sure how much this applies to anyone else, especially for a case like the narrator in this story, who seems to be concerned with appearances to an exponentially scary degree (it seemed a little overexagerated). Another thing: this story doesn’t seem to go anywhere, the problem is defined, and then it is defined some more, etc. etc. until he kills himself. I feel like I could’ve written this story, given the nature of the narrator’s problem and how I’ve thought about all this before. It didn’t really provide any new insight for me.

As for the meta quality at the end, I’m not sure what to think, other than maybe it was a stab at providing hope at the end of the story: that hope being that some brilliant writer out there named David Wallace (if he hadn’t killed himself yet) would be capable of supreme empathy, at a level which makes it able for him to inhabit the mind of someone hopeless and see things from that bleak perspective=that there is still genuine empathy out in the world. But perhaps it is DFW showing us how empathetic he is that is the problem, perhaps it is DFW’s own wish to convince us, the readers, of how empathetic he is that is a mirror to the narrator’s own problems, and perhaps this is why DFW ended up killing himself in the end also. I don’t really believe this, (the thinking in this story is too simplistic for DFW to have followed himself when he killed himself, and also, I don’t believe he would write this story if it was really himself, it seems too personal) but this is the kind of conclusion overthinking leads to.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 2/5: I’m not sure what this story is about. I might have to read it again. It seems like he is doing what he does in other stories like Mister Squishy where he alternates between several different storylines within the same paragraph, so that the current sentence may have nothing to do with the last one. But whereas the other stories made sense, this strategy seems to lead to confusion in this particular case. I did, however, find the mother whose face was plastic surgeried into a constant state of shock to be both hilarious and somewhat poignant.

Oblivion 2/5: wha? really? I thought DFW was ‘above’ the whole ‘it-was-all-a-dream’ sham ‘ending’ so popular with Creative Writing 101 students or perhaps he thought this was ‘acceptable’ in this case because the ‘story’ was explicitly about sleep, so the conceit/form was justified by how it folded back into the ‘content’ of the story, but no, just no. I thought about the possible ‘excuses’ that would make this shit-move alright but it still didn’t work for me, it was awful and quite tacky. The story before the shit-ending was alright although at times its tedium and repetitiveness reminded me of a less funny and more ‘boring’ Bernhard. I wonder if DFW read Bernhard or what he thought of him. That asshole’s influence was far-reaching, man.

The Suffering Channel 3.5/5: Perhaps it was appropriate that, while I was reading this story in my backyard one sunny day, I was suddenly shat on by a bird. The shit hit my left shoulder and it was the first time I had ever been bird-shat on. This story is about shit, but beyond that, it is about (I think) art, commercialization of art, suffering (of course), and spectacle... the spectacle of art and the spectacle of suffering, both. It is also interesting that the story was set in the WTC a few months before 9/11. It’s almost like that Chekhov saying about the gun in the first act... You can see the shadows of the planes looming over this story, but it is never explicitly written into the story, just implied.

The last line of this story (and also of this book) should warrant further attention. Let’s set the scene here first. They are trying to film an ‘artist’ while he shits. They, being the media (for all intents and purposes). One camera is on his face and one is coming up from under him to show his shit as it emerges (he is a shit-artist, in that shit comes out of him fully formed as sculptural art). Furthermore, the artist is set up so that he will be watching the live-feed of his own shit as it comes out, hopefully in the form of n  Winged Victory of Samothracen. Here is the sentence:

There’s some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare--the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.

There is so much packed in here, so much... dare I say it: Symbolism! Strangely enough, DFW uses symbolism, but it is so fucked up you’re not sure what it represents and how it works together exactly. We have the artist caught between these two, in-essence, mirrors. We have the artist’s work which is either shit or a masterpiece (Victory!). Or both! We have a feedback loop between the camera and the monitor, which is essentially a not-so-veiled reference to self-reference. Self-reference being both a writing trick/device DFW (the artist, in this case) uses often as well as the basis of our whole conception of ourselves (I Am a Strange Loop). The former is sometimes a cynical, self-defeating, downward spiral (as in the story ‘Good Old Neon’ in this collection) whereas the latter is often seen as a searing and amorphous light known as consciousness.

I feel pretty sheepish about liking DFW's work as much as I do. He is a terrible role model, yet still used as one by many young, white men such as myself. It seems that he did things in his personal life that are, on balance, unredeemable through his work. There's a decently-sized group of people who idolize him and are correspondingly self-absorbed, vacuous and obnoxious, three things I aspire not to be.

With that being said, I hope I have untangled art and artist sufficiently in my own mind to judge his work on its standalone merits, and leave the social context of its author to one side. And I must say, it's monumentally meritorious.

The stories are hilarious, humbling and haunting. They uncover the worst parts of human nature, occasionally highlighting their absurdity, but more frequently forcing readers to confront aspects of modern society they'd surely rather keep out of sight and out of mind. Of course, they will make you think - but they will hurt you too. The name of the collection is entirely appropriate, as the author explores some of the various different flavours of oblivion that are on offer to us all. A masterpiece.

Emetic, thanatophilic and fucking entyposiastic.

Al di là che sia un indiscutibile fuoriclasse, non ho ancora chiaro qual è il mio rapporto con Wallace. Comunque, per quanto letto finora (non molto), questo è senza dubbi il mio preferito. Alla fine mi rimane la sensazione che andrebbe tutto riletto per dare coordinate più chiare a questa sovrabbondanza minuziosa di descrizioni, all’iperrealismo spinto, agli strati di divagazioni. Peccato l’ultimo racconto, una mattonata di 100 pagine di noia notevole.
Impegnativo.

[78/100]

Mister Squishy ★★★★
L’anima non è una fucina ★★★★★
Incarnazioni di bambini bruciati ★★★★
Un altro pioniere ★★★
Caro vecchio neon ★★★★
La filosofia e lo specchio della natura ★★
Oblio ★★★★★
Il canale del dolore ★★

In dialectic fashion, both a step forward from Brief Interviews, since DFW here got rid from most (most) of the linguistic showing-off which marred quite a few of the stories from that otherwise remarkable collection, and a step back, since he then began to show off by playing with millenia-honed readerly expectations regarding tension and resolution in narrative, this being, as far I as could see, this book's main point of existence (figure DFW would maybe write raison d'être, never backing away neither from non-English expressions, be them in Latin or even, look at that, an entire sentence in Portuguese a few paragraphs away from the end of the book, nor from long, conspicuous parenthetical insertions like this very one).

It was an infinitely frustrating experience to see him toying again and again with what us, banal readers, await on our stories, not mattering their language, country of origin or time of writing: empathetic transportation and that nice, gut-warming feeling of being torn away by whatever sentiment the author is willing to wallow in, it all hopefully being wrapped in some neat and sublime way (see: Chekhov, Joyce, Maupassant, Machado, Bolaño, etc). Since DFW obviously knew something about fiction which me and you do not and will probably never know, in almost every single story here he instead opted for side exits, non-finishes, unresolved conflicts and other military-graded paraphernalia perfect for inducing confusion and varied levels of rage on the bewildered reader, an exception maybe being the circa-El Aleph-Borges-inflected-but-with-a-DFW-flavor-of-its-own story Another Pioneer, not coincidentally my favorite one in the collection.

Figure 5 stars for sheer intelligence and imagination averaged with 3 stars for deliberate inconclusiveness throughout the book.

Now ducking for the incoming Infinite Jest meteor which will, any unforeseen calamity notwithstanding, fall on my head sometime later this year.

Lo que está claro es que los libros de David Foster Wallace, o te gustan o no te gustan. Personalmente, prefiero cuando le da más importancia al fondo de la historia, que a la forma de contarla. Cuando no me gusta es cuando experimenta. En este sentido, 'Extinción' es el libro que más me ha gustado por ahora de DFW.

La característica más destacable de la escritura de DFW no es su calidad literaria, que la tiene y mucha, ni las historias que cuenta, que son magníficas, todo un prodigio de imaginación, agudeza y erudición; lo que destaca por encima de todo es su visión del mundo, su inteligencia a la hora de abrirnos los ojos a la realidad que nos rodea. Su ojo, su mente, es como un bisturí con el cual disecciona todo lo que cae bajo su punto de observación. DFW narra como si tuviera un zoom, está contándote una historia, para a continuación pasar a otro sub-tema, y a continuación a otro sub-sub-tema, todo ello con la máxima minuciosidad. No se trata de historias dentro de historias, como hace Paul Auster. Lo que desea hacer DFW es contarnos la historia abarcando todos los puntos de vista y con todos los detalles posibles, utilizando para ello estadísticas, Historia, matemáticas, física, etc., pero siempre con unas dosis de observación extraordinarias. Creo que DFW sacaría un buen relato hasta del prospecto de un medicamento.

Esta manera de narrar tan singular puede dejarte exhausto en algunos momentos (desde luego, no se trata de una lectura de metro), pero merece la pena no rendirse y seguir leyendo porque al acabar de leer el relato te das cuenta de la profundidad de DFW como escritor y persona. Su prosa puede parecer aséptica hasta cierto punto, sobre todo cuando entra en algunos detalles, pero es sólo una sensación superficial. A un nivel más profundo llegas a conocer tan íntimamente a los personajes que deseas seguir acompañándolos en sus tribulaciones.

Otro detalle a destacar de las historias de DFW es que no tienen ni principio ni final. Al término de sus relatos, da la impresión de que prodría seguir y seguir ad infinitum. DFW quería abarcar la vida entera de los personajes. Quizá me guste DFW como también me gusta la música minimalista, con la que pienso tiene similitudes. Una composición de Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Wim Mertens o Michael Nyman, tiene la misma estructura que un relato de DFW. Empieza con fuerza, no posee aparentemente melodía y termina abruptamente, pero te mantiene en un estado hipnótico durante unos minutos. La prosa de DFW es igual, con esos párrafos interminables, al estilo de Marcel Proust o Thomas Bernhard, que te mantienen pegado a sus páginas, hasta que de repente se acaban, casi como si fuesen una partitura porque poseen una musicalidad propia.

Estos son los ocho relatos contenidos en 'Extinción':

- Señor Blandito. (***) Un Grupo de Discusión está realizando unos test para el lanzamiento de un nuevo producto, un pastelido de nombre "¡Delitos!" Se trata de una terrible crítica a los medios publicitarios. El relato más duro de leer del libro, con el que hay que armarse de paciencia porque cuando llevas leídas unas páginas, todo encaja.

- El alma no es una forja. (*****) El protagonista nos cuenta el trauma que sufrieron tanto él como sus compañeros en la clase de Educación Cívica cuando eran niños, al mismo tiempo que recuerda las fantasías que se inventaba en clase, y cómo trata de entender la vida que llevó su padre durante esos años. Un relato maravilloso, una obra maestra. Sólo por este cuento merece la pena leer este libro.

- Encarnaciones de niños quemados. (****) En apenas tres páginas, el autor nos muestra un hecho puntual y trascendente en la vida de una familia.

- Otro pionero. (****) El protagonista recuerda una historia que le contó un amigo de un amigo que iba en un vuelo y que escuchó por casualidad. Se trata de una fábula sobre un niño que nació en una tribu paleolítica capaz de responder cualquier pregunta.

- El neón de siempre. (*****) El protagonista nos quiere explicar como todo su vida es un fraude. Otra muestra de la genialidad de DFW.

- La filosofía y el espejo de la naturaleza. (***) La madre del protagonista, el cual acaba de salir de prisión, está en juicios con unos cirujanos plásticos que le destrozaron la cara. Relato de humor negro con muy mala leche.

- Extinción. (****) Historia de un matrimonio, contada desde el punto de vista del marido, que pasa por un mal momento debido a los supuestos ronquidos de él. Gran relato, cuyo final me dejó francamente perturbado.

- El canal del sufrimiento. (***) Skip Atwater anda tras un personaje que podría darle el siguiente artículo en la revista para la que trabaja. Se trata de un "escultor" que "realiza" unas "figuritas" bastante curiosas. Otra crítica feroz, esta vez a la prensa amarillista y de cotilleo, pero también al mundo del arte, porque ¿quién tiene la potestad para decidir lo que es o no es arte? No cabe duda de que el sentido del humor de DFW era un poco especial.

One of the most interesting things happening in American literature is the degree to which writers are getting inside the language and really making it work. With David Foster Wallace, you feel as if every punctuation mark, every comma, is fine tuned and well-honed.

Yep, you buy this book for the language. It is the only comfort you will get from this series of bleak tales about the futility of existence for the average man in the American street; the futility of resistance, the eternal bleakness of the average life.

So no, you don't buy it for the tale, there is nothing 'feel good' about these misanthropic tales - although they are so well crafted that there is something intriguingly satisfying about reading them. And I object to the comparisons with Don DeLillo - yes, the subject matter is similar, but Don DeLillo makes the epic out of the mundane, taking your breath away with his observations. David Foster Wallace is the opposite - his work is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, disturbing.

Intrigued?

After I finished reading it a few years ago, this book did not make me sad. Or at least, it made me sad in the way that we like art to make us sad; where we allow ourselves to mistake sadness for poignancy, peaking a flashlight into our dark bits through someone else's work. Now? I don't know how I could re-read this and not feel incredibly saddened. DFW was my favorite living author, just a raging cyclone of genius tearing his way through the short story and laughing (literally?) off the idea of the novel with 1200ish pages of infinite jesting. It always seems like suicide should change the way we read an authors' work, though I don't really know that I believe that. The list of incredible artists who pull a Felo de se is pretty long, and I'll note that Virginia Woolf, who is also one of my favorite authors, went this route as well, though she was older than DFW (59 as opposed to 46, if that makes a difference).

So maybe in 20 years it will make less of a difference than it seems like it does or should now ... but for right now, there's still an odd sting in considering these stories. Certainly "Good Old Neon", which is told uncomfortably close to the view of the author, and recounts the suicide of someone who considered himself a fraud and drove into a bridge abutment, rings more sharply. It contains the line, "The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever." DFW does not often use plain & unadorned sentences, and when he does, it is with the sense of having dug them up from layers and layers of compacted silt and earth.

Pretty much everything in this collection is terrific: the opening story ("Mister Squishy") is actually the most trying, in terms of long-winded DFW-isms (exasperating run-on sentences, asides that seem to go nowhere, slow burns that may or may not lead to anything), but the effect of reading it to its last lines was, for me, one of extreme vertigo. The story "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" is abjectly terrifying, in my opinion -- that's all I'll say about it. The title story, meanwhile, has a curious trap to it: It almost absolutely NEEDS to be read twice to be fully comprehended, however after reading it the first time you sense that reading it the second time will be like deliberately pounding yourself in the knuckles with a hammer. Then, you read it again anyway, because you have to know. I also cannot speak highly enough of the story that closes the book (and, in a very morbid way, DFW's fiction career), which contains a last line (I am fond of last lines, I can't help it) that widens one's eyes like saucers to read. Spoiler alert, of sorts, if you want to save it: "...the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light."

But my two favorite stories are, by far, "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and "Another Pioneer." In the former, we are told intertwining narratives about an autistic/savant (there's no accurate diagnosis for the narrator, though he does strongly recall Hal from Infinite Jest) child's recollection, told by himself as a normal-seeming adult, of a horrific classroom event from his youth & the strange imagination-land he had invented to go along with it; this is coupled with his recollections of his father. No one splices realities like DFW, and he is at home with his subject matter here: how fathers and sons understand each other is his domain, as examined through the lens of the preternaturally neurotic & talented. It is so incredibly imaginative that we forget that it must be achingly autobiographical -- but anyway, I've always deplored autobiographical readings of works, even from authors who make it their trade. Plus the story makes me cry every time I read it, a fine piece of evidence against those who have argued DFW's work is purely an intellectual exercise.

While "Soul is Not a Smithy" is probably my emotional favorite, "Another Pioneer" may be one of the most profoundly mystical things DFW has written -- like Castaneda by way of Kafka and Borges by way of Derrida, or some combination thereof. I don't want to say much about the plot here, it's too odd to describe, but if we play the "if you only read one story from this collection" game ... well, fuck that, let's not play that game, I don't like it. So: "Another Pioneer" has, in a very clever way, the narrative structure of "Heart of Darkness": a story within a story that is overheard by someone else (in this case on an airplane, instead of a boat) and then relayed to the reader. These layers & distances highlight what DFW has always understood intrinsically in his writing: that a body is as big as it can be drawn; that a tribe in the jungle represents the totality of a single human consciousness, as do the Tennis Academy and halfway house in Infinite Jest, and the rebellions and triumphs of those bodies are an exacting reflection/refraction of any individual human soul. Wham! -- mystical.

Also: the story here is that all borders are fuzzy, flammable, and imperfect; they polarize when we need them open and open when we try to close ranks. One reckons this leaves the soul perpetually vulnerable as we saw back and forth between these extremes; DFW charts the motives & velocities of these motions, back and forth over our most vulnerable places, way past rawness, with a skill that is quite literally dizzying.

This sense of vertigo is like a drug experience, I only know of a few authors who can do it to the point as to render psychotropics absolutely unnecessary -- Georges Bataille in "the Impossible" comes to mind, so does Woolf's "To the Lighthouse", and so does DFW at his best, which he is at in this collection. I don't mean to say that they're the only psychotropic-feeling authors, and of course it's a relative experience & everyone has their own mind-blowing books: but I'm not just talking about psychedelic writing, even in the way a champion like Borges can do it -- I'm talking about language so dense and involved that if we follow it closely enough, it physically pulls us in several directions at once, before uncoiling & releasing us into something else entirely.

I realize how hyperbolic my praise is in a lot of the reviews I've posted here. It's because, for the most part, I only review the stuff I have an insane & fierce love for, so phrases like "devastating" and "harrowing" and "best most favorite ever!!!" see a lot of employment. A friend teased me (fairly) that basically all my reviews are 4 or 5 stars. That possibly makes it hard to communicate when something is truly vital.

I will say that this is a fairly difficult DFW book, especially as an introduction, although of course I could be wrong. Traditionally, 'Girl With Curious Hair' is probably the best introduction to DFW, at least to his fiction. (Curiously, I have found that some people know DFW entirely through his non-fiction, of which I haven't read nearly as much: but if nothing else, I can heartily recommend his essay on why Kafka is funny). At any rate, I adore 'Infinite Jest', & of course 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men' --- but it is worth noting that 'Oblivion', in the most devastating & harrowing sense of the term, lives up to its title.

گاهی از کتابی چنین خوشت می‌آید که می‌ترسی؛ از این خلع‌سلاح شدن در برابرش و ناتوانی در نقد.
یک دلیلی که از روانشناسی (و کتاب‌هایی که به هر نحوی به آن مربوط می‌شوند) همیشه دوری می‌کنم، این است که مباحث را چنان ساده‌سازی می‌کند که مخاطب --که حرف باب‌میلش را شنیده (ولی نه لزوما گزاره‌ای صحیح را)--، تصور می‌کند همه‌ی حقیقت این‌جاست. انگار راه‌حل همه‌ی مشکلات انسان و درونیات و برونیات نزد این رشته است.
بنظرم رسید که دلیل جذب شدنم (و ترس همزمانم) از داستان اول به همین دلیل بود. این‌که فاستر والاس بقدری هنرمندانه قضیه را (انسانِ ریاکاری که بر ریاکاری‌اش واقف است) باز می‌کند که نمی‌شود در برابرش هیچ سخنی گفت!

کتاب ترجمه‌ی 4 داستان از 8 داستانِ مجموعه‌‌ی زیر است:
Oblivion
احتمالا بروم بقیه‌ی داستان‌ها را از از کتاب اصلی بخوانم. همین حرکت هم خوب است؛ که وقتی داستان‌ها قابل ترجمه نیستند، مترجم به قیمت شرحه‌شرحه کردن کتاب، دل مخاطب را خوش نکند.

3.5/5