Ripensarci, dopo oltre un anno dalla lettura.
Alzare il voto ( tanto, che senso ha? Ma facciamolo comunque ), perché La persona depressa è ancora vividamente impresso nella memoria, quasi come l'avessi appena letto. Un sasso letterario che continua a generare increspature.

Peccato che il resto della raccolta sia così altalenante, a coprire tutto il range che va dal capolavoro assoluto all'irritante ostentazione della propria bravura ( indiscussa ).

this is the most offensive thing i have read in a while. its literally just misogyny repackaged as edgy-straight-white-guy- genius. this is also incredibly disturbing in terms of the content so like content warnings for sexual violence and just like men being men. thats the other thing, as if lots of women dont hear these things everyday???! why not pay us for having to put up with ur shitty behaviour??? rage rage rage rage

Como en toda recopilación de historias, y haciendo un poco el vago, tengo que juzgar por el conjunto y no individualmente. ¿Por qué? Pues porque se vende un conjunto y no una historia individual, basicamente.

El caso es que tiene un montón de historias y no todas están al mismo nivel en cuanto a interes por mi parte.

Por ello no se lleva las cinco, solo por ese motivo, porque aún no interesandome todas por igual, lo que si que tienen todas es un nivel altísimo en las formas y el estilo único de DFW.

'İğrenç Adamlarla Kısa Görüşmeler’ trajik intiharıyla akıllara kazınan David Foster Wallace’ın dev eseri Infinite Jest’i yazdıktan sonra 1999’da yayımlandığı kısa parçalardan oluşan fakat tematik yapısı bağlamında bir bütün olarak okunabilen kitabı. Uzun zamandır okuma listemdeydi fakat bir türlü sıra gelmiyordu. Okurluğuna çok güvendiğim bir arkadaşımın övgüsüyle(iyi ki) hemen öne aldım ve lezzetli bir okuma yaşadım.

Wallace gibi kendi hayatına son vermiş bir yazarı okurken, genelde yazdıklarında o intiharın habercisi bir şeyler bulmayı ümit eder insan. En baştan bu refleksi göstermemek adına kendime söz vermiştim. Fakat kitabın daha başlarında bundan kaçamayacağımı anladım. Wallace düşüncelerini ve dünyayı algılama şeklini yüksek sesle bağırıyor satırlarında. Bu kısa öykülerden oluşan kitapta -asla alıştığımız formda ve içerikte öykülerden bahsetmiyorum- Wallace’ın zihninde dolaşıp, hayatın akışında bulduğu çöp kokan anlarla karşılaşıyoruz. Elbette öznemiz insan. Modern insan!

Bu insanları aklamayan, aksine onlardan nefret etmek için bize sebep-sekanslar gösteren uyarıcı bir kitap bu. Belki de Wallace için bir ‘insan sevmez’ demek yanlış olmaz. Dünyadan gidiş biletini kendi kendine keserken ham bir düşüncenin değil, olgun bir felsefi aklın eylemiyle hareket ettiğini gösteriyor yazdıkları. Hatta eser sayfa sayfa ilerlerken, insanlığın tümevarım yöntemiyle ifşalandığını bile düşündürtüyor. Bu ifşanın tezi, insanın çürümüş bir ahlak anlayışını modern dünyanın dinamikleriyle erdemsiz bir pratiğe dönüştürmüş olması oluyor. Eril düzenin eril özneleri içinde kadının metadan da ucuz bir ‘şey’e dönüşmesi, toplumsal rollerin bize biçtiği senaryolar doğrultusunda bireyin nasıl haince ve erdemsiz hareket edebildiğini belgeliyor. Günümüz dünyasında yaşayan bir Marquis De Sade’dan bile diyebiliriz. Sadece Sade’ın metinlerinde saklı olan haz duygusu burda acıya, iğrenmeye, tiksinmeye, körleşmeye bırakıyor kendini. De Sade için güç olan şey, Wallace’da silaha dönüşüp, dönüp okuru vuruyor.

Metinde yaptığı kurmaca oyunlar da cabası. Bir tık zorlayan ama okuru sürekli dinamik tutan, hayranlık uyandıran denemeler.

Mutlaka okuma listenizde olsun. Biraz mide bulantısı ve yabancılaşmanın kimseye zararı olmaz.

I was antipathetic towards DFW - much to my friend Anastasia’s disgust - for a long time, believing him to be intentionally arcane and pretentious for the sake of it. This collection shocked me in its humour, thoughtfulness and intense - almost painful - anti-solipsism. DFW is the kind of writer that makes you question the extent to which your own subconsciousness is curated. He is deeply suspicious of self-awareness, especially the clever, literary, reflexive kind. The men the subject of each brief interview - and they are all men - believe they can preempt the judgment of their observers with their technical, brilliant, rarefied language, but beneath all their elevated references they are hubristic, cruel and emotionally doltish.

Rilettura dopo nove anni. Stessa meraviglia e nuove sfumature di senso.
Prendete l’ultimo dei cinque racconti che hanno lo stesso titolo e danno il titolo alla raccolta. E' una delle cose più audaci concettualmente e lancinanti che si possano leggere; e per una lettrice sarà senz'altro meglio/peggio. E' formidabile nella tensione narrativa, nello scavo psicologico, nella energia emotiva che lo anima. In misura diversa questo vale per tutti i testi della raccolta. Inclassificabili, di genio assoluto. Un campionario di situazioni esemplari "della porositá di certi confini" tra il commendevole ed il riprovevole, tra cause/intenzioni e risultati/effetti, tra il vissuto e il consapevole, tra la più compassionevole empatia e la più impietosa crudeltà.

Ma soprattutto dietro c'è una idea molto precisa della funzione della letteratura.

Chi vuol approfondire qui trova qualcosa
https://scarabooks.blogspot.com/2019/...

Originally posted this on Eyeshot.net way back in 1999:

In all the reviews I read of David Foster Wallace’s recently published “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” I haven’t read a discussion of generosity. (My motivation for searching through the articles is simple: I wanted a reviewer to validate my thoughts, and if none did, I wanted to express this idea of generosity and make it accessible to, like, set everything straight.) Reviewers of Mr. Wallace’s latest book often mention “sex” and “alienation” and the “war-of-the-sexes,” or they wax absolutely pathetically about how DFW’s characters “exemplify what can go wrong in a society when the romance of individualism turns inward and loosens restraints.” Survey says? XXX. (These signify “three strikes”; most of DFW’s reviewers would probably mistake XXX for pornographic content just as they mistook the book to be primarily about society’s “hideous” obsession with sex.)

Allow me to extend a fishing analogy past breaking: reviewers of “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” have been like shallowstream-running fishies that swallowed the lure and died belly-up rather than getting snagged and eaten by the author. Or if the reviewers are fishing they’re pulling up nasty cartilaginous skates from obtuse angles. Here’s the problem: reviewers don’t seem to come up with the right question. (One of the coolest formal contrivances in the book is that the “brief interviews” are in question-and-answer format, but they lack explicit questions: there’s just empty space for the reader to fill-in after Q and before A). As in Jeopardy, Wallace (a hyperliterate Alex Trebek) supplies the reader (the contestant) with a 273-page question. Now I have the opportunity to buzz in, my question to the overriding response of “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” is four-fold: “How is generosity manipulative? What are the dynamics of give-and-take, giving and receiving? How does motivation complicate generosity? How are these complications played out in daily lives?”

One chapter, “The Devil is A Busy Man,” comes in two installments. In the first, a redneck narrator’s father tries to give away the space-wasting contents of his machine shed/cellar. He even puts a “Free Stuff” ad in the local Trading Post, but no one takes anything until he affixes $5 and $10 tags to the old JC Penny Sleep Sofa and Old Harrow With Some Teeth a Little Rusted. People lap it all up and drive away “tickled to death to get a harrow for next to nothing.” (For extra credit: draw parallels between this story and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” The sin is written across one’s back by a harrow.) The son asks the father the moral of the story and the father tells him he guesses “you don’t try to teach a pig to sing.” In the second story, a man anonymously “diverts” money to friends in need and justifies this anonymity thusly: “A lack of namelessness on my part would destroy the ultimate value of the nice gesture.” His “motivation” would be “not generosity, but desiring gratitude, affection, and approval.” The narrator meets with the recipients of the anonymous gift and refuses to acknowledge that he gave the much-needed money to them. The recipients gush about how thankful they are and the narrator dives into how the gift will help them (ie, the recipients), and he suddenly realizes that these words reveal his true motive to the recipients. Then he immediately spirals down into a despairing realization that his generosity has been emptied of any sincere good by his deception driven by motivation to receive something in return: “My attempts to sincerely be what someone would classify as truly a ‘nice’ or ‘good’ person . . . despairingly, cast me in a light to myself which could only be classified as ‘dark,’ ‘evil,’ or ‘beyond hope of ever sincerely becoming good.’”

There are more instances of this ping-ponging dynamic that I won’t go into now. The devil is a busy man because secular pigs believe “next to nothing” is more valuable than nothing. The devil is a busy man because there is little hope to live beyond motivation. I ain’t preaching, but check out Genesis: God gave Eve to Adam and then Satan gave Eve an apple. The first gift ends solitude, setting the stage for the tumbling interworkings of give-and-take; the second gift (Satan’s) is a temptation. It’s manipulative generosity. Light and darkness have been in perpetual round long before Milton. Ultimately I think the way out of this labyrinthine ball is to be good without being sincere. And the easiest way to not have to worry about being sincere is to do something for profit. That way there’s no despair. Income fills the moral cavity. Go outside, breath the open air, and buy DFW’s book at a local independent bookstore. Help everybody out. Get what you pay for. If the major chains have vanquished your area’s indy booksellers, however, go get it in the traditional way.

I sold my first car just a little over a year ago. It was sort of a bittersweet thing for me because even though that rustbox was old and broken there was a comfortable familiarity there. I loved it in spite of itself. I venture to guess that if I were ever to get back into the driver’s seat (theoretically, of course—the car is long gone now), I’d be awash in nostalgic warmth and tenderness for it. Then, I’d start driving it and quickly remember that yes, the turn signal does sometimes blink spontaneously without driver input and yes, the heater fan does get “tired” if you keep it too long at Level 4. Oh, not to mention that weird noise when you first start it but I swear it will go away on its own once the car warms up. Still, I would love to be driving it again. In a lot of ways it was a great car; so what if it had a few shortcomings?

DFW’s got a few shortcomings. He’s got that twitchy way of winking at you in his footnotes (some of which go on for pages). He’s got the long, winding sentences that often have a kind of manic quality to them. And often times he devolves with his storytelling choices into an almost experimental writing style (e.g. providing the reader with a story in the form of his narrative notes rather than that of the finished product itself).

And yet, there is definitely still a loveable familiarity there. The footnotes are entertaining, sometimes even fairly amusing. The long sentences are actually pretty brilliant for the most part and lend his stories a qualitative edge that is unique to DFW and somehow just…works. I’m not particularly fond of the writing experiments but I can look past them when they crop up here and there and appreciate the story for what it is. All in all it’s not a bad drive and even with those DFW-isms I hated while reading Infinite Jest, it was nice being back in DFW territory.

Of course not every story in this collection worked for me, which is why I’m only giving it three stars. (Infinite Jest got four.) I hated “Church Not Made with Hands” and “Tri-Stan,” for example. That said, the stories I did like, I loved. Here are my favorites:

“Forever Overhead”
“The Depressed Person”
“Signifying Nothing”
“Octet”
“Adult World”

Oh and but except the other thing this DFW car does that’s pretty quirky sometimes is instead of successfully ending a story it’ll just

http://www.lercio.it/david-foster-wal...

It seems I am a little stupid. A bit slow. Not so quick on the uptake. Perhaps even a hair over the boundary separating the uncultured from the genuinely dumb-ass.

The reason for this sudden self-awareness, my profound dumb-lightenment?

I can’t read David Foster Wallace. I tried. I opened Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and bashed myself against the towering walls of his prolixity, his long meandering stories, the seemingly endless sentences.

And oh, those sentences. They are rabbits disappearing down endless winding warrens, lit only by the dim glow of ten-dollar words.

If Wallace’s most famous work - Infinite Jest - is anything like his short stories it would have more aptly been named infinite Sentence. Seriously. Forget just taking a breather in the middle of some of DFW’s sentences to gather yourself and try to hold all the ideas he presents together. You’ll need to take a packed lunch, and perhaps an emergency beacon for when you inevitably become lost in his deep jungles of words that stretch for half a page or more, with only the odd comma to mark the trail.

For me, Foster Wallace is the kind of writer who has you constantly flicking a few pages ahead, trying to motivate yourself with a mixture of the thoughts ‘there really aren’t that many pages to go, I can finish this’ and ‘this is a test. I have to finish this to prove that the internet hasn’t ruined my attention span.’

Once upon a time I would have flogged myself through this collection. I would have whipped myself along with an imaginary birch switch, believing that finishing this book would be character building, that I would be a better, maybe smarter person for making it to the end. Now, painfully aware that I will never have time to read all the books I want to in my lifetime, I am past this kind of self-improving masochism. I bailed on Brief Interviews With Hideous Men at the halfway point.

I didn’t hate all the stories I got through. There’s artistry here, and a sense of humour in some of the titular stories where awful men demonstrate and justify their awfulness. DFW has style, and wit, but he does not possess, in any measure, succinctness. Each paragraph is an interesting example of form and language, but, in their multitudes their uniqueness becomes uniform, their meandering tedious, their overall effect anything but the ‘Brief’ promised in the title.

David Foster Wallace has long seemed to me to be a cultural marker in the reading world. An author to be seen reading on the train, a delineator between cultured, Capital-L-Literary reader types and the genre-reading, hoi polloi. If that is the case, then I count myself among the unwashed, Stephen-King-loving masses, a reading milieu where you only flick ahead in a story when, gripped with excitement, you cannot wait to see how it ends.

Si tratta di un libro duro, difficile, bellissimo. Complicato perchè scandaglia con tentacoli nella materia oscura della tua anima, pone domande, immette pensieri scomodi.

I suoi racconti non indagano affatto il carattere dei personaggi: non se lo propongono neanche. Sono viceversa rivolti all’esterno, verso di noi. È il nostro carattere quello che viene sottoposto a indagine

Tema centrale mi pare appunto l'egoismo, o meglio l'essere intrappolati dentro sè stessi in varie modalità: nei propri pensieri, nelle proprie paure, nella propria stupidità, nei propri meccanismi difensivi. Credo che il tema centrale sia l'incomunicabilità. L'impossibilità di una condivisione vera con le altre persone, disperatamente cercata, in mille modi sbagliati, e mai trovata. Anche quando sembra essere dietro l'angolo ecco che sparisce, pallido fantasma che ti riconsegna alla tua personale e terrificante solitudine.
Come dice Zadie Smith nell'introduzione:

Dave ha detto cose geniali sul dono: sulla nostra incapacità di dare gratuitamente, o di accettare quello che ci viene dato gratis. Nei suoi racconti, dare è diventato impossibile: la logica di mercato permea ogni aspetto della vita.

Un libro de relatos de Foster Wallace que me ha gustado pero que es de lo más flojíto que le he leído.
Después de leer La broma infinita, La escoba del sistema y su libro de cuentos La niña del pelo raro me decidí por este
El libro incluye una colección de veintitrés relatos de lo más variopintos, muy desiguales. Algunos son brillantes, otros galimatías difíciles de entender ya que incluso se permiten empezar por el nudo o el desenlace saltándose la estructura del relato. Bendito posmodernismo.
El relato Entrevistas breves con hombres repulsivos, son una colección de diálogos —o más bien monólogos, pues nunca se lee la réplica— de un grupo de hombres que se caracterizan por una cierta visión enfermiza, machista o ingenua de la mujer, llegando a hacer análisis que resultan una afrenta, como en el que un hombre considera que el que una mujer sea violada es positivo en cierto modo, pues le sirve a esta para ser consciente de su fortaleza mental y donde se razona todo como si fuese de lo más normal. Aquí está lo malo de este libro, cuando se pone de manera reiterativa a mostrarnos lo sórdido y la basura del mundo. No es un libro muy optimista y eso contrasta con La broma infinita. Que tenia mucho de sórdido, del abismo de las drogas y la depresión pero también de la redención.

También hay lugar para momentos hilarantes y profundos que salvo de la quema en raltos como "En su lecho de muerte, cogiéndote la mano, el padre del aclamado nuevo dramaturgo joven y alternativo pide un favor" donde un hombre postrado en una cama, y mientras los técnicos le aplican continuos cuidados médicos, le cuenta a un cura el profundo desprecio que siente por su propio hijo. En " La persona deprimida" vemos la propia lucha del autor con la enfermedad que lo llevaría al suicidio y una escritura que refleja esos sentimientos de manera sobrecogedora.

En suma, no es el mejor libro de Foster Wallace ni el más literario o divertido pero si el más incomodo, este libro despierta una voz en tu interior que surge de las profundidades para preguntarte al oído cuánto podría haber de ti en los personajes de este libro.