About this title: Set in the near-future, this swirling comedy/epic revolves around a tennis academy, a residence for recovering substance abusers, a tight group of Quebecois-separatist terrorists, and "Infinite Jest", a film so funny that it literally kills. Perhaps one of the most ambitious attempts to capture the spirit of the age, Wallace's pervasive theme is ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780316920049ISBN:0316920045
Description: Good. Good: A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dust cover, if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels. About Austin eBooks Austin eBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service! We add inventory to our store daily, and guarantee order processing and shipment ... read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Little, Brown
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780316920049ISBN:0316920045
Description: Paperback, NO highlighting or notes, old prices marked out on endpaper, wear to corners and edges(a bit dog eared); otherwise, a tight, clean copy. INV#H-4 G/no DJ. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780316921176ISBN:0316921173
Description: Very good. Paperback. Has minor wear and/or markings. Has minor wear and/or markings. SKU: 25032188 All orders shipped within 1 business day. 14 day money back guarantee ISBN: 9780316921176. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2006-11-13
ISBN-13:9780316066525ISBN:0316066524
Description: New. Paperback. Enjoyable reading copy for your personal pleasure. You are buying a Book in NEW condition with very light shelf wear to include very light edge and corner wear. Buy it Now! ! ! As always, thank you for buying this book from International Book Source, YOUR ONE source FOR ALL your BOOK related NEEDS. Please remember to CHOOSE carefully how QUICKLY you would like to RECEIVE this material FAST, or standard (on next page). Thanks again! ! ! ! read more
Edition: 10 ANV
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780316066525ISBN:0316066524
Description: New. A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential... read more
Edition: Tenth Anniversary ed.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780316066525ISBN:0316066524
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. VG trade PB, v clean/bright/square, unmarked. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 1079 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 1997-02-01
ISBN-13:9780316921176ISBN:0316921173
Description: Very Good. Light edge wear to large softcover. Firm binding. No marks. The late D.F. Wallace's masterpiece. A long slog, but worth it. read more
"I just discovered Wallace and believe me, all the praise is deserved. This is a fascinating interweaving of stories and styles - all of them in such a true voice.
Can't believe he's gone."
"What genre of novel is Infinite Jest? Spy thriller? Coming of age? Science fiction? Pot boiler? Psychodrama? Sports tale? Political satire? Pharmacopoeia? Action adventure? Side-splitting comedy? Great literature? YES, to all of the above. I'm recommending this book to all of my friends because I want to have people to talk to about it. Infinite Jest has been listed as one of the top 100 All Time Greatest Novels of 1923-2006.
Logophiliacs, lovers of words, will revel in this appetizer, salad, entree and piece de resistance of an entire word meal. Rather, each reading is a meal -- the whole tome is practically a steady diet. Whether you are a word gourmet or gourmand, Infinite Jest provides it all for you. If you have ever spouted a pun that went over heads or offered sarcasm that was taken literally, then this book is for you. You can practice catching word plays thrown at the speed of light and I can almost assure you that even YOU will fumble a few. The author was appointed to the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary and was a fan of The Oxford English. It seems clear, after several trips to the 'net for diction assistance, that he wanted to get in the OED himself. I hope he makes it, some of his new word forms and usages are dynamite.
Infinite Jest introduced me to style breakthroughs that I hope will be emulated: fictional endnotes, even meta fictional endnotes (if that is what you would call the fictional endnote containing the fictional footnote.) This author fears no new literary device and mixes them up with wide-grinning glee. Mr. Wallace also has developed stream-of-consciousness writing to it's finest degree yet. Previous authors have written the stream-of-consciousness of the protagonist in the language of the author; David Foster Wallace has written the cognitive processing of his characters in the very language of the characters themselves including the misspellings and vocabulary peculiarities that would be used by the character. This technique took me right into the cortex of the characters; I could feel the pleasure and the pain almost better than second hand.
I am a new David Foster Wallace fan: somehow, his name never stuck in my awareness files until I read his obituaries in a magazine this Fall. Since excellent writers were so distraught at Mr. Wallace's untimely suicide I needed to see what I had missed. Through the thoughts, feelings and experiences of several of his characters, Mr. Wallace has shown us poignantly the pain of his own life which was stalked by intractable depression and substance addiction. I join many of his students in forgiving him for depriving us of more of his spellbinding work -- the hurt was too large."
"as if the sheer heft of the book wasn't enough, there's a culture of active intimidation that's grown up around infinite jest (which is why it's taken me so long to pick it up). it's sold as impossible but "incredibly worth it," something you can't read on the subway but have to take "a few months to read" - the intro to my edition had the always cloying but also always well meaning and usually lovable-despite-yourself Dave Eggers likening the read to some sort of initiation: like beers or ritualized genital mutilation. it's a book to live by, people say. and the footnotes!
well, all i want to do with this review is set the record straight:
Infinite Jest is incredibly readable, even with the criminal font and non-existant margins. the footnotes are not in excess or in any way treacly. the majority of the text is plot driven, Foster Wallace being an avowed anti-academic (if you're paying attention to camps, or to the text itself, which always has one hand under the table, flipping off the universities) who knew good writing meant audience engagement... and even Entertainment.
Meaning: I can understand how it would be difficult to comprehend, as a whole, if it was approached over the course of six months, or piecemeal over a lifetime (like Finnegan's Wake or something). This is clearly not how the book is set to be experienced, it being more of a frenzied plot driven sort of experience than philosophical tract - although it may be that too, for some people. Read it straight through if you pick it up. The people who are intimidating you with this book are reading it the wrong way. it is - and if you pick it up, you'll understand - it is The Entertainment (for better or worse).
it's also anti-entertainment, which I suspect is the point of the whole thing, the blast whole (sic) at the end and the thousand pages of where-is-this-going? and the realization that maybe most of the plots you thought were driving the whole thing weren't really and the empathetic tremens. but that's a hole (sic) other discussion, the meta-commentary. the joke doesn't work if you just drop in for the punchline.
if you want to know about comparisons that aren't completely bogus or unhelpful, it (mostly)felt to me like a sprawling and tragi-comic sci-fi novel - Salinger's Glass Family as imagined by William Gibson, Burroughs, and Kennedy O'Toole. (Maybe amend that to read "William Gibson if he'd written Ender's Game" and "Burroughs if he wasn't an idiot a-hole").
also, n.b., it sometimes feels like your reading of the text is somehow historic, which i've only come across before, really, with Ulysses. This book definitely has a Ulysses sort of feel/heft to it, but is (again) less consciously obfuscatory - more concerned with audience entertainment and less an aggressively historic artifact: in short, a very long but very good book.
A book I sometimes read en route to other places, ignoring directions, in between things. And a book with an ending that read, to me, like a landmine victim blown apart. A book that ultimately felt, for its thousands of pages, like half a book.
which is why i'm not sure how i feel about infinite jest, even though i enjoyed it immensely, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a way that was good for being almost nauseatingly bad.
but never the writing: that was always mostly very good.
****
PS: do yourselves a favor and google DFW and "Sierpinski Gasket". the macarthur will make sense, if it didn't already."
"I started this book about a week after DFW died. I'd tried to read it about ten years ago, but I'd gotten frustrated with it, partly because I thought DFW was a showoff and possibly a douchebag, based solely (and stupidly) on the fact that he'd worn a bandana in his author photo in a bandana (I'd wondered WTF was he trying to prove-as if proving something was the only possible reason). This first attempt at IJ I'd only gotten about 300-some pages in and given up, thinking (because I really had no other reference-point) that he was trying to out-Pynchon Pynchon and doing a not-so-hot job of it (and also congratulating myself for having read most of Pynchon and being able to recognize an imposter). But then, ten years later, DFW died, and I ordered it on Amazon, feeling sort of sheepish and guilty about diving into the guy's work so soon after he passed, wondering if and sort of at the same time acknowledging that there was something maudlin about that, me being, let's face it, morbidly curious about a suddenly dead guy who I'd totally taken for granted would be around for four more decades at least, a guy whose essays and stories-especially "Girl with Curious Hair," about a military guy who drops acid with some punk rockers and goes to see a Keith Jarrett concert-I really admired but who'd written this book that I had pretty much dismissed because of its discursiveness and heft. So I started the book in September and was immediately like, wow, this is good, realizing very quickly that DFW had committed himself to accomplishing a number of things in the writing of this tome, the most interesting and inspiring (to me) being his commitment to hunkering down-like unfathomably deep down-inside a(n often very) troubled character and giving us, in prose that is florid but totally (this time around anyway) non-show-offy, what it's like for that character to experience his/her environments, whether it's Hal getting high and then dipping Kodiak in the tunnels underneath the tennis academy or his brother Orin the NFL punter roaming the "scalp-crackling" heat of Arizona or Don Gately observing the nuances of old timers vs. newcomers of people in Boston AA or this guy named Lenz who's in AA but also does toots of coke he's hid in a carved out book and roams the streets looking for cats to strangle inside of Glad bags or Bruce Green whose mom died from a heart attack after opening a fake can of peanuts (from which a plastic snake exploded) on Christmas day or this woman named Joelle a former beauty disfigured in an accident who must now wear a veil so as not to horrify others with her revolting visage. So anyway, one of the reasons it took me so long to read this-other than the length and the fact that it is my job to read all day even without having to read pages upon pages of gargantuan paragraphs of 10 pt font-is because early on I did get a little frustrated by some of the digressions (of which there are many) and a lot frustrated by being urged so frequently to turn back to the end notes (of which there are 388, which translates into a hundred pages of even smaller font) and sometimes (especially at first) downright discouraged by the nearly-Sisyphusian task of moving forward through the book (on a good day, I'd get through 20 pages and think damn, this is pretty good but then be totally worn out). Then, around page 300, the thing started to really gain some momentum, and I was finding that I could get through 50 or 75 pages in a day, and then around page 620, I decided, okay, I'm gonna read the rest of this thing TONIGHT (last night) and announced to my wife and son that after I cleaned up the kitchen I would be hunkering down in my office to finish this book, which I was at this point very much enjoying but also tired of lugging around and even holding (you basically have to prop it against something because it's so heavy), a book which at first felt simply like something to bludgeon someone with, and had for a while felt more like DFW's tombstone-something you felt honored to be lugging around but also didn't really want to keep doing much longer, feeling sort of like even he wouldn't exactly want you to keep lugging it around (it'd been several months, after all). I felt skeptical, remembering how difficult the first 300 pages had been, but told myself I was going to blaze through it, drank a coffee at 6 pm (which I never do normally, being somewhat of an insomniac) and resumed reading. And what I discovered was that the book actually kept getting better, and funnier, and darker, and that I never had to tell myself to "stay awake" or force myself to read anything but more like I had dropped down into a universe of terror and beauty, a truly uninterrupted dream, and that I as I was reading I was actually feeling something as I read, not like "oh I can really sympathize with this character" but actually physically feeling a weird pressure inside my chest, not only in response to the intricacies of description of these various troubled souls' lives, but because of the writing itself, and what it said about someone who was able to write so lucidly and clearly about depression and loneliness-that he knew what it was like, understood it in ways that, barring some unspeakable future events, I never will. So now, I'm glad and sad to be done and look forward to going back through it, reading old reviews, and copying stuff out of it to show my future classes, and in general spreading, however insufficiently, its gospel."
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