Goodreads | La broma infinita (Hardcover) by David Foster Wallace

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Herbie added it (review of isbn 0316921173)

01/10/08

Read in January, 2008

It's my habit to write on the inside sleeve of a book the words from the text that I can't define or don't understand. Here is the resulting list from the back inside sleeve of Infinite Jest:

apocopes
bolections
reglets
dipsomania
quincunx
varicoceles
simpatico
aleatory
experialist
agnate
pedalferrous
fulvous
louvered
sangfroid
gibbons
apercu
eidetic
murated
tumescent
recidivism
erumpent
rutilant
hale
purled
nacelle
sulcus
imprecated
tumbrel
comportment
scopophob...more

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David rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

02/01/08

I've been waiting, panther-like, for the right combination of caffeine and personal gumption to strike, to attack writing about this, since it really is one of my favorite books ever-ever, and one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. I've read this book twice and I could care less what people say about it, because when I *do* care, I tend to grit my teeth over the ridiculous comments & reviews that tend to come up in discussing David Foster Wallace's work. People like to levy the c...more I've been waiting, panther-like, for the right combination of caffeine and personal gumption to strike, to attack writing about this, since it really is one of my favorite books ever-ever, and one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. I've read this book twice and I could care less what people say about it, because when I *do* care, I tend to grit my teeth over the ridiculous comments & reviews that tend to come up in discussing David Foster Wallace's work. People like to levy the criticism that the book is "sloppy" or "digressive". Really? You think? An 1100 page book with 200 pages of small-print footnotes might be a little digressive or indulgent or maddening? It might stray a wee bit into uncharted, dark-woods territory? Jeez.

There is, in art, what I like to call the "crazy project". Once you go to work on the Crazy Project -- C.P. for short -- you don't leave the Crazy Project. You don't FINISH the crazy project. You can -- when you are really involved in it, I mean really involved -- scarcely even talk about it; you may not even realize you're involved in it. The C.P. involves being given a hammer (the only real tool of the artist), a mouthful of nails, and being sent "over yonder hill" and told to do AS MUCH DAMAGE AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN with the hammer you have been given. When working on the C.P., the creative force is one in the same as the destructive force, and your hammer is a useful tool regardless of which way you are swinging it.

I think DFW is one of the most fascinating authors alive -- he's doing work with the English language in the tradition of Kathy Acker, Bill Burroughs, or James Joyce. The marketplace demands "novels" and so people oblige, but there is a difference between a "novel" and a BOOK, and I would consider a book to be more interesting -- if more difficult and less "composed"-- and Infinite Jest is definitely a BOOK, and shouldn't be treated as a "novel" in the same way, say, "Life of Pi" is a novel (and I do think Life of Pi is terrific, don't get me wrong). But, if you want immaculately written works of fiction by Wallace, check out his short stories -- especially the ones in Girl w/ Curious Hair -- because these conform more to what you would expect from traditional notions of "reading fiction". If you want a beautiful, wildly ambitious, insanely indulgent, uncompromising mind-bending skull-violating MESS, one that comprises an entire Victorian manor of the Crazy Project, then Infinite Jest may well be worth your while.

The book is, definitely, a mess, let's not mince words. It is also obsessively-compulsively mathematical in the way that DFW seems to enjoy; there is an order to the chaos, and it did take reading it a second time to pull out some of the exquisitely crafted crystalline plot strands he was working at. Linearity & coherence of disparate plot elements is not what the book is interested in, be warned.

But before I make the case of this being some academic project with no soul, let me say that reading this, I was genuinely surprised and moved by how deep & real the characters in it become. The characters in here are terribly tragic, in a real Shakespearian sense (the book's title is after all a reference to Hamlet), and their tapestry in this book's pages is as intimate and heartrending as it is vast; this book is a language project but one that remains absolutely invested in the lives of the people involved in that "project".

The book is about a lot of things: American culture & the nature of desire, fathers and sons, art, addiction, institutions, drugs, consciousness, film & the nature of narrative . . . too much to go into. More than anything, I think, the book is about addiction, and how our desires are moderated and mediated by culture, and how desire & addiction are entwined, and how Westerners approach these things.

Infinite Jest is wildly funny and, like I mentioned above, almost unexpectedly moving: there is a kind of veneer between the reader and the characters; they are guarded and stoic people, for the most part, and "getting to know" them can be as frustrating as trying to "get to know" someone in your own life who is guarded and careful with their emotions. But over the course of hundreds of pages you learn the inner-workings of IJ's huge cast, and their emotional motivations and subtleties begin to resonate with you in ways that dig so deep I think they're almost frightening.

This book is dense enough -- to say the least -- that I think you can get out of it whatever you are willing to put into it. Isn't this true of most good art? But the depth here is incredible. To say I'm "biased" and a bit blinded to criticisms about this book is hardly the point -- I think its a marvel, I think its a mess, I think it taught me what the difference is between a book & a novel, and why I think BOOKS are what the front-line artists working on the Crazy Project are really hammering out....less

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Alex rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

06/19/07

recommends it for: anybody with a good chunk of time on his or her hands

Heart-breaking, hilarious, and ultimately all-too-human.

Infinite Jest is a mammoth slice of American pie, tipping the scales at 1079 pages, including 388 endnotes. Some of the endnotes have footnotes, too. A book of these proportions is bound to have its nay-sayers, from people who believe verbosity to be a sin akin to gluttony, to those who got lost somewhere in the mid-500s and never found their way out.

I had some reservations; I'd heard the book was overwritten, overclever, o...more Heart-breaking, hilarious, and ultimately all-too-human.

Infinite Jest is a mammoth slice of American pie, tipping the scales at 1079 pages, including 388 endnotes. Some of the endnotes have footnotes, too. A book of these proportions is bound to have its nay-sayers, from people who believe verbosity to be a sin akin to gluttony, to those who got lost somewhere in the mid-500s and never found their way out.

I had some reservations; I'd heard the book was overwritten, overclever, overconfident, and overpostmodern. But I can emphatically say, none of these is actually the case. In the end, after roughly three months of getting through this beast, I can report that it was worth every word and superscripted numeral.

In IJ, David Foster Wallace wants to get at this Janus-faced überAmerican dual-concept of Addiction/Entertainment. Each of the characters has some form of addiction, be it to alcohol, marijuana, television, tennis, cleaning, sex, lying, or addiction-recovery meetings. The characters use their addictions as escapes from their selves, as something Other to focus their powers on so as to avoid the pain of true self-scrutiny.

One of the two main characters is Hal Incandenza, junior tennis star and secret savorer of THC. He is the youngest of the three Incandenza brothers, and the most promising regarding a future playing competitive tennis. But he's also an empty young man. And it's this emptiness that his covertly getting high fills. It's this emptiness that his father feared was making his son mute before the old-man suicided.

The other main character is Don Gately, a live-in staffer at an addiction halfway house and ex-break-and-entering specialist with a recovering penchant for Demerol. Gately offers the book access to the other side of the proverbial coin from Hal's juvenile dependence on marijuana; a look into the sphere of Boston AA and drug-addiction environs and a cast of characters trying to learn how to fill that emptiness without their Substances of choice.

That said, Wallace doesn't just set these two characters up on intersecting narrative arcs and let the story play out like we expect it to. In many ways, Infinite Jest is a refutation of exactly that sort of passive expectation that American culture has taught us to bring to our Entertainment. The author, in fact, goes out of his way to chop up the accustomed flow of the book and makes the reader work, in a way, to "get it". Hence the endnotes, disrupting the linear aesthetic we expect, and the use of non-numerical years (the book takes place after the advent of "Subsidized Time", in which each year is given the name of the highest-bidding sponsor).

While this could come across as chaotic or desultory, it actually lends the text a delightful experiential quality. It lacks the big-picture central truths that some might demand of literature, but it does so in the same way that life, at least in late-twentieth-century America, does. Truth is rather constructed through bits of memory and tangents of thought. The book does not have a climax, though in retrospect one might be constructed by connecting some dots. By defying literary formality, Wallace is doing more than just pulling some intellectual-postmodern stunt; he's reasserting the human element, placing real emotion and desire at the fore. The result is heart-felt and eschews the hipness of glib irony admirably.

In all, Infinite Jest is the best account of the cable-television era that we now live in, of a strange America seemingly on the verge of suicide-by-hedonism. But most of all, it's just an extremely touching and deliciously unironic book with some of the best-developed characters I've ever met, and worth a couple months out of anybody's examined life....less

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Andy rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

10/04/07

bookshelves: read-but-not-recommended

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in November, 1998

recommends it for: I would not recommend this book.

I actually wrote and posted a review of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest:

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary tale...more I actually wrote and posted a review of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest:

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.

I tend to believe the author's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing; but I can't completely dismiss Wallace as a literary artist. Infinite Jest is not the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), but it's not truly fodder for the Moronic Inferno, either, as Dale Peck and the rest would have it.

The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "après" filmography than in developing characters. The author's utilization of the language of pop psychology and millennial technological frenzy to portray teenage tennis phenoms is largely dead-on. Wallace hits definite false notes, however, in drawing the mostly lower-class residents of a halfway house as if they were operating from the same frames of reference as the junior tennis stars.

Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates the Big Rule of compelling fiction: There has to be something at stake. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausible combination of natural gifts, not Wallace's rendering of character or of his story itself, that make Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, a thirtyish petty thug and recovering addict named Don Gately, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise hold for him.

Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer blessed with such intellectual gifts would offer up a shaggy dog story as his magnum opus. Infinite Jest feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages before it actually does, and yet it hasn't earned an ending.

Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But the difference between a laundry list of our contemporary social maladies and a novel that compellingly addresses these is all but infinite. ...less

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Tal rated it:

(review of isbn 0316920004)

07/29/08

Read in July, 2008

It was a year ago, almost to the day.

I was sitting on the southeast corner of 54th & Park; the first day I worked with Simon, king crawdaddy of the axe slayers, hardhat in hand shining like an unpeeled orange in the sun. Opened up the book and page one was already impenetrable and confounding. Tried to read a couple pages and put it down--looked over at Sy, did a children’s puzzle book to hair metal bands. Two weeks of non-stop conversations with a guy I now barely talk to. Then I quit...more

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Tara rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

09/14/08

I only wish I could give it zero stars. Infinite Jest is a symptom of something wrong in the literary world: is there nothing else out there with meaning people can find to adore? It's neither a work of genius, nor is it insightful. There are serious things wrong with this book. I think the bigger problem here is why anyone, anywhere, thinks this is brilliant. Somehow the advent of smarmy advertisement and sterile, banal corporate living over the past one hundred and fifty years has invaded our ...more

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Michael rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

10/09/07

Read in September, 2007

“I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium. There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” says David Foster Wallace in an interview with Salon.com. His sp...more “I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium. There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” says David Foster Wallace in an interview with Salon.com. His sprawling novel, with multitudes of characters, narrators, tangential anecdotes, and endnotes, is an exploration of this very distinct and profound feeling. The result is exhilarating, earnest, and somehow cathartic.

Infinite Jest is set in a kind of near-future world in which the U.S. has annexed Canada and Mexico. The internet, telephones, television, and movies have merged into a single device which enables the middle-class to work, access all entertainment (ever), information, and contacts from their homes. The ensuing isolation which such complete availability causes leads to widespread psychological problems, a rise in the production of, use, and abuse of prescription drugs, and a rise in AA-type self help groups which try to restore faith and community. The story neatly juxtaposes a group of boys at an elite tennis academy who turn to drugs as an alternative to the Spartan lifestyle and oppressive purposiveness of their academy, and a halfway house where a group of addicts try to flee drug abuse through a stringently structured and dogmatic AA program.

The narrative structure is intentionally convoluted. Snippets of the story from various points in time are presented without apparent order, leaving the reader to actively construct a chronology. Years are no longer numbered, but subsidized and named after corporations, further obscuring the temporal setting. It is often unclear who exactly the narrator is. With a real virtuosity, the third person telling of a story will shift in tone from chapter to chapter to suggest a character already introduced, or more often being introduced or described. Throughout the novel there is a sort of supra-narrator who interjects comments, technical references, and sometimes entire tangential stories or conversations through extensive footnotes.

The ambiguity of narrator, time, morality, and ultimately of plot conclusion illustrates rather than explicates the sense of “lostness” which Wallace refers to, much the way a poem obliquely conjures a sentiment without any outright declaration of it. Through the patient introduction of a seemingly endless number of characters, and the minute details of their distresses and struggles, Wallace continually probes the “lostness”, and ultimately reveals it as a certain lassitude of modern society. Nothing is absolute. Each character struggles with a deep-seated psychological and emotional emptiness that comes from isolation, lack of purpose, and an inability to believe absolutely in anything. Through various characters, entertainment, drugs, financial success, athletic achievement, sexual gratification, intellectual achievement, grammatical activism, nationalism, and art are considered as meanings for life- all with disastrously fucked-up results. In fact the one character who doesn’t get a 90 plus page hearing is a mystical gym instructor who levitates in a sauna. Short of that, there really aren’t any answers in this story- just many important questions, and a very heavy, complex and immediate sensation throughout.

All that said, it’s thrilling, hilarious, and completely enjoyable to read. His writing is exuberant and masterful…
...less

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Emirate rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

08/21/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in February, 2006

recommends it for: people that like roller coasters with loops/that almost make you throw up

If you read through online reviews of the book, Infinite Jest seems to have divided the fiction reading world largely into two camps: those that are in it (it="the reading of fiction") for the satisfaction that comes from having witnessed an author deftly tie together a narrative; and those that seem to be in it for the simple exposure to moments of humanity and new ideas (regardless of subject matter) (nuggets, if you will).

Normally, I kind of consider myself to straddle this line...more If you read through online reviews of the book, Infinite Jest seems to have divided the fiction reading world largely into two camps: those that are in it (it="the reading of fiction") for the satisfaction that comes from having witnessed an author deftly tie together a narrative; and those that seem to be in it for the simple exposure to moments of humanity and new ideas (regardless of subject matter) (nuggets, if you will).

Normally, I kind of consider myself to straddle this line - or rather to look for that rare work that exists in the shaded portion of the venn diagram. However, in spite of the fact that, yes, Jest does leave a bunch of loose ends and that, yes, I was moved to throw the book against the wall as a way of dealing with the sense of injustice at (what I would then have called) Foster Wallace's abdication of his responsibilities to his audience (I didn't throw the book for fear that the impact of the tome would simply have shattered my rare collection of antique porcelain mice (I'm just kidding, I'm incredibly poor) (but seriously, the book is fucking enormous)), that rage was calmed quickly by some ensuing thoughts: it's a great read; it's got intricate and beautifully imagined characters that put you quickly in touch with some powerful themes (addiction, redemption, struggle, meaning, modernity, etc) all in a way that's so fun, intelligent, creative and fucking 'hip' that it might almost be called subversive. You have no idea how much you goddamn care - really - until that last word.

To me, whether DFW tied the remaining strands of the plot together (and let's face it, he just let them hang; perhaps because he was just more focused on the internal struggles of his cast, yes, but please don't make the argument that this is some post-modern work of blah blah blah - he just fucking let the plot float away), he certainly reached out and pulled me closer to some incredibly human figures (I'm crying as I write this). All books and narratives end, but the moments from this one just seem to stick with you (now I'm just weeping uncontrollably; i'm so happy no one's here to see this.)

If you're the kind that could see yourself writing that last line, I'd say this is the brick for you....less

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Oren rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

07/17/07

Read in January, 2003

recommends it for: people who I don't like

I want to give it zero stars.

This book is a giant pile of pretentious drivel. With a thousand pages and hundreds of endnotes (endnotes dammit! you need two bookmarks for this shit!) it's a book full of promises that are never delivered. By the end it feels like a practical joke has been perpetrated on you and the appropriate response is to punch the author in the face. Seriously, it would be a mild response. I feel that assaulting him blows to the head with a copy of the book would be consid...more

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Nick rated it:

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11/18/08

Read in November, 2008

recommended to Nick by: Joe Yoga
recommends it for: most

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:...more

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Amy rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

09/14/08

Read in June, 1997

Postscript: 9.14.08

Sad news -- just read that DFW is no longer with us as of 9.12.08. Apparently he hung himself. It feels like a friend is suddenly gone. Of course, I didn't know him, but reading his work over the years and really liking it and getting all excited to see his name in the "Table of Contents" of a new issue of the New Yorker or Harper's -- it felt like I did know him. I used to fantasize that we would meet and he would fall instantly in love with me upon first sigh...more

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Adam rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

02/14/08

Read in January, 2001

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

with paragraph structure as intimidating as the Borg on star Trek, A strong and vast spectrum of vernacular, and interstingly voiced characters (of which there are about thirty) this story daunts many people into putting it down -- mostly people you want reading this stuff anyway. The book is huge. over 1000 pages with 370+ endnotes that are all (for the time) in accordance with grammatical guidelines and everylittle possible thing that could be done "in case this needs to be done" wit...more with paragraph structure as intimidating as the Borg on star Trek, A strong and vast spectrum of vernacular, and interstingly voiced characters (of which there are about thirty) this story daunts many people into putting it down -- mostly people you want reading this stuff anyway. The book is huge. over 1000 pages with 370+ endnotes that are all (for the time) in accordance with grammatical guidelines and everylittle possible thing that could be done "in case this needs to be done" with endnotes, is basically done in this book.

It's about many things. but mostly this: Hal Incandenza is a tennis star and academic genius at the school his parents founded for academic geniuses and tennis all star kids, he's addicted to one-hitters of weed. his older brother is a punter for a football team and a ladies man, and his younger brother is the perfect human being the only problem is, he's severely crippled and very ugly (but he's the most lovable character). the other part of the book is in a halfway house up the street for crack addicts, narcotics and alcohol addicts who are trying to beat the drug.

essentially the story is about entertainment, how we cope with needing it, being it, and not having it. There is a hilarious political agenda going on where the USA is called ONAN organization of north american nations (onan was the first biblical character to masterbate), in which our country is guilty of experialism: we keep giving away our land, but only conveniently after we've catapaulted toxic waste north of ticondaroga. Quebecois separatists are the world's most lethalterrorists, and they are all in wheelchairs. Point is Hal's afther is an independent film maker as well. he some how made a film called infinite jest, that's so entertaining, that it kills anyone who watches it. the film creeps around the background of the dramas and little stories that populate the pages of the book (which literally goes off in so many directions in more than needed words).

But once you get into it, you're as addicted as the guys in the halfway house, or the terrorists who arelooking for the movie the book is named for. and you're wondering in Hal's older brother is gonna accidently hook up with the secret agent man dressed like a woman trying to get info from him, or discover if his ex, the star of the film, is truly the most beautiful woman alive, or the most hideous.

The chapters are all out of chonology. time has been subsidized int he book so each year advertizes a new product, of course, once you get to page 500 or something he finally reveals what the order is in a small list you have to remember.

I love this book, having read it. i sometimes pic it up and read any random page because it's written so neurotically, so obsessively. I think you may trudge through some of it (i took 4 months to actually read it all, but i was putting it down alot), but once you read it, you'll kind of love having so much stuff to talk about....less

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grantonio rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

02/08/08

Read in January, 2008

I had mentioned previously that this was one of the best books I've read in recent years. At first, upon finishing this, I plopped it down and mulled my disappointment at the ending. But after settling down and mulling this over a bit, I don't see how I could give this anything but a perfect score.

Where to begin? I won't go to much into the bizarre plot itself, which, although it includes such things as tennis academies, 12-step programs, militant Quebecois separatist wheelchair assassins, a...more I had mentioned previously that this was one of the best books I've read in recent years. At first, upon finishing this, I plopped it down and mulled my disappointment at the ending. But after settling down and mulling this over a bit, I don't see how I could give this anything but a perfect score.

Where to begin? I won't go to much into the bizarre plot itself, which, although it includes such things as tennis academies, 12-step programs, militant Quebecois separatist wheelchair assassins, avant garde film, substance abuse, etc., is only a canvas for the maelstrom of poignant observations generally neatly bookended within the horizon of pages, if not paragraphs and sentences.

This quality is what first struck me. Wallace is erudite but hip, loquacious yet brusque, frequently all within the same sentence. He conveys little vignettes of crazed human behavior that only an inveterate people watcher could. And above all he does so with a wry, nerdy, smart-alecky sense of humor that I can only deign, well, vastly entertaining. I almost never laugh out loud at prose, even that which I find very funny, and this book made me do so almost every time I picked it up.

Alas, entertainment is one theme of this book; entertainment as a form of addiction, the primary theme. Not just rat-pushing-the-lever-for-more-cocaine addiction as seen in the street addict and halfway house portions of the plot, but mindless, ennui-stricken cognitive abeyance. The plot itself vaguely orbits the existence of a film said to be fatally entertaining: those who glimpse it lose their mental faculty and will almost instantly.

Can we become so caught up in entertaining ourselves, titillating our synapses to produce certain firing patterns, that the comparison to substance addiction is warranted? Should we be frightened of the 7+ hours a day that the average household has their television running? Are books off the hook? It should make us shudder to think that all of our activities, even ones we think are altruistic, are ultimately devoted to repeating pleasurable sequences of brain activity for a few hours a day, until said brain dies and rots.

Wallace doesn't offer much in the way of cure, either. Religion is scarcely mentioned, although Wallace may see it as an ultimately substanceless palliative - more of a mantra than anything - by way of comparison to the nebulous "higher power" of AA (for some reason this oft-mentioned phrase in this Boston-set novel reminds me of the song Higher Power by the band Boston, which addresses some of these themes, albeit in a cheesy manner. Also, the song contains the Serenity Prayer, also repeated in the book. Ah.). That we lack something and try to fill it with various distractions - substances, religion, entertainment - is not a particularly novel or thrilling thesis. What Wallace has created, though, is an in-depth scrutiny of some of the manifestations of existential flailing.

In the end, this novel is not "about" any one thing, beyond the superficial level. Realizing this helped me to better accept the ending, or lack thereof. It also makes me feel better about the nagging suspicion that the novel itself was designed as an entertainment similar to the film of the same name in the book; Wallace loves meta- anything, and the book about the film may be morally equivalent to the film itself.

This makes it onto my very short list of books to reread again in my life. ...less

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Ryan rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

07/30/07

Read in July, 2007

This book is a massive 1100 pages, but nearly every page made me laugh. Wallace has insight into what is currently going on in our society. Loneliness and addiction and the lack of an ability to feel sincere about anything being a few major motifs in the novel. I would recommend this book for anyone whose looking to read something unlike anything else they've read. I can guarantee that. The structure of the novel is unconventional, but you spend so much time with the Incandenza family and wi...more

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Maya rated it:

(review of isbn 0316066524)

11/09/08

bookshelves: currently-reading

Read in January, 1996

I am currently rereading this and it is a lot of fun! I also note a way more intimate tone to my reviewing.

*****

I was rereading my high school year book and someone (Carlo) made a comment about how I needed to stop being a loser who read books like Infinite Jest and start drinking. That was funny, although it was so hard to decipher his handwriting, it was almost not wroth reading.

My dad used to subscribe to Newsweek and I read a review of this book and thought it sounded really c...more

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Nicholas rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

12/28/06

recommends it for: everyone

Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace, is quite possibly the most dense and literate book I've read (of my own choice) thus far in my life (and keep in mind, I've read The Silmarillion.) But don't let that fool you: I loved it.

Obstenibly a "sci-fi" story (though not in any way I would say), Infinite Jest is about (alternately) a tennis academy, a drug/alcohol treatment house, avant-garde cinema, game theory, addiction, nationalism, love, abuse, damaged childhoods, the conn...more

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Morgan rated it:

(review of isbn 0316921173)

11/08/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in October, 2007

Barrie recommended this book to me, but I swear, I must just not be smart enough to really get it. David Foster Wallace's style is reminiscent of Vonnegut who's listened to one too many vocabulary builder subliminal message

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