A humbling experience for me...
I read Malraux or Hemingway, and I know I am reading some great literature... I know it, and yet I remain unmoved, uninvolved, unable to embrace what I read. So is it with David Foster Wallace. My very great loss...
All but "Incantations of burned children" which actually terrorized me.

'stary dobry neon' jest o mnie, reszty opowiadań nie przeczytałem

David Foster Wallace inspires many complaints -- he is overly self-conscious, he abuses the footnote, he is at times impenetrable -- but here happily, none of these are especially true. Even the post-modern playfulness is reigned in somewhat. Unlike the layered interviews and broken portraits of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, these are more properly stories (or even novellas, perhaps, as many are quite lengthy), winding and carefully plotted, and fully invested in the narrative. Only a single selection was notable mostly for style and structure (the frivolous but hilarious "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", actually one of my favorites for its concise insanity), and most managed to grapple with enough serious content to put most entire novels to shame. My personal favorite, "The Soul Is Not a Smithy", took several scathing routes to the heart of an unwell America, through a civics class gone wrong just before Vietnam, while "The Suffering Channel" spiraled endlessly around and through the combined fascination-terror-revulsion-obsession which we which we regard the human body, ours and those of others. At his best, as in those pieces, every seemingly disparate detail points unerringly to the whole.

I'm going to have to work backwards through Wallace's other short story collection, I think. Infinite Jest is perhaps his culminating work, but he's abundantly more digestible in these smaller doses.

D. F. Wallace: ostico, ridondante, ossessivo e dunque detestabile per taluni; intrigante, ironico, mirabolante e dunque amabile per talaltri, fra i quali senz'altro mi annovero.
P.S.: 12.9.2008: pace all'anima tua, David.

These stories are exhilarating but demanding. His ironic use of corporatese reminds me of George Saunders. From the density of his prose, and from his use of metanarrative, I guessed a few lines in that DFW is a fan of Borges, a hunch that was confirmed by Google. I love the way DFW's mind works, and the nerd in me even enjoyed the formula, written in symbolic logic, that was inserted into one story, a mathematical proof of the narrator's despair. The best stories: "The Soul is Not a Smithy", about a school shooting that prompts Proustian flashbacks, and "Another Pioneer" a mock anthropological study overheard on a plane. "Good Old Neon", about a depressive who's undergoing analysis, just made me sad.

Na, turiu prisipažinti, kad Wallace'o knyga buvo šių metų laukiamiausia tiek tarp Raros leidyklos, tiek tarp visų kitų vertinių. Namų bibliotekoje turiu iš man dar neįveikiamą Infinity Jest, Pale King ir apsakymų rinkinį - Consider the Lobster. Bet turiu prisipažinti, kad ir kaip mėginčiau save įtikinti anglų kalbos mokėjimu - šie kūriniai man vis dar nepasiekiami originalo kalba.... Ir todėl lenkiu galvą prieš Igną Beitsą ir kalbos redaktorę Rimą Bertašavičiūtę.
Laukdamas vertimo, peržiūrėjau begalę Youtube paskelbtų inverviu su rašytoju, taip pat, kritikų ir jo leidėjų prisiminimus - žodžiu, ruošiau save neįprasto rašytojo debiutui lietuvių kalba.
Pirmas pirmo apsakymo įspūdis - kas per velniava? Autorius tikrai turi - tiksliau turėjo, savitą braižą, naudoja daug trumpinimų/abreviatūrų, todėl jeigu nesupranti autoriaus trumpinių logikos, gali likti nesupratęs teksto.... Tikrai teko nevieną kartą grįžti į pastraipos pradžią (o pastraipos buvo ir kelių puslapių apimties), kad suprasti ką autorius norėjo pasakyti. O dar nuolatinis šokinėjimas nuo vienos pasakojimo linijos iki kitos - vau:-). Reikia susitaikyti, kad specifinėse temose autorius naudojo daug specifinės terminologijos, ir kartais meistriškai žongliruoja skaitytojo neišprūsimu....
Mano išvada - rimtas kūrinys, reikalaujantis ypatingo susikaupimo ir nuotaikos, tikrai ne prieš miegą ar po sunkios darbo savaitės.
Ir pabaigai - apsakymas "Nudegusių vaikų įsikūnijimai" - sugraudino ir giliai sukrėtė....
Ir dar - jeigu kuris nors vertėjas ir leidėjas išdrįs išversti kitus Wallace kūrinius, tuomet aš tikrai pripažinsiu, kad jau susiformavo nedidelė, bet ištikimas rimtos literatūros gurmanų sekta....

i get it now

Ant jūsų stalo – naujo prekės ženklo šokoladinis batonėlis. Pabandykite pasitelkti visą savo vaizduotę ir parašyti apie šį saldų objektą maždaug 100 puslapių tekstą. Pageidautina – grožinį. Davidui Fosteriui Wallace’ui atlikti tokį kūrybinį pratimą buvo vieni juokai. Pirmasis aštuonių apsakymų rinkinio „Užmarštis“ kūrinys „Ponas Tešlius“ – pavartosiu banalų lietuviškų portalų antraščių žodį – sprogdina. Ir drauge sukelia neviltį, kad visa ta hiperbarokinė rinkodaros ar chemijos terminologija, kuri ir yra didžioji dalis minėto apsakymo įdaro, taip ir liks neperkandama.

https://370.diena.lt/2021/12/29/skait...

Comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.

This is one of the eight portrayals of failure to communicate in the ‘Oblivion’ short fiction collection – which was the last of DFW’s published fiction in his lifetime. I have already posted a review of ‘The Soul is not a Smithy’ which is also from this collection, and in my opinion these two stories are the most outstanding.
Wallace uses the clinical, the theoretical, and the confessional style of narrative, and often all three, to home in on the solipsism, self-deception, and fraudulence in his characters. In Good Old Neon the narrator is obsessed by his sense of hollowness and lack of authenticity:

“ My own basic problem was that at an early age I'd somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life's drama supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable effects”

Wallace's idiosyncratic narration is dizzyingly inventive, threatening to overload the reader’s neural networks with the hyper-focus on exhaustive detail and constant digressions. The prose is however, perfectly suited to create a vicarious experience of anguish and identification with the character in the reader’s mind.
His narrator/protagonist is such a calculated narcissist that he psychoanalyses his analyst, after finding no relief in meditation classes, jogging or religion - attending the hilariously entitled ‘Church of the Flaming Sword of the Redeemer’. And even in his suicide note he is being manipulative in the image that he presents of his motivation.
Wallace' slyly subversive humour is apparent throughout the piece, which makes the ending even more chillingly prophetic and heart-wrenching.

والاس نویسنده جالبیه اما هرچی به سمت‌ آخر کتاب میرفت من با داستان‌ها ارتباط کمتری برقرار کردم.
اما اولین داستان قطعا به نظرم یکی از جذاب‌ترین داستان‌های کوتاهی بود که تا حالا خوندم.

Not only in light of DFW's suicide I don't think, but certainly in light of it, the despair that this collection of stories is shot through with is sobering. There is here a merciless, microlevel, and exacting existential critique both of our outward facing lives in contemporary society, centered in the banalities and inanities of work life, showing through the characters' very commitment to their jobs and roles the utter meaninglessness of them without having to stoop to any even tiny bit of triteness in making the point (instead depending heavily on, ahem, irony), and of our inner lives, or at least of his own inner life, I'm afraid, weighted down heavily with contradictory feelings of grandiosity and insignificance, of feeling like a genius and feeling like the worst fraud imaginable.

I don't know how exactly true to life the hilarious and pathetic workplace procedures and terminology and culture and such of the focus group and market testing company as portrayed in the opener, "Mister Squishy", are, as the characters revolve around a new snack cake confection, but the existential horror of finding oneself spending one's life in such an environment is effectively (and comprehensively... some might say too comprehensively!) portrayed.

"The Soul Is Not A Smithy" continues this theme of the horror of modern adult life in a story from the point of view of a grown man looking back to when he was a grade school student involved in an "incident" when he failed to notice his teacher having a mental breakdown at the blackboard, so occupied was he in his own creative imaginations that his soul could be said to be absent from the classroom his body is sat in. The adult narrator at one point remarks,

For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven. I knew, even then, that the dreams involved my father’s life and job and the way he seemed when he returned home from work at the end of the day.

In "Good Old Neon" the narrator turns from the despair over one's outward-facing life to despair over one's core inner self. Essentially, the feeling that human nature is fundamentally bad, in some sense. He expresses this through a focus on how his connection to other people is inauthentic due to an inability to be honest about himself:

There was a basic logical paradox that I called the 'fraudulence paradox' that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school...The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside - you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were.

I mean. Ouch.

I can imagine a "love it or hate it" reaction to the prose itself in this collection. I listened to it as an audiobook and thought it worked really well. I'm curious how I would have taken the prose if I was reading it in print instead.

Normally I think I wouldn't be a fan of something that comes off overall so, well, nihilistic. But it's not for effect, not to be transgressive, not fraudulent one might say. The voices here are at root sympathetically all too human, even good, it seems to me. They just can't see their way out into something more of the light.

DFW’s next level erudition, wit, formal experiments/innovations on full display here. It’s LOL funny, as hysterical and outrageous as it is intimate. His prose is that of a once-in-a-generation brilliant mind infected with post modern brain rot. Of course nearly all of the stories are extremely depressing