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Last week I discussed David Foster Wallace's important novella, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way." I thought it had a number of flaws–in fact, I'd say that on the whole the novella doesn't work for me. Although last week I did mention that the piece is still worth reading, especially as a bridge between his early writing and his masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Now I'd like to write a little about why I think that is.
Several years after reading Infinite Jest, one of the things I still most admire about that book is Wallace's . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Given the author's own thoughts on it, it's difficult to read David Foster Wallace's novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" without bias:
Larry McCaffery: Why is meta-metafiction a trap? Isn’t that what you were doing in "Westward"?
David Foster Wallace: That’s a Rog. And maybe "Westward"’s only real value’ll be showing the kind of pretentious loops you fall into now if you fuck around with recursion. My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore’s poetry or like DeLillo’s "Libra" had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion, the . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Valve bloger Scott Eric Kaufman offers what must be among the dumber reasons for not reading Infinite Jest:
Am I alone in finding the whole idea of Infinite Summer a little morbid? The renewed interest in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is an obvious Good Thing—a first step toward popular as well as academic canonization—but having lived through the recent Michael Jackson Media Event, I can’t help but wonder whether the desire to read Wallace’s novel is akin downloading Thriller because Some Important Someone died. Do I sound like I’m thwacking some straw man with shovel? . . . continue reading, and add your comments
I like what Andrew has to say about Infinite Jest's "research":
Specialized knowledges pervade the book—tennis, recreational drug use, optics, burglary, even punting (surely the most narrowly specialized position in football). But one of the more (in)famous elements of "research" in the novel is the filmography Wallace includes in endnote 24. In the age of IMDb, we might be apt to forget that the filmography is (or was) actually a highly specialized and intensely laborious feat of archival research, but the almost eight-and-a-half pages of James O. Incandenza's collected works should surely remind us . . . continue reading, and add your comments
There's a website dedicated to reading Infinite Jest this summer. Lots of interesting material (e.g. How to Read Infinite Jest)
I, of course, am a huge, huge partisan of this book, so I hereby exhort you all to grab a copy of IJ and read it this summer.
I read Infinite Jest back in 2004, and it remains one of the most memorable reading experiences in the past 5 years. (There is actually a large amount of Jest-related material available on this blog, both from my own reading and that of other . . . continue reading, and add your comments
In honor of the Infinite Jest 10 year reissue, the TLS has given the book another look. It’s a good take.
For all its many branching offshoots, the structure of Infinite Jest is built on a narrative foundation that recalls James Joyce’s Ulysses, an ancestor text that is specifically evoked in Wallace’s use of the famous Joycean compound "scrotumtightening". Both texts have one foot in Hamlet, and both are organized around two narrative arcs that set a youthful prodigy who has problems with his father, next to an older man, who is less well educated but more humane . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Last time, I mentioned that the two main hurdles I had to
deal with in reading Infinite Jest were how to deal with the length and how to
deal with the endnotes. I yammered on about the length last time, but I forgot
to yammer about the endnotes. So here goes.*
Continue reading Infinite Jest, Digested: Part Two
Barrett, whom we’ll be hearing more from on other books he reads in the future, is currently talking about Infinite Jest. In his first post on the book, he got into a little meta-discussion by mentioning a number of good sites with IJ criticism. I’ve visited several of those myself, and I think many other readers of this book have too, because IJ is a novel that leaves you with a number of dangling threads. Not dangling as in David Foster Wallace did a bad job of cleaning up after himself, but dangling as in purposely left unsolved . . . continue reading, and add your comments
In one of my first posts last fall, I talked about Infinite Jest not as a work of literature—I hadn’t read it yet—but as an objet d’art, as a physical artifact in and of itself, a lapful of pages that was about to be reissued in paperback to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
Well now, these few months later, I have actually read the indomitable Jest, and I’m here with a report, a sort of reader’s response/diary of how I climbed the infinite Everest. In the spirit of open endings and fragmented narration and incomplete circles, I’ll break these posts up onto various themes or subjects, as not to go on to bloggingly long, though I will no doubt repeat myself horribly before I get good into the second post.
Continue reading Infinite Jest, Digested: Part One
In 1995 in The New York Review of Books, Brad Leithauser was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to adulate his favorite book ever in the pages of one of the widest-read and most respected literary periodicals in the nation.
Leithauser left little doubt as to the place this book held in his heart:
There are good books and there are great books and there may be a book that is something still more: it is the book of your life. If you’re quite lucky, you may at some point chance upon a novel which inspires so close a . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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The Novels of Kim Young-ha
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
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