L’insostenibile schifezza dell’essere

Confrontata a “La ragazza coi capelli strani” questa selezione di racconti appare più compatta e omogenea sul tema di fondo, ma allo stesso tempo molto più frantumata e originale nella struttura narrativa che l’autore adotta, sia per costruire ogni singolo racconto sia per congegnare l’insieme della raccolta.

Ne risultano così “brani” o “frammenti” (più che racconti…) che creano folgoranti istantanee fin nel minimo dettaglio con minuziosa precisione entomologica (il poeta sul bordo della piscina, il ragazzino sul trampolino…), assemblati a veri racconti, talora lunghi, dotati di un’ossatura narrativa che fa raramente evolvere la vicenda nel tempo, ma procede per progressivi svelamenti, celati fra le vertiginose digressioni labirintiche di cui Wallace è maestro.

I brani ricompresi nelle tre sezioni denominate “Brevi interviste con uomini schifosi” abbracciano meno di un terzo del volume, ma anche tutto il restante materiale è improntato all’analisi dell’umana abiezione, prevalentemente maschile (con qualche rara eccezione), nelle sue sfaccettature che paiono infinite. Si tratta per lo più di bassezze morali, vigliaccherie, soprattutto manipolazioni delle fragilità altrui al limite del plagio e molto meno di atteggiamenti fisicamente aggressivi. Anzi l’artefice del comportamento più violento, lo stupratore del penultimo racconto, finisce per risultare il più fragile e patetico fra gli uomini schifosi.

Come per la struttura formale, la varietà dei racconti risulta massima anche in funzione dell’assimilabilità delle singole storie: vi sono picchi travolgenti da cui non ci si riesce a distogliere come quello intitolato “La persona depressa”, ma anche brani in cui si brancola nel buio più fitto (il mio personale calvario è stato “Chiesa fatta senza le mani”, leggendo il quale ho temuto i prodromi di un ictus, talmente le parole scritte faticavano a comporre un significato nel mio povero cervello!). Ma queste opzioni sono del tutto opinabili perché non conosco autori in cui l’individuazione del meglio e del peggio risulti altrettanto soggettiva…

Comunque sia, tra i due estremi si collocano gli altri brani, rimbalzando fra il genio e l’ermetico autocompiaciuto e d’altronde, escludendo i saggi, questa è la prima opera pubblicata da Wallace dopo lo spartiacque di “Infinite Jest”, da cui si riverberano diverse invenzioni come l’uso stratificato delle note o i dialoghi che si rivelano monologhi con interlocutore muto o ammutolito.

In conclusione un altro tassello dell’opera di questo autore amato/odiato (odiato non per colpa sua ma per il fervore spesso eccessivo dei suoi fans fra i quali confesso di annoverarmi), ingombrante, onnipresente e stupefacente in tutti i sensi che tale parola implica.

David Foster Wallace was a great writer. No two ways about that, it is so evident in his prose and in his stories that it does make you a little bit sad inside to know that you will never get the opportunity to meet this man. Yes, sometimes he gets a bit pretentious and self-important by hitting you over the head with the fact of his great-writer-ness. At some points the writing gets so esoteric and overly metaphorical that it ceases to make human sense or becomes extremely difficult to follow (I'll admit I could not find it in me to finish "Church Not Made With Hands" and elected to omit the last 5 pages).

Considering how obsessed he was with irony, it's quite fitting that this book which was mostly with concerned the egomania of humankind was quite pretentious and self-important. I mean, it is fiction after all, there should simply not be footnotes within footnotes within footnotes.

But getting back to my original point, the writing is superb overall. I feel like only DFW could pull off the trick of dehumanizing characters by taking away their names, genders, and all else that make them human to show their overwhelmingly flawed humanity. Stories like The Depressed Person (which, having dealt with clinical depression for a number of years, hit very close to home and nearly moved me to tears) or Adult World are shining examples of this. He was brave (although, this was post-Infinite-Jest, so I don't know how much courage he really needed after all of that overwhelming support from the literary community) in his efforts to try new things, that sometimes worked and sometimes did not. A lot of this came out in the form of narrative, using the second-person a lot of times, doing cool things with tenses and so on. I think he really took the old saying about "it's not the story that matters, but how you tell it"to heart.

All of the blurbs on the book's cover reference his humor, and while DFW certainly made me laugh at points, I think "irony" would be more accurate. His comedy transcended Dark Humor, in my opinion. It's a very chilly brand of humor, and you can almost hear the man shouting as he pecks away at his keyboard, "HA look at how dumb and savage and miserable and self-consumed everyone is. It's HYSTERICAL!" There's a sort of savagery to Wallace's comedy that makes you feel truly sorry for both him and his suffering.

Which brings me to my last point, which is that it is impossible not to read DFW without the fact that he took his own life in mind. He was no doubt a tortured soul, and this is evident throughout the book. I get the feeling that he was so disgusted by the self-importance of the human race that it probably destroyed him in the end, because, as he knew all too well, a large part of the human condition has to do with being a little self-indulgent. We can't NOT value our own lives and be happy. DFW, if you want my unprofessional opinion, died trying.

SIDE NOTE: I dare anyone to go out and find an author who uses the word "niggardly" more in one book.

I have a confession to make; I am an obsessive reader, even a reader of postmodern fiction, but I think this is the first fiction I have read from David Foster Wallace. I read his former wife Karen Green's reflection about him in her book, Bough Down, and some of his non-fiction, but when I saw that I could hear the author narrate this book (with a few actors) and saw it was not the thousand page length of Infinite Jest, I decided to listen to it. It was a kind of rollercoaster experience for me. The dude can write, so listening to the language tumbling out of various men's mouths was at turns exhilarating and disgusting. More disgusting as the stories of hideous men piled up, but I was never entirely without admiration for his propulsive prose.

As I read I was reminded of Joyce and his breathless, stream-of-consciousness cataloguing, all the long, flowing sentences, and the great talk. All of Wallace's men are non-stop talking obsessively lost and narcissistic/misogynistic men talking about women throughout, but the language is itself seductive. I thought of Nabokov's Lolita: I am being seduced by the very language Wallace uses to depict behavior and ideas of which I simply cannot approve, which sometimes even turns my stomach, and yet makes me admire his taking on the deepest darkest places in (male) psyches. Some of it is funny, and some of it makes me cry and some of it makes me sad, and some of it makes me angry. There were plays by Neil LaBute and others in the nineties that captured male assholism very well and this is part of that admirable and hard to stomach tradition.

Here's an example of the kind of outrageous/hideous guy he includes, a guy who is explaining why he is dumping his girlfriend:

“And I was--this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be 'See, you're leaving after all when you promised you wouldn't.' I knew it but I'm trying to explain anyway, okay? And I know you probably won't understand this either, but --wait-- just try to listen and maybe absorb this, okay? Ready? Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It's because of them. Okay? Can you see that? It's your fear I can't take. It's your distrust and fear I've been trying to fight. And I can't anymore. I'm out of gas on it. If I loved you even a little less maybe I could take it. But this is killing me, this constant feeling that I am always scaring you and never making you feel secure. Can you see that?”

The interviews are page long monologues by guys who just cannot shut up, alternated with Q, though we never hear the Question, the interviewer, often a woman, who is thus silenced. I have to say, though, that this book is very good fiction, technically a collection of related stories, which has sent me in a little spiral of depression about men on this planet. And that was Wallace's problem, depression, which may in fact have led him to write this very book. But the writing is often amazing.

ON HAVING HAD IT WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE FOR THE MOMENT

Given that most of my goodread friends love DFW with immoderate, alarming gusto, this requires some kind of explanation.

There’s a direct parallel between DFW and James Joyce. They both tended perpetually towards the encyclopaedic. They were utterly indifferent to audience expectation - even to the modernist, avantgardish audience they themselves created. Their main books are vast, oceanic, limitless affairs. They appeared to wish to use eventually every single word ever admitted into the English language and a shedload of foreign ones too. You might say they were both insufferable know-it-alls. They had a delightful propensity for going off on rants or lists or ranting lists in their books - these are from the present book :

we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms
comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace and love post-Hippie diction

or

Lying there helpless and connected, she says her senses had taken on the nearly unbearable acuity we associate with drugs or extreme meditative states. She could distinguish lilac and shattercane’s scents from phlox and lambs’-quarter, the watery mind of first-growth clover. Wearing a corbeau leotard beneath a kind of loose-waisted cotton dirndl and on one wrist a great many bracelets of pinchbeck copper.

But there’s a difference between the ocean of Joyce and the ocean of DFW, or what I have observed of it. Joyce had a plan and he stuck to it. DFW, it seems, never sticks to the point in his writing (forever interrupting himself, subverting his own text with page long footnotes, or end notes, forever entangling us readers in his sperm-whale-sized syntactic constructions, forever digressing) because he wasn’t that sure there actually was a point. He thought there should be but he wasn’t sure he’d discovered it. He was an out of control noticing machine (that’s not my phrase). All of his writing is suffused with unbearable acuity we associate with drugs or extreme meditative states. It's like breathing poisoned air. He writes about “addiction” and “tennis” and “parental abuse” and whatnot, all daytime tv subjects. He was mighty literary power-drill cracking a nut. Not much left of the nut when he’s done. Not much of a nut to begin with.

I’m not saying the reason I love Joyce & unlove DFW is that Joyce was a general ordering a successful campaign and DFW was a lonely guerilla hacking through the jungle with a dead radio. One's heart lies with the guerilla, after all. But there’s also the matter of JJ’s gorgeous way with words and effortless humour. Even his fans may concede that DFW’s logorrhific outpouring is often ugly, deliberately ugly. And also that reading JJ & DFW is like attending a service at the Church of Giant Brains - there's a great choir, fab stained glass windows, but it's so chilly, and it makes you feel like an ant, a bad ant who does bad things.

DFW’s narrators are most of the time like a rat in a trap, ceaselessly whirling around in a confined space, hysterically looking for the way out, but there’s no way out of their own awful sensibilities into the world, and I can’t help but think that as his characters, so it was with DFW himself, never getting to the end of his own endless sentences until the day he just wrote a full stop and had done with it.

DFW's own motto might be from p247 of this book :

I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgements you’re forming

***

Note - two stars just for my own discomforting reading experience. I think it's a four star piece of writing. But I don't like it.

Q.
I’m conflicted about the author’s stylistic buffoonery. Vituperative is what it is. I’m a bit punch-drunk, if I’m being honest. I have suffered a sustained bludgeoning to my self esteem. Frankly, it’s as if I were accosted in the supermarket by a terrifying maniac and drilled, almost fatally, by a frozen chunk of venison. Right here, you see? I’m pointing at the occipital dimension of my head calcium. Utterly blindsided by this block of wild game to the dome which caused an explosion of white, followed by a kind of pointillist mosaic of unresolvable questions and concerned figures. Anyway, I found myself, while weathering the author’s obvious distain for my attention, wondering if anything of value was being revealed, or if DFW was at fool-mast, for making me feel like an imbecile. A part of me balks at enduring abuse from some puffed up organism that would be terminated by attempting to inhale an irregular tater tot. Just like you or me. Have you ever nearly choked to death on, lets say, a chicken nugget, or a lego, and had a searing flash of cosmic insignificance? Well, let me tell you, unless you have a terminally fixed perspective, this simple act of nearly asphyxiating on the severed head of a Malibu Barbie will cause you to reappraise everything.

Q.
Rapport? Do you call instances of domestic abuse instrumental to building a harmonious relationship? What you’re asking me to do here, is, what you’re asking me to - let me get this straight, you’re saying; put on my best bib a tucker and let DFW make aero plane noises while he feeds me Stockholme-O’s? Is the crippling extraneous details a necessary component of the delivery system? Can a book not be both difficult and engaging? Why prohibitively difficult? What if the difficulty is just a method of obscurantism for what is, at base, a vacuous piece of masturbatory drivel that only receives accolades in a manner similar to Black Metal bands who try to out-kvlt each other, where devolving one’s sound to the level of hateful inaccessibility is the primary animus, because who would want to be associated with the hoi polloi and their horrible tendency to catapult kitsch to commercial success? Someone told me once that the point of it was to be inedible. Maximalism they call it. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. You remember what Orwell said about certain ideas being so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them? Well, that applies to this entire genre. It’s a kind of fiction that only a bunch of hyper educated pillocks would endorse. It’s as if we had sat down at a restaurant recommended to us by these stinky gourmands, and we’re consuming and not really taking time to taste anything, but then, like, I had inquired, with dawning consternation; “Are we... (leaning forward and cutting through the avant-garde jazz fusion) ... Are we eating shit, mate?” I don’t feel edified. I don’t feel nourished. I don’t feel entertained. I feel as though half masticated feces is rolling around in my open trap. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard the author address this very thing in interviews. This naked hostility expressed by pretentious little shits who have realized, deep down, that they have no way to make durable transformations to the reality they inhabit, because they’re inept and frightened by how stupid they are, and so but, these are resentful acts. I’m telling you, they’re looking for revenge for having no actionable skills. They carve out a niche where they can feel superior. They produce these holograms of knowledge that are predicated on axioms of their own devising, which, if you really wanna know what I think, it’s all about getting laid. Pomo is just a big noodle wetting machine.

Q.
Kvlt? Well. Let me give you an example. If I, while on stage, wrapped myself in razor wire and crawled up the ass of a dead bison, that’s pretty Kvlt, right? But if I obtained widespread notoriety for these bizarre rites and gained, lets say, a thousand fans, I will have diminished my Kvlt status in direct proportion to the amount of groupies amassed? Understood? It’s not important. Anyway.

Q.
That’s right. Appearing tortured and mysterious and on this other level. But they don’t want to have collisions with comprehensibility, because if they said anything plainly they’d receive our collective ridicule. They don’t want to pass through the dreadful sieve of empirical reality where they’ll inevitably find themselves trapped in the company of other coarse individuals who found the act of communicating too difficult and so opted to masquerade as semiotic Mavericks, who place the onus on you to consume excrement, to disregard all the common conventions of sense making and just wallop your fat gob with manure, and smile and exclaim with gustatory avidity; “Simply divine!” Entire metaphysical substrates are constructed and populated by a gullible clergy who are similarly disenfranchised by their lack of creative engagement with the world, these people, the faithful, supply the whole enterprise with tremendous motive force by imputing genius to the scribblings of these painfully insecure, petty tyrants. Goddamn sadists. They have their own lingo, their own methods of analysis which reveals in the text whatever they wish. Do you know what I heard once as a defense for these fucking footnotes? That they were there to take you out of the work, so you could observe it in a more clinical fashion.

Q.
Say that to me again! I’ll bash ye fookin’ ‘ead in, I swear on me mum!

...

Q.
I enjoyed pretty much all of the stories, and some of them were transcendental. The bit of clumsy meta-fiction’ing during Octet is a good example of the earnestness which always attracted me to his work. That a person could possess such tremendous self awareness yet be brave enough to render themselves fully human before their readers, it’s just very moving. The bit about the hand waving and stopping time in order to fornicate with a clerical aide, but, like, extrapolating the consequences of that power to such a degree that you’ve cognitively cock blocked yourself, genius. And I think that despite some of the difficulty, there’s nearly always something important being said or inferred, or else an interaction is being captured at such a level of granularity that you’re able to reconfigure your own sensitivity. Then the thing is, like, you begin to internalize this lesson, you come to realize that, much of the time, when you’re going about your daily life, you are, for all practical purposes, insensate. Just totally numb to this panoply of complex interactions. But you don’t have to be. That’s one of things that great works of fiction offer. A remonstrance to wake the fuck up. Like what Bradbury said about putting a book under a microscope and seeing life streaming past in infinite profusion? Well, Wallace is the microscope. I think that’s one of the aims of Maximalism, to show the kind of Brownian motion that underlies the seemingly mundane.

Q.
That’s hard to say, I’m pretty much in love with the guy. I think it’s probably his sensitivity to detail. I also find him to be one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read. He seizes these moments of absurdity by the scruff while they’re in the act of pissing up the furniture. Take for example the idea that a marriage could be improved by mutually hidden agendas, that discovering her husband is chronically tweaking his heat-seeking moisture missile could assuage a woman’s insecurities and precipitate a kind of sexual liberation in her. The idea of a kind of transparency only being possible for these neurotic souls through willful blindness. He’s amazing at exposing these preposterous motives which typify our existence. He is also very good with dialogue, at making it seem like a believable exchange. It’s messy and digressive and, like, riddled with these little idiosyncrasies.

Q.
Personally, I think it’s important for art to always seek new modes of expression. Stagnation is the alternative. Culture is always in flux, and so writers must also be dynamic if they wish to capture something important about the spirit of the time. There’s no shortage of traditional narratives for those people who are completely satisfied with them. But it can only be a net benefit for experimental forms of fiction to emerge and thrive. And if they’re difficult to digest, so what? Most of what we find fulfilling in life is not easily obtained or understood. It seems to me that much of what we value, we value because of the effort involved. Freshly squeezed orange juice is better than swilling from the carton. It’s an incontrovertible fact that nuts you have to crack yourself yield more tasty innards. And feeling a person’s flesh yield to a perfect rapier thrust, after an intense back and forth of parries and feints, is inherently more satisfying than, say, blindsiding them in the supermarket with a frigid truncheon of elk meat while they puzzle over their shopping list and just, like, discombobulating them mid-thought and causing them to pitch violently into the cabbages and be spritzed by the automated produce moisturizers in a state of mystified pain and confusion while you leer above them and mutter cryptically; “I told you.”

Q.
Kvlt? Okay, lets say that one musician is willing to fist a dead hog on stage, but another is willing to do so while aggressively rubbing his Bobby Dangler all over a Jumping Cholla Cactus, the later is said to have out performed his contemporaries in the Kvlt olympics. But lets say that, due to this obscene perforation of his twig and berries, he had garnered attention sufficient enough to move the needle of commercial success, it is then incumbent upon him to recede into deeper obscurity or else risk losing the kvlt resources which were gained through genital mutilation. Understood? It’s not important. Anyway.

4.5 stars rounded up to a fanboyish five. Brief Interviews is the strongest short story collection from the affectionately acronymously monikered DFW in this reviewer’s eyes—Girl With Curious Hair falling too far into a sort of rat-escaping-the-fictional-labyrinth obliqueness, and Oblivion supersized with unstoppable novella-length formal flops. Both flaws are in evidence here but are steeped in so much hip-shaking wonderment it’s heartless not too turn a blind eye. ‘Forever Overhead’ and ‘The Depressed Person’ and ‘Octet’ and the title stories are the formidable insulation of the book, caulked with little vignettes and cool experiments, giving the collection a clear-minded unity, purpose . . . manifesto, even. Unlike the other collections, Brief Interviews feels touched with the same form-owning irrepressible one-man Goliathian intellectual megalomania at play in Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. The mostly appalling ‘Tri-Stan’ and ‘On His Deathbed’ can be excused because they belong to the broader purpose of allowing the one-of-a-kind mind of DFW to expand to its fattest, happiest horizons on the page for us all to see. Not that I’m pandering to the mythopoeia or anything. But this is a seriously significant work. Got it? [P.S. The UK Abacus DFW editions are useless. Miniscule fonts and hideous covers will not help win a legion of British supporters—look at poor Paul Bryant . . . ]

Update while reading, October 24 2016:
I'm enamored with his writing so much at the moment that I'm sharing a whole segment here. This is one of the 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men' which has made a huge impression on me so far. (pp.20-22)

B.I. #11 06-96
VIENNA VA
'All right, I am, okay, yes, but hang on a second, okay? I need you to try and understand this. Okay? Look. I know I'm moody. I know I'm kind of withdrawn sometimes. I know I'm hard to be in this with, okay? All right? But this every time I get moody or withdrawn you thinking I'm leaving or getting ready to ditch you - I can't take it. This thing of you being afraid all the time. It wears me out. It makes me feel like I have to, like, hide whatever mood I might be in because right away you're going to think it's about you and that I'm getting ready to ditch you and leave. You don't trust me. You don't. It's not like I'm saying given our history I deserved a whole lot of trust right off the bat. But you still don't at all. There's like zero security no matter what I do. Okay? I said I'd promise I wouldn't leave and you said you believed me that I was in this with you for the long haul this time, but you didn't. Okay? Just admit it, all right? You don't trust me. I'm on eggshells all the time. Do you see? I can't keep going around reassuring you all the time.'
Q.
'No, I'm not saying this is reassuring. What this is is just trying to get you to see - okay, look, things ebb and flow, okay? Sometimes people are just more into it than other times. This is just how it is. But you can't stand ebb. It feels like no ebb's allowed. And I know that's partly my fault, okay? I know the other times didn't exactly make you feel secure. But I can't change that, okay? But this is now. And now I feel like anytime I'd just rather not talk or get a little moody or withdrawn you think I'm plotting to ditch you. And that breaks my heart. Okay? It just breaks my heart. Maybe if I loved you a little less or cared about you less I could take it. But I can't. So yes, that's what the bags are, I'm leaving.'
Q.
'And I was - this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be "See, you're leaving after all when you promised you wouldn't." I knew it but I'm trying to explain anyway, okay? And I know you probably won't understand this either, but - wait - just try to listen and maybe absorb this, okay? Ready? Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It's because of them. Okay? Can you see that? It's your fear I can't take. It's your distrust and fear I've been trying to fight. And I can't anymore. I'm out of gas on it. If I loved you even a little less maybe I could take it. But this is killing me, this constant feeling that I'm always scaring you and never making you feel secure. Can you see that?'
Q.
It is ironic from your point of view, I can see that. Okay. And I can see you totally hate me now. And I've spent a long time getting myself to where I'm ready to face your totally hating me for this and this look of like total confirmation of all your fears and suspicions on your face if you could see it, okay? I swear if you could see your face right now anybody'd understand why I'm leaving.'
Q.
'I'm sorry. I don't mean to put it all on you. I'm sorry. It's not you, okay? I mean, it has to be something about me if you can't trust me after all these weeks or stand even just a little normal ebb and flow without always thinking I'm getting ready to leave. I don't know what, but there must be. Okay, and I know our history's not great, but I swear to you I meant everything I said, and I've tried a hundred-plus percent. I swear to God I did. I'm so sorry. I'd give anything in the world not to hurt you. I love you. I always will love you. I hope you believe that, but I'm giving up trying to get you to. Just please believe I tried. And don't think this is about something wrong with you. Don't do that to yourself. It's us, us is why I'm leaving, okay? Can you see that? That it's not what you've always been so afraid of? Okay? Can you see that? Can you maybe see you just might have been wrong, even possibly? Could you give me that much, do you think? Because this isn't exactly fun for me either, okay? Leaving like this, seeing your face like this as my last mental picture of you. Can you see I might be pretty torn up about it too? Can you? That you're not alone in this?'

Nov 17, 2016: watched the film adaptation a couple of nights ago. Not bad, but definitely read the book first; the film wasn't so memorable.

October 9, 2018: I recently read about adult attachment theory, and came to the realisation that several of the 'interviews' may have really hit home for me because DFW and I share some similar flaws (in the sphere of relationships and personality), belonging to the group of avoidants (fearful-avoidant rather than dismissive-avoidant, though maybe a mix of both). Well, it seemed to me that it would be impossible to write what he wrote without having experienced such scenarios himself; but it could be that he's just that good at writing, of course.

If there are 12 things i appreciate in the world, i'm sure one of them is repetition for effect and i don't care if it's in music or in humor, anything. I'm not saying that's DFW's best element here, but it's done sooooo masterfully and it just works for me. I love tight and elegant prose, duh, but if you're going to be neurotic then just go all the way and DO IT and don't stop, keep going, it's so good and getting better.

From a linguistic view, yep, it's astounding. The subtleties of language that he works into the pieces will make you die because you hadn't yourself written them into a story yet and should have.

Yes some of it comes off as "tricks" and is, get over it. But i don't want you to write it off as just experimental because what he's doing is important. There were chapters where i'd start with "Eh, is he really going to write about this, i'm not necessarily looking forward to this one," and i don't know if i'd say that the substance of the story is what ended up winning me over, but the style makes me care about and appreciate the substance. A lot! (And then in some cases the substance of the story itself IS winning.)

And there were moments when i'd think "Okay i can see why people think he's probably an arrogant jerk and yeah i too could have thought of second-guessing my own pieces and then writing one that actually comments on that, easy way out," but no, he then knocks that idea, and then the idea of that idea, and so on, he's soooo many steps ahead, he always has the upper hand. So i guess if you want you can still just say he's pulling some meta bullshit gimmicks but i say the extreme to which he does it and distance from which he does it makes it great.

Oh, there were so many parts that made me freak out. And it was so rich that by the end it was hard to remember that it was the same book that had contained the very first piece which blew me away from the start.

Suffice it to say he's got it goin' on.

Um livro mais difícil que a média de avaliar, dado o grau de espalhamento dos alvos artísticos e as relativas taxas de acerto ou erro por parte de DFW dos alvos em questão. Um número maior do que eu esperava de histórias acabam por pousar em um grande pântano repleto de gases tóxicos cujas fronteiras são o hermetismo ao leste, a mera inconsequência ao norte, o vasto - vaaaaaasto - deserto do exibicionismo ao oeste e a cidade da insegurança ao sul. Quando ele interrompe o conto na metade para explicar o porquê de ter afinal decidido escrever daquele jeito específico, e não de outro, não há para mim argumentos de vanguarda literária ou desconstrucionismo que salvem o leitor da agonia e impaciência com aquele autor tão inteligente que ainda assim, caralhos me fodam, faz questão de se explicar.

No entanto - no entanto -, quando o homem da bandana acerta, e em alguns casos mesmo quando ele erra, várias portas se abrem...sua estratégia de guerra parece ser a de levar qualquer discurso ao limite da possibilidade, ver até onde um cenário ou sentimento ou fala é capaz de ser prolongado, esticado, repetido e repetido e repetido, analisado em cada ramo proveniente de cada ramo, até que o conto ultrapasse o limite do razoável e mergulhe de cabeça no que há além, buscando ali algo mais humano, que simplesmente permaneceria além do alcance caso uma abordagem literária mais comum fosse utilizada. Uma estratégia soberba, ao meu ver, que não só pede para ser imitada como dá vazão para, nas mãos de alguém tão capaz quanto o próprio DFW, atingir algo transcendente, sem qualquer ironia no uso dessa palavra tão carregada.

O ato de reproduzir e criar discursos ao mesmo tempo tão inteligentes e escrotos como os das Brief Interviews em si, os vários tipos de desesperos e buscas por empatia e humanidade, o ir além do razoável pois não há mais nada para se encontrar deste lado da normalidade: quando o livro acerta, é memorável.

Adendo: é notável como as diversas Brief Interviews espalhadas ao longo do livro constituem uma forma original, eficaz e, ao contrário de tantos textos que lutam por justiça social, artisticamente elevada de expôr o discurso misógino, traçando de modo eloquente os passos lógicos que tantos homens seguem para explicar e justificar para si mesmos e para os outros as suas visões de mundo distorcidas; expondo, assim, o chorume, que na prática pode ser tão sutil, através da amplificação literária. O mais doloroso que é os personagens misóginos aqui entrevistados são tão inteligentes e cultos quanto o seu melhor professor universitário. DFW, assim como Bolaño, parece ser incrédulo, felizmente, na salvação moral através do mero acúmulo de conhecimento e cultura - aquele mito tão propagado desde sempre pelas alas conservadoras. Quanto mais ambicioso o escritor, mais sutil a exposição que ele faz do discurso pernicioso. Nesse sentido, DFW acerta no olho da mira.

How many writing styles in a only book.
And how many ethics doubts that it made grown in me.

1. Είναι μεγάλη υπόθεση που σιγά σιγά ολόκληρο το έργο του DFW μεταφράζεται στη γλώσσα μας, ώστε να έχουμε άμεση αναγνωστική επαφή με τον σπουδαίο συγγραφέα και να μη εγκλωβιστούμε στον μύθο που τον συνοδεύει.

2. Σε αυτή τη συλλογή λογοτεχνήματων λοιπόν με κύριο θέμα τις ανθρώπινες σχέσεις στη μεταμοντέρνα εποχή μας, μερικά κείμενα (διηγήματα μάλλον είναι ένας καταχρηστικός όρος) είναι τολμηρά αριστουργήματα που φτάνουν στις πιο ακραίες περιοχές του ανθρώπινου ψυχισμού, άλλα είναι πιο πειραματικά και παίζουν με την ίδια τη μορφή του κειμένου και της γλώσσας.

3. Σε κάτι που μπορεί να σταθεί κανείς είναι μια από τις έμμονες ιδέες του DFW που επανέρχεται και σε αυτό το βιβλίο του: το πως δηλαδή διαμορφώνονται οι ανθρώπινες σχέσεις σε μια εποχή οπού το άτομο γνωρίζει (με την συνδρομή της ψυχανάλυσης και των υπόλοιπων τεχνικών αυτογνωσίας) τα κίνητρα του, την σημασία του περιβάλλοντος και των οικογενειακών του βιωμάτων. Αυτή η γνώση αλλά και η γνώση της γνώσης του Άλλου δημιουργεί ατέρμονες αντανακλάσεις που πολλές φορές καταλήγουν σε μια αδιέξοδη και ιδιοτελή μορφή σχέσεων που τελικά εγκλωβίζει παρά απελευθερώνει. Τελικά μας λέει ο DFW ο Άλλος (όσο τρομακτικός και να είναι) είναι ουσιώδες κομμάτι μας και όχι απλώς μια προέκταση του εαυτού μας.

4. Αν κάτι με συγκρατεί προσωπικά καποιες στιγμές είναι ίσως ότι ο DFW είναι πολύ πιο Αμερικάνος για τα γούστα μου, νιώθω δλδ ένα χάσμα (πολιτισμικό, βιωματικό, παραδειγματικό) που η λογοτεχνική του δημιουργία δε μπορεί να γεφυρώσει.

5. Μετάφραση νομίζω πολύ καλή αν λάβει κανείς υπόψη του τη δυσκολία του κειμένου, επίμετρο ατυχές στα συν ότι έχει στο τέλος βιβλιογραφία για περαιτέρω μελέτη.

As much as I like DFW, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was a real challenge.

The title suggests, and the reader becomes quickly aware, that DFW will be critiquing the insidious nature of "hideous" men through the lens of conditioned or willful adherence to socially acceptable behaviours of men. And perhaps he is attempting this but 23 short stories through the male gaze; 23 stories of various ways in which men openly acknowledge how they use women, how they manipulate women, how they use their privilege, how they placate to typical female stereotypes to get what they want from women; 23 stories devoid of an authentic female voice; 23 stories of men just shitting on women and excusing themselves, pitying themselves, is far too many to assume that there also isn't a semblance of gratuitous moaning at how women provoke such behaviours in these hideous men -- or more aptly: on men.

Think I'm being too sensitive? Consider these were written in the 90s, shortly after DFW's tumultuous relationship with Mary Karr who has claimed openly of physical, mental, and emotional abuse by DFW.

Think it's just a joke and if I don't get it, then it's a joke on me (or people like me)? But here's the problem with that line of thinking: just saying it -- joke or not -- validates. Dismissing it because it's written by DFW and he's trying out new narrative styles still validates the claims and thoughts of these hideous men.

Yeah but he claims they're "hideous". Sure. Except then counter with a woman's voice. Counter it with a man dealing with the consequences of masculinity -- not just typifying masculinity and ending it with that. Counter to make it clear otherwise, you're just swimming in misogyny.

I am a firm advocate that an artist is allowed to make personal mistakes, as we all do, but as an artist, they have a responsibility in the art they choose to produce and share to the world. It's one thing for DFW to have behaved in the way he did with the women in his life, but, for example, Infinite Jest makes no claim to masculinity's role in perpetuating abuse and violence against women -- which is why I appreciate and admire Infinite Jest as an artistic endeavour. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men proposes a claim on views about gender, specifically, through only a man's perspective of their role in women's lives: this then gives reason to look at DFW's personal life and scrutinise. If we do not hold people accountable when they are evidenced to the contrary, we can never address the hideousness that continues, invisible, under the guise, in this case, of "art".