in rilettura

Oh boy. Oh man, do I have a lot to say about this here book. I can't even begin to tackle it as a whole entity, so I'm going to do a review of each story, unless I get tired and have to smoosh.

Also: I am the kind of person who listens to all my music on shuffle, which means I clearly have no respect for the artist's conception of a complete work. Consequently I read these stories totally out of order, and will review them the same way.

"The Suffering Channel" and "Mister Squishy"
I think these are examples of DFW at nearly his best. They're certainly typifications of what I think of when I think of him. These long twisty stories with a fairly simple (though unique) plot, constellated with exhaustively depicted characters—to the point, sometimes, that it seems like the sort of pre-writing exercise you're taught to do in a creative writing class, where you jot down every single thing you can think of about your characters, from their appearance to their education to their mannerisms to their innermost fears and desires. Of course, those exercises are typically meant to be reference points only, a tool to help the writer really know his characters, so that they can be rendered more real on the page. But pff, DFW doesn't—didn't, oh god, pain in my heart—follow rules like that. Another rule he doesn't follow? The normal flow and rhythm of a story. Even pomo or trickerish authors tend to do things like group similar ideas or moments into the same paragraph, but not DFW. No, his stories (or his stories of the type exemplified by these two) have dense paragraphs that cover everything at once, with the interior monologue of one character tripping over a physical description of another character which is then pushed up next to the action the first was contemplating making a few pages ago. I want to make a metaphor about balls (ha), like juggling, but it's not like juggling, it's more like shuffling, like each part of the story is one suit in a deck, and he just swishes them all together so that everything is on top of something else, and you have to, um, count fucking cards or something, or anyway work really hard to keep each running narrative in your head so you know whom he means each time he says "she" because, following the logical sentence structure, it does not refer to the person it ought to refer to. Gosh, did I manage to make that sentence as confusing as the thing I'm trying to explain? Maybe I should have said that DFW at his best claws his way into your brain and makes you think and write and sometimes even talk like him, which is amazing and thrilling and a little bit awful.

I should also have said that "The Suffering Channel" is a brilliant excuse to have a whole slew of different characters have long, involved conversations about shit and shitting and playing with shit and caring for shit and preserving shit and making art out of shit—all while maintaining his aura of brilliance and scholarly aplomb. And I know there's nothing new under the sun etc etc, but I would bet a large amount of money that no one ever, in the history of the world, has used the phrase "intracunnilingual flatus vignette" before. These two stories each get high B+, and for a lesser author would be the top of his achievements. (See "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and "Good Old Neon" for why DFW, of course, can do even better.)

"Incarnations of Burned Children"
As MJ promised in the comments below, this story is fist-chewingly great. And devastating. In fact, this might be DFW at his best, but that's hard to claim, since it's so unlike what he usually does. It's short, it's too the point, it's sharply poetic, it's emotionally raw, it's essentially free of character description or background or intellectualizing. It's a short sharp stunning burst of beautiful horror.

"Another Pioneer"
This story was too much on the over-intellectualization. It's kind of what you'd expect from DFW telling you a fable, I guess, reinterpreted through his ridiculous brain and spat out by a weird narrator, shot through with obtuse Latin phrases and rendered much less moving by being made so so writerly. Stories like this are why the haters hate DFW.

"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "Oblivion"
These stories can suck a dick. Lest you think I am just a mindless DFW fluffer, I want to stress that he can absolutely be just insufferable at times, which is why I always give his books the "too smart for their own good" tag. "Oblivion" in particular just made me furious, written as it is in this incredibly stilted style, with all kinds of "words" put in unnecessarily "quotation marks," as if the narrator were some kind of alien or moron who had never been in polite society. Which he wasn't. It was just a story about a dude who was having weird trouble with his wife, a story that should, in fact, have been a really interesting and engaging, involving sleep studies and intra-familial weirdness and strange manifestations of psychological trouble between long-married people after their kids leave home and the many, many layers of thought and self-doubt and self-assurance we use to fool ourselves and those we love. But he just fucking buried it all under this stupid conceit where everything was overexplained and mummified by weird constructions and stilted language and it was just awful. Ditto for "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." Fail.

"The Soul Is Not a Smithy"
Spectacular. Hands down the best story in the book, and the reason why DFW is a consummate motherfucking genius.

***I'm still not done with this review, dammit. I have obvs a lot more to say about that one, and I haven't even gotten to the utterly wrecking "Good Old Neon." Why can't I just spend my entire life writing book reviews? Can someone pay me a million dollars for that please??

David Foster Wallace is a literary stylist, and one can dislike his style without denying the fact that he is an outstanding writer. While reading Oblivion, my opinion of this style was constantly switching. Sometimes I was reading something brilliant, transcendent, which in both language and perspective captured perfectly and beautifully the essence of his subject. However the greater part of the experience was one of pure tedium. Wallace does like to go on and on and on, about every minute detail of subjects, which though often entertaining and while he clearly understands them intimately and is able to express himself very well, often does little to serve the narrative. This is especially evident in a collection of "short" stories (some of which are practically novellas). My intuition appears vindicated by the fact that Incarnations of Burned Children (which at barely three pages is by far the shortest story) is easily the most powerful story in the collection. If Wallace could have brought himself to edit his writing to be more direct and concise, I believe it could have been far greater**. Instead, Wallace tries to impress the reader with his knowledge, brilliance of prose and experimentalism: playing with punctuation, footnotes, nested brackets, repetition, use of phrases in different languages, extremely long sentences (which are completely unnecessary: a full-stop being easily substituted for a comma in many cases). All of these are clever and inventive and, I concede, are worthy of exploration in themselves, but on balance serve to diminish the writing - they are basically distractions that make the work less readable (punctuation being no more than a visual cue for a reader about when to pause, and sometimes whether a clause is dependent on or a digression from a previous clause). The prose is accomplished, and the stories here are on the whole excellent, but one has sift through a lot to get to get to the heart of the matter. I have not yet read Wallace's non-fiction, but I expect his style would be a lot more compelling in that genre. In fiction (especially short fiction!) it largely seems to miss the point.

**At this point I must acknowledge the ridiculousness of such a statement directed at one of the most highly-regarded writers of the late 20th century, as well as the irony of making this statement in a footnote, given what I go on to write in the next sentence.

2.5

Señor Blandito: No me gustó en absoluto. Creo que es el relato más pesado, insufrible y lento que he leído en mi vida. Admiro muchísimo la capacidad que tenía Wallace para analizar y describir hasta la más ínfima minucia; sin embargo, fue tanto lo que desmembró y analizó que mi voluntad para seguir pasando la página quedó gravemente herida. Pude terminarlo, pero el daño ya estaba hecho. No se lo recomiendo a nadie: un hastío interminable. (1.5/5).

El alma no es una forja: Me gustó. Es interesante el tema que trató el autor en este cuento: el miedo onírico; los tormentos internos y su poder dentro de nosotros. Principalmente, Wallace se centró en el temor a la rutina y al camino gris que nos transporta hacia la triste monotonía de la vida. (3/5)

Encarnaciones de niños quemados: Es de los mejores de este libro. Asimismo, es el más corto. Muy recomendable. (3.5/5)

Otro pionero: Es un cuento borgiano: se nota ostensiblemente la influencia de Borges. Tiene una inusitada cantidad de palabras que ignoro, sin embargo no llegó al punto de afectar mi comprensión del texto. A pesar de no tener diálogo, se lee rápido y engancha al instante. Me gustó. (3/5).

El neón de siempre: El mejor relato de este libro. Excelente. Es de esa clase de historias que dejan una cicatriz en nosotros; no se olvidan con la última oración leída. Se concentra en el suicidio y en la máscara que todos nos ponemos para agradar a los demás. El final le robó varios latidos a mi corazón. (4.5/5)

La paradoja de la fraudulencia consistía en que cuanto más tiempo y esfuerzo invertías en resultar impresionante o atractivo a los demás, menos impresionante o atractivo te sentías por dentro.

La filosofía y el espejo de la naturaleza: No me gustó. Un cuento sin sentido, del tipo de los que desaparecen de nuestras vidas a medida que vamos avanzando en su lectura. No le encontré nada de magia a este trabajo. Algo bueno que puedo rescatar es que no es tedioso. (2/5)

Extinción: Interesante, simplemente interesante. Wallace retrató a un matrimonio como cualquier otro, con sus sendos problemas relacionales. Al principio no sabía bien de qué iba, no obstante, conforme pasaban las páginas la luz se hacía presente. El final es bastante cliché. (3/5).

El canal del sufrimiento: Un hombre que hace esculturas con mierda. (2/5).

Read: April-May 2019
DNF at 33%

“People Prefer Electric Shock to Thinking: Study” was the way they put it in the New York Post only a few days ago. Whether these click- and tenure-bait studies are worth the time and energy it takes read about them is an excellent question, but assuming that this particular one is, the world reaction could probably be divided into two categories: non-readers of DF Wallace, and readers of same. The former may have snorted derisively, rolled their eyes, or lamented (silently or aloud) the state of the human condition today. The latter said to themselves: Oh, yeah, sure, of course they do. I've read about them already in Oblivion.

DFW's stories in this collection are largely about people suffering from a serious case of what my Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) is pleased to call “monkey brain”. (Others, perhaps attempting to avoid confusion with the material which is eaten out of a hollowed-out monkey's skull, have termed it “monkey mind”.) Whatever you call it, it's the largely modern experience of useless thoughts ricocheting rattling uncontrollably around your mind like beebees in a tin can.

Your reaction to these stories many depend on (1) whether you yourself are in possession of monkey brain, (b) whether you acknowledge same, (iii) whether you, in personal possession of monkey brain or not, feel that accurate depictions of this mental state are a worthwhile object of the writer's craft (and the reader's time).

Some readers may not like DFW's stories because they (the readers) are not in possession of monkey brain themselves, and lack the empathy, desire, or imagination (or some combination thereof) to project themselves into the minds that do. These people are not necessarily dummies or bad. Some people find it difficult or impossible to imagine mental states different from the ones they find themselves in. They see these states portrayed in fiction (or even in real life) and they just don't get them, just like, no matter how long your dog looks at the doorknob, he won't be able to figure out how to open it. He's not a bad dog. He just can't understand doorknobs.

However, your dog, even if he doesn't understand doorknobs, would not (because dogs are famously earnest and truthful) say (if he/she could talk) that they (the doorknobs) don't exist. However, those who are not in possession of monkey brain might, here at Goodreads and elsewhere, deny that anyone is in possession of the mental states portrayed in this book, and DFW's attempts to portray same are just a bag of post-modern tricks, useful only to impress the other members of the graduate writing program and fiction-publishing elite. They are wrong. Monkey brain exists.

Others may not like these stories because they are too familiar with these mental states. They don't want to read about them. They read books to get away from monkey brain, since a good book provides a few blessed moments escape from monkey brain, in my experience. At this point, LSW (a brainy chick) might invoke aristotelian poetics, which, if I'm understanding her correctly, would say that reading fictional portrayals of your deepest and most annoying mental states might lead you to a catharsis, which would do you a power of good, sort of like a colonic irrigation for the brain (not the most elegant image but I hope you get my drift). Just as many are skeptical about colonic irrigation, the potential benefits of reading about your most unpleasant mental states are lost on certain monkey-brainers.

I've been trying to maintain as light and pleasant a tone as I can muster until now, but of course the future suicide of DFW hangs over this book like a ugly spectre, and that's a serious business. Reviewers here at Goodreads and elsewhere have opined that this, DFW's last book before his death, was really a cry for help. (Try the following combination at Google yourself: “David Foster Wallace” Oblivion “cry for help”.) There is very little one can write on this topic without appearing, at best, a clueless nimrod, so I'll just come out and say that it's a damn shame there seems to be such a positive correlation between talent and madness.

It's generally considered to be a very shallow response to fiction when a person says “I identify with that” or “That felt just like my life” or something similar. Still, that's how I feel. In this case, if you enthuse too, uh, enthusiastically about how DFW captures a part of your lived experience uncaptured elsewhere, you also run the possibility that your friends might begin to worry about you and your mental health. Still, I'm going to say it: DFW, like Guinness, reaches the parts that others don't reach. If reading him is sometimes an obligation instead of a pleasure, it's only because he's making you think about yourself and others in new ways, which even my monkey brain found itself able to do, if only for a few seconds before some other distraction came along.

'Mister Squishy' is a tremendous work of storycraft and if I were still an English teacher I would absolutely spoil the experience by asking everyone to overanalyze it to bits.

There are other stories in here too.

کتاب خوبیه بخونیدش و لذت ببرید

- Mister Squishy: ★★★★
- L'anima non è una fucina: ★★★★
- Incarnazioni di bambini bruciati: ★★★ ½
- Un altro pioniere: ★★★
- Caro vecchio neon: ★★★★★
- La filosofia e lo specchio della natura: ★★★
- Oblio: ★★★ ½
- Il canale del dolore: ★★★★

David Foster Wallace estremo. Straziante il racconto post mortem di un suicida se si pensa al destino dell'autore. Quasi una prova generale.

Zo. Dit was alvast het meest uitdagende boek van David Foster Wallace dat ik las, misschien wel het meest uitdagende boek dat ik ooit las tout court.

Nu was het een doel van Foster Wallace om zijn lezers uit te dagen en hen "net als in het echte leven" te leren genieten van dingen waarvoor ze moesten werken, omdat hij dat als een meerwaarde beschouwde tegenover de eenvoudige, hapklare populaire tv-cultuur. Die missie is alvast geslaagd, me dunkt.

Vier sterren gaf ik toch met overtuiging (een halve ster ongetwijfeld voor mezelf, omdat ik de uitdaging ben aangegaan en niet opgaf toen ze te zwaar leek te worden) 3,5 voor het boek omdat het een verhalenbundel is, en je niet alle verhalen over dezelfde kam kan scheren.

Van de acht verhalen zijn er enkele waarover ik niets te vertellen heb maar met plezier las (3 sterren) en andere die me nog lang zullen bijblijven (4 sterren).
Sommige verhalen bloeiden open naarmate ik aandachtiger werd of verder vorderde, andere leken hermetisch gesloten te blijven maar boeiden me toch.
Wie Wallace leest omwille van zijn stijl zal nooit ontgoocheld worden en telkens opnieuw geprikkeld worden. Wie Wallace leest omwille van zijn sociaal empatisch vermogen zal ook niet ontgoocheld worden, al is het soms graven door de verschillende stijl-lagen heen om die te vinden.
Maar laat dat nu net zijn kracht zijn: de verhalen die me lagen en waarin ik mijn weg vond, fileerden relevante kanten van ons bestaan op manieren die ik voorheen niet zag. Ik geloof dat Wallace daarin net een meester was: de weg zo plaveien, soms vol obstakels en doornen, dat als de boodschap bereikt wordt, ze glashelder is. En dan ben je als lezer niet alleen verheugd dat je de uitdaging bent aangegaan, maar evenzeer verblind, geraakt of verbluft door de dingen die Wallace voor je klaar heeft gelegd. Straf.

Do contemporary intellectuals really like description this much? The guy spends so much time hammering away at completely banal ideas - but as they're strung together with similarly bland stuff it creates a flow that some people like. For me, when someone goes on and on about what 1960's elementary school classrooms look like (see the second story), I think to myself "I know what 1960's classrooms look like, and I could be using my brain more if this guy were describing something that isn't so obvious." Then I completely tune out.