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Oblivion

4.02 of 5 stars 4.02 · rating details · 5,038 ratings · 415 reviews

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homici...more

Paperback, 329 pages

Published August 30th 2005 by Back Bay Books (first published 2004)

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Apr 11, 2012 oriana rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2011, too-smart-for-their-own-good

Oh boy. Oh man, do I have a lot to say about this here book. I can't even begin to tackle it as a whole entity, so I'm going to do a review of each story, unless I get tired and have to smoosh.

Also: I am the kind of person who listens to all my music on shuffle, which means I clearly have no respect for the artist's conception of a complete work. Consequently I read these stories totally out of order, and will review them the same way.

"The Suffering Channel" and "Mister Squishy"
I think these a...more

24 likes · like · see review

Mar 01, 2011 Jimmy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: male, short-stories, year-2000s, and-a-half-stars

If nothing else, this book really made me think. Maybe even over-think. This book invites it. There is a lot to mull over in each of these stories, and DFW is very rarely direct about anything, preferring to leave clues along the way.

I think it’s interesting that each story has its own specific vocabulary and/or verbal tics from Mister Squishy's ad agency lingo to Oblivion’s strange use of latin/pace/'air-quotes' to Suffering Channel’s magazine-speak; it’s almost as if the characters in one sto...more

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Sep 22, 2007 Núria rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Raül

Shelves: mios, 5-favoritos, 2006, literatura-en-ingles, siglo-xxi, cuentos

Mi DFW favorito hasta la fecha. Antes de leer 'Extinción', David Foster Wallace me gustaba: escribía bien, era postmoderno, original y divertido, pero sus cuentos eran sólo anécdotas, algunas más incisivas que otras, pero anécdotas al fin y al cabo. En cambio 'Extinción' va mucho más allá. Sus cuentos alcanzan una profundidad impresionante y, detrás de la anécdota, nos acaba hablando de cosas universales que nos afectan a todos, básicamente acaba hablando del sufrimiento, del horror, de la trage...more

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Raül De Tena Joer... ara veo que aquí no puedes contestar al comentario de una persona en concreto, sino que esto va rollo "suma y sigue". Así que sumo y sigo: Núr...more
Jan 19, 2008 05:27pm

Ritz Hola Raül
Gracias por enriquecer el asunto por acá...
Breve explicación: nunca he leído a DFW, me lo recomendó un librero diciéndome, "Si te gusta Pala...more
Jan 20, 2008 06:55am

Jun 25, 2012 Frank rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: acquisto

Parlare bene della scrittura di David Foster Wallace e di un suo libro in particolare, probabilmente è anche diventata una moda.

Così come è difficile trovare qualcuno a cui non piacciano personaggi come Benigni oppure Vasco (anche se qui è già più facile), altrettanto difficile è trovare una forte lettore che non apprezzi DFW.

Le ragioni possono essere tante, alcune personali, altre più allargate, fino ad arrivare ai commenti degli altri scrittori.

Dal mio punto di vista devo dire che non mi fido...more

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Jan 28, 2009 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

Most of the stories in this collection focus on individuals surviving in various nightmares of modernity. These same stories are often seen through the cold and mechanical filter of the language of the worlds the characters inhabit, the language of statistic and focus groups, the jargon of advertising and big glossy magazines. Despite the detachment of the prose, the pain and horror is readily apparent. In some stories such as the one paragraph, couple page "Incarnations of Burned Children" the...more

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Apr 04, 2009 Hannah Messler rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've only got a few pages left of the last story in this collection and the whole thing has just been so excruciatingly beautiful I am almost palpably sad to see its end approach. That the guy whose mind from whence this sprung had to want to die so bad is just the worst the worst the worst.

Done. Buh. So sad.

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Feb 18, 2013 the review man rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: postmodern

Oblivion is a collection of eight of David Foster Wallace's short stories whose themes run the gamut from our entertainment-addled society to suicide to the act of writing itself. Wallace continually uses unreliable narrators and 'friend-of-a-friend' literary devices to make his point. And while they really are short (the longest is not quite 100 pages), they're in-depth enough to allow the reader to understand their various contexts and ultimate meanings.

"Mister Squishy" and "The Suffering Chan...more Oblivion is a collection of eight of David Foster Wallace's short stories whose themes run the gamut from our entertainment-addled society to suicide to the act of writing itself. Wallace continually uses unreliable narrators and 'friend-of-a-friend' literary devices to make his point. And while they really are short (the longest is not quite 100 pages), they're in-depth enough to allow the reader to understand their various contexts and ultimate meanings.

"Mister Squishy" and "The Suffering Channel" (the first and last stories, respectively, in Oblivion) deal primarily with entertainment, an idea Wallace explored to great effect in Infinite Jest. They're both slightly absurd: "Mister Squishy" is about a focus group's reactions to a new chocolate cake cookie, while "The Suffering Channel" explores human excrement in great detail. This brings about an odd sense of closure; just as "Channel" follows "Squishy" in the physical book, so does excretion follow degustation. (I'm sure I'm reading too much into this, but I thought it a nice touch nonetheless.) Despite this, these stories were long and nearly uninteresting; together with the sixth story ("Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature"), they're the worst of the lot. To be fair, Wallace is never a bad writer, although he does overuse whimsical tangents as a means to add depth to his writing, and it's quite evident here.

The second story, "The Soul Is Not a Smithy", is another surreal take on existence from the fringes of human culture. Its postmodern, layered storytelling provides a quite interesting view of the human imagination. Stories about childhood are hard to get right (children don't know what they don't know; adults know that children don't know what they don't know, but how can an author show this without accidentally proving that (s)he doesn't know what (s)he thinks he knows?) but DFW does a good job of it here.

"Incarnations of Burned Children" and "Another Pioneer" are next. Both are quite short and are among my favourite. "Another Pioneer" is particularly good: its fractured narrative provides excellent commentary on the nature of fiction itself. I won't spoil either of these stories, but they're fantastically written and easy to read.

"Good Old Neon" and "Oblivion" are the other two stories (I purposely ignore "Philosophy" because I found it terribly uninteresting). They deal with existential ennui, both individual and familial. Both stories are framed by significant plot devices, but if you look past the story you'll also see Wallace's incredibly apt musings on life, love and existence. They're top-notch works and they boast more literary depth than most of the other stories.

It's interesting to note that Wallace frames most of Oblivion with subjective narrators, newspaper clippings, footnotes, dreams and the like. I wouldn't blame someone for taking these literary devices as an exercise in abstraction or metafiction. It doesn't feel like a gimmick, however; Wallace seems to know exactly how much postmodern wizardry to sprinkle into his stories to make them original but not over-rich.

All in all, Oblivion is full of fine prose, wry humour and issues worth contemplating. Wallace plays the zany name card that I so love — one character's name is Skip Atwater — and he delves into issues of self-awareness, psychology and metahumour. If you're at all interested in postmodern fiction, you won't want to miss Oblivion.(less)

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Oct 30, 2012 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1970-present, prose

Oblivion is far and away DFW's best story collection. The stories here, for the most part, showcase DFW's most disciplined and complete writing, and his most mature. The Pale King is more like Oblivion than any of DFW's other writing, but it doesn't match the sophistication of these stories.

This stuff is razor-sharp, and distills DFW's finest traits as a writer, and most of the thematic concerns broadly found in his work. There's a literary sensitivity and profoundly incisive attention to human...more

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Oct 24, 2012 Oscar rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: antología-recopilación, drama, mainstream, míos, postmodernos

Lo que está claro es que los libros de David Foster Wallace, o te gustan o no te gustan. Personalmente, me gusta cuando le da más importancia al fondo de la historia, que a la forma de contarla. Cuando no me gusta es cuando experimenta. En este sentido, 'Extinción' es el libro que más me ha gustado por ahora de DFW.

La característica más destacable de la escritura de DFW, no es su calidad literaria, que la tiene y mucha, ni las historias que cuenta, que son magníficas, todo un prodigio de imagina...more

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May 12, 2009 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

From my favorite story, "Good Old Neon":

"What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant."

Oblivion is not as consistently solid as his first short stories collection Girl With Curious Hair, but hands down is amazing nonetheless.

Only slight complaint: The very first story is a bit difficult as it's loaded with corporate marketing, PR and advertising jargon, but it...more

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Jan 19, 2008 Raül De Tena rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2007

No arranca Extinción de forma demasiado afortunada: Señor Blandito resulta, de entrada, un relato innecesariamente denso que cae de pleno en algunos de los tics más irritantes de la literatura contemporánea (distancia narrativa, descripción exhaustiva con ínfulas de objetivismo científico, descripción como enumeración). Y aunque algunos de estos tics ensombrecen pasajes de algunos de los otros relatos, cuando has acabado Extinción debes rendirte a la evidencia de que David Foster Wallace sabe ll...more No arranca Extinción de forma demasiado afortunada: Señor Blandito resulta, de entrada, un relato innecesariamente denso que cae de pleno en algunos de los tics más irritantes de la literatura contemporánea (distancia narrativa, descripción exhaustiva con ínfulas de objetivismo científico, descripción como enumeración). Y aunque algunos de estos tics ensombrecen pasajes de algunos de los otros relatos, cuando has acabado Extinción debes rendirte a la evidencia de que David Foster Wallace sabe llevar al límite su propuesta literaria, erigiéndose como uno de los autores más coherentes y con una propuesta más interesante del panorama actual. En su épica búsqueda de la voz del pensamiento (es, sin duda, magistral a la hora de sintetizar en palabra escrita lo que pasa por una cabeza humana, respetando órdenes y cadencias de pensamiento), Foster Wallace consigue rubricar algunos de los mejores relatos que este lector ocasional de relatos ha leído en mucho tiempo. Brilla por encima del resto El neón de siempre, una pirueta sublime que no sólo retrata ese complejo de impostura comunmente enquistado en el hombre urbano, sino que además se desmarca con un twist final sorprendente en el que todo se desvela como la fabulación del propio autor en torno a alguien que conoció cuando era joven. Esos giros finales que reformulan lo leído abundan en los cuentos deFoster Wallace, como si de un M. Night Shyamalam literario se tratara. Pero que quede una cosa clara: mientras que el director hace girar sus relatos sobre finales (comunmente) forzados, el escritor consigue que el conjunto quede perfectamente lubricado sobre un retruécano arriesgado y resolutivo. Otro ejemplo de esta práctica es el relato que titula el libro: Extinción acaba con una conversación entre dos personajes que nunca sabemos si son los mismos protagonistas a los que hemos seguido durante tantas páginas. Es la típica conversación que tienes con tu pareja al despertar de una pesadilla: una forma genial de cerrar un texto claustrofóbico que, ahora te das cuenta, ha estado preñado página a página del malestar propio de los peores sueños. Incluso cuando Foster Wallace se adentra en terrenos más tradicionales en lo que a narratividad se refiere (El canal del sufrimiento), no puede evitar sobresalir por encima de la media con una capacidad sobre-humana para el retrato psicológico redondo: sus primeras personas, en este y en el resto de relatos, están pobladas de tics característicos (frases repetitivas, coletillas, vicios lingüísticos) que las convierten en voces únicas y profundamente personales. En general, e incurriendo en un lugar común que el autor evitaría a toda costa, Extinción toma el pulso de forma magistral al hombre moderno. A sus neuras y disfunciones. A nuestras neuras y disfunciones. Y, sobre todo, sabe introducirse dentro de tu cabeza y plantar allí mismo, en algún pliegue desconocido de tu cerebro, la semilla de un relato que crece dentro de ti. No fuera de ti, ajeno a ti. ¿No es suficiente para prestarle un mínimo de atención?(less)

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Nov 07, 2007 Pete rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: ummmmmmm

Oh, man. Do you see how I couldn't really recommend this book to anybody, despite the fact that I voted it five stars? That's because I genuinely felt haunted by some of the enclosed stories. Now, let's think about that for a second: "haunted." What that means, basically, is that I felt like the stories were inside of me and that I really, really wished that they weren't there. Especially the title story, which is hands down the most powerful piece of written-word language ever to wrack my psych...more

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Sep 25, 2007 Dave rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I get a little depressed after reading DFW books because I realize how far my writing skills fall short. This book is insanely dense and show-offy in the best sense (like when a magician draws attention to himself to fool you...then leaves you breathless after the bangs and flashes). This is a book of short stories, though some should technically be called novellas, each with totally implausible plots...until Wallace pulls it off. Faulknerian sentences were sort of his schtick in Infinite Jest--...more

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May 12, 2008 Wendy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Another one where I'd like give it 2.5 stars. Stories are hit ( the one about the spiders, the one about the kids in the classroom, the guy who's a fraud) and miss (the one about the kid in the village, incarnations of burned children) and in between (Mr. Squishy, the title story about the snoring).

I think DFW succeeds when his stories have some heart underneath the excessive and crazy details. Sometimes, too, DFW just needs to give us a few more paragraph breaks.

If you read just one, read the o...more

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Jun 24, 2010 Melody rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: second-monday-bookgroup

I couldn’t help hearing a cry for help in every story by David Foster Wallace. The fact that the author committed suicide sat on my shoulder and nudged me at every disparaging word (of which one should expect in a book entitled Ovlivion). But just like a BP worker might want to pass by an oil covered sea turtle, I ignored his calls and instead enchanted myself with his rich prose and got lost in a copse of trees while following one of his full-to-the-brim sentences. I’ve added everything I could...more

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Apr 01, 2009 Juanita Rice rated it 5 of 5 stars

This review is stewing and "in process."

Oblivion: Stories: A soul-piercing look at the
torture of having a schism between the inner and the outer life. An extremely successful man commits suicide because he can't stop manipulating other people to like him, but he also--after that suicide--sits in the car with his pre-suicide self on the way to the smash-up,
counseling, or does he? ("Good Old Neon") A Field Researcher and Group Facilitator for Market Research for a Product Management firm plans t...more

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Jan 02, 2009 Enrique Valdivia rated it 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up after hearing an old interview of the author on NPR. The show was aired in the recent aftermath of Foster Wallace's suicide. His manic fast talk and wit reminded me of an old college buddy, a similarly gifted writer who perhaps fortunately never made it big.

I tried getting into this book several times. My ADD kept me from making much progress. Foster Wallace's sentences can go on for months. But I did finish and enjoy "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" a story about the autho...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Joseph rated it 3 of 5 stars

A challenging and interesting book of stories that still succumbs to DFW's consistent gimmickiness and fatuous preoccupation with "authenticity" and its alleged absence. This collection of virtues & flaws is most obviously typified in the famous story "Good Old Neon", which contains beautiful writing and works interestingly at formal crossways to the actual "plot" of the story, but which spends much too much time on irritating & repetitive yammering. I get it. It's supposed to be repetit...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Bob Wake rated it 5 of 5 stars

[Reviewed in 2004]

Oblivion is David Foster Wallace’s third and best collection of short stories to date. Without sacrificing his flair for brainy surreal prose and dead-on social satire—which have on occasion seemed like ends in themselves—Wallace has added a stronger than usual emphasis on narrative drive and ingenious plotting. Consistently impressive is his much-admired talent for bringing a plaintive three-dimensionality to the inner lives of his characters. Six of the eight stories here are...more [Reviewed in 2004]

Oblivion is David Foster Wallace’s third and best collection of short stories to date. Without sacrificing his flair for brainy surreal prose and dead-on social satire—which have on occasion seemed like ends in themselves—Wallace has added a stronger than usual emphasis on narrative drive and ingenious plotting. Consistently impressive is his much-admired talent for bringing a plaintive three-dimensionality to the inner lives of his characters. Six of the eight stories here are long and intricate examples of the author’s labyrinthine tale spinning. And yet, one of the most memorable pieces is only three pages in length. A masterpiece of heart-stopping brevity, “Incarnations of Burned Children” concerns the frantic efforts of a mother and father to console their infant son who has been severely scalded from an overturned pot of boiling water on the stove. The child’s screams, we’re told, “were regular as breath and went on so long they’d become already a thing in the kitchen.” As the title suggests, Wallace imbues the story with a mythic universality. The characters and the locale are never named, thus allowing readers to distance themselves from the horrific scene while at the same time pondering the eternal verities of familial tragedy.

In the story “The Suffering Channel,” a corporation with the motto “consciousness is nature’s nightmare” plans to launch a cable channel devoted to human misery. It’s a motto suitable for much of Wallace’s work. No other contemporary American author has so painstakingly—and hilariously—mapped the incessant dysfunctional chatter that streams through our heads and masquerades as rational thought. Several of the stories in Oblivion are tours de force of cognition gone awry. The title piece is an increasingly desperate first-person account of the sleep-deprived meltdown of Randall Napier, an assistant systems supervisor for a company called Advanced Data Capture. Embroiled in a dispute with his wife over the issue of his nighttime snoring, Napier no longer can sleep at all. His brain-fried daytime hours are given over to aural and visual hallucinations (“sometimes, for instance, trying to shave in the mirror, my visage will appear to have an extra eye in the center of my forehead…”). Visits to an unsympathetic psychiatrist and a high-tech sleep clinic succeed merely in compounding Napier’s frustration. The ending delivers a double whammy that will have enterprising readers going back over the narrative and trying to follow the breadcrumb trail of bizarre clues.

Wallace is nothing if not fearlessly ecumenical in his literary tastes and influences, at times blending elements of science fiction and fantasy with a kind of micromanaged naturalism. “Good Old Neon,” for example, begins as a painfully detailed confession of one man’s route to suicide. “I know this part is boring,” he laments, “but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies.” Remarkably, the story fulfills its promise: We’re treated to an eerily plausible and unsentimental glimpse of the afterlife. Sometimes Wallace’s relentless quest for offbeat material can become tedious and self-indulgent on the page. The collection’s opening piece, “Mister Squishy,” relies rather too heavily on the drone of acronym-laden corporate-speak at a Chicago ad agency. (“Down the hall and past the MROP Division’s green room, in another R.S.B. conference room whose windows faced NE, Darlene Lilley was leading twelve consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase of Focused Response without any structured QA or ersatz Full-Access background.”) It’s something of a lost cause, but “Mister Squishy” springs fitfully to life with an impending act of domestic terror involving a deadly batch of home-brewed ricin.

The triumph of Oblivion is a deepening sense of compassion in Wallace’s work. While alienation and despair remain key themes, his characters are so richly drawn that they behave less like pawns of injustice or fate than tragic purveyors of their own limitations. “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” is notable for the graceful manner in which its layered story lines intertwine and mirror one another in unexpected ways. The narrator is recalling a traumatic experience from his childhood when he was nine years old and a grade school teacher suffered a nervous breakdown at the blackboard. Fervently daydreaming in the back of the room, the narrator failed to notice the exodus of frightened classmates. “For my own part,” he tells us, “I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven.” As he reflects on the monotonous insurance company job his father dutifully held for years, an unspoken parallel emerges between the school teacher and the father, as well as the narrator himself. How does an individual avoid going crazy in dehumanizing circumstances? Fear, it seems, is subdued via the transformative gestalts of storytelling and daydreaming. Chaos is held at bay by shaping and refining it into a coherent narrative. David Foster Wallace has long been a master at showing us the face of chaos. Oblivion represents his blossoming into a writer of profoundly artful coherence.
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Jan 08, 2013 Vivian Valvano rated it 5 of 5 stars

Published in 2004, this collection of short stories (it is so painful to say - DFW's last) is a tour de force. I would not recommend this as an introduction to DFW's work. I believe it can be best appreciated by readers who've grown accustomed, in so far as we're able, to the writerly mind of DFW. The stories have his peerless humor and his underpinnings of woe, and they are rife with his masterly word games and mediated narrations and exhaustive compilations of details that seem to be meanderin...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Adam Krause rated it 4 of 5 stars

In many of this collection’s passages about the daily hell and heroism of an unfulfilling job, we see Wallace working out some of the ideas that would find their way into The Pale King. (The father’s cherished lunch break in front of his square of grass in “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” recalls the mercilessly elapsing break time for Lane Dean, Jr. in The Pale King, for instance.) As in almost all of Wallace, the stunningly beautiful and frightening is side by side with the eye-wateringly tedious, o...more

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Sep 18, 2012 Debbie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Short story collections are difficult to rate... the first story in this one took me something like 2 weeks to read. I nearly gave up on the whole thing, but am mostly glad that I did not. There are a few really good stories, and a couple that I would recommend skipping. The one about the man who Wallace (apparently) went to school with that committed suicide was very interesting, mostly because I found myself wondering how much of the characterization is a peek into the mind of a man who, only...more

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Aug 04, 2012 Κατερίνα Μαλακατέ rated it 5 of 5 stars

http://www.diavazontas.blogspot.gr/20...

"The heir apparent to Thomas Pynchon*", λέει η κριτική των Times στο πίσω μέρος του paperback που έχω στα χέρια μου. Κι αν και οι γνώσεις μου για τον Pynchon είναι πολύ περιορισμένες, μιας και οι πρόσφατες προσπάθειες μου με το «Ουράνιο τόξο της βαρύτητας» δεν ξεπέρασαν ποτέ την 50η σελίδα, νιώθω πως ο κριτικός των Times έχει τα δίκια του. Μιλάμε κι εδώ για μια γραφή δύσκολη και συνειρμική, που καθώς προχωρά βυθίζεται στις λεπτομέρειες, με μια αίσθηση σπιρ...more

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Jan 03, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: merkins, short-stories

I don’t think collections serve Foster Wallace well: it seems to me his stories would read better as stand-alones on some thoroughly modern internet webshite, with accompanying artwork or explanatory hyperlinks, rather than modishly festering on some fading acid paper alongside all the other fuddy-duddies. (PS Abacus, your paper is cheap and lousy). Case in point is ‘Mister Squishy,’ which seems to cry out for its own accompanying glossary, appended addenda and so on, but sits uneasily on the pa...more I don’t think collections serve Foster Wallace well: it seems to me his stories would read better as stand-alones on some thoroughly modern internet webshite, with accompanying artwork or explanatory hyperlinks, rather than modishly festering on some fading acid paper alongside all the other fuddy-duddies. (PS Abacus, your paper is cheap and lousy). Case in point is ‘Mister Squishy,’ which seems to cry out for its own accompanying glossary, appended addenda and so on, but sits uneasily on the page in all its hypermodern dazzle. Nevertheless, the gang’s all here, from the disquieting hometown horror of ‘The Soul is Not a Smithy’ to the absolutely staggeringly wonderful exploration of a mind locked in a recursive self-critical philosophy, ‘Good Old Neon,’ to the blithering incomprehension of ‘Another Pioneer’ which I did not understand AT ALL.

‘The Suffering Channel’ is a brilliant novella about a pretentious style mag based in the World Trade Centre a few months before impact, and explores the peddling of suffering and faecal matter under the guise of an acceptable counterculture. Like the other pieces in this collection, it mimics the language and tone of its world with beyond pedantic perfection, without losing the detached overlord tone that keeps Wallace’s style distinctive. It is telling that the sentence that made me quiver the most was the unexpectedly direct insertion, on a one-word line of dialogue, of the simple statement: “She had ten weeks to live.” Oh God, I think my bones done froze themselves. How does he DO that?

The other pieces here are excellent, including the dramatic rush of ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ which is a story it seems about narrative perspective, the short and endearingly odd ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,’ and the title piece is a bamboozling voice experiment using a form of dreamlike language where the narrator is perpetually indecisive about word choice, and where words and their meanings are continually being challenged by infernal quote marks. The end result almost seems like a slightly canny self-parody or coyly embedded meta-comment, but who knows? It’s a difficult story to get through (along with the opening piece) but perseverance will be rewarded.

This collection will frustrate you and tantalise you in equal measure, but don’t worry: you’ll feel it in your nerve endings.
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Jul 18, 2011 Ck rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The eight stories that make up David Foster Wallace's Oblivion are perhaps the bleakest I've read from him. Just looking at the title can tell you that. An infant trapped in a scalding diaper, a mentally deranged substitute teacher, a marriage teetering on the outcome of a snoring diagnosis...His characters tend to project a sad sack-ish nature bordering on some kind of mania. They're also difficult reads. They're tersely written stories and as much as DFW has confused me with his prose his abil...more

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Nov 13, 2010 Kirstie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes I find David Foster Wallace a little hyper-intellectual and what I mean by that is he has many great ideas that get lost in his own hyperbolic self. Some of the appeal of the greatest writers of our time-take Hemingway or Kerouac for instance is that they were able to write novels that anyone with interest in literature could grasp and understand. Wallace is (was) a bit of an elitist in this respect. He writes novels for the highest literary echelon to try to fathom and after awhile it...more Sometimes I find David Foster Wallace a little hyper-intellectual and what I mean by that is he has many great ideas that get lost in his own hyperbolic self. Some of the appeal of the greatest writers of our time-take Hemingway or Kerouac for instance is that they were able to write novels that anyone with interest in literature could grasp and understand. Wallace is (was) a bit of an elitist in this respect. He writes novels for the highest literary echelon to try to fathom and after awhile it seems almost pointless..it's a sake of writing to impress and it's, quite bluntly, wankery. It's akin to hearing a 20 minute reeling guitar solo that signifies absolutely nothing besides how fast someone can use their fingers. I know Wallace can write a slew of big words, but can he make me feel something besides? That's where the bottom line comes in for me.

Of course, Oblivion is insufferable to the reader in many ways and Wallace was certainly oblivious for not seeing how over 60 pages of tiring descriptions of corporate product focus groups and marketing would inspire anyone to do anything besides take copious quantities of Ibuprofen. If you can get past this first story entitled "Mister Squishy", it does get better. The story about the insane substitute who starts writing KILL THEM all over the chalkboard during a Bill of Rights lesson for instance is quite interesting (The Soul is Not a Smithy). It's also not surprising that one of the student hostages taken (a protagonist) is a perpetual day dreamer. There's also the story (The Suffering Channel) of the very anal man who excretes literally works of art every time he uses the toilet and Style magazine has to decide whether or not to run an article about it. Of course, it's set about a month from 911 and the offices are high up in the World Trade Center so you have to figure all of the execs making the decisions will be passing away soon anyhow, making it seem like a rather futile story just like all of Wallace's stories inevitably do seem. Some of the complexity of a relationship crossed with paranoid delusions and possible hallucinations are explored well in "Oblivion" Probably the best story is "Good Old Neon" which is about a man who feels so fake and like a fraud he must kill himself.

Wallace has some excellent ideas and I'd really like to rate this collection higher but ultimately many of the emotion and the feeling of what he could bring out gets lots in pretension. That's not good writing in my opinion. It's frankly a waste of talent.

Give me Dostoevsky instead any day of the week. There's an intellectual that could write with the kind of feeling that helped the reader understand the deep nature of his darkness.(less)

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Aug 09, 2010 Daniel King rated it 5 of 5 stars

Based on some negative reviews I had read of this book, I started reading it expecting to be disappointed. Far from it; it actually ended up sucking me in, and I thought that it was an excellent read overall. Some stories are far stronger than others, of course. "Good Old Neon" and "The Soul is Not a Smithy" were my two favorites, the former because it seemed the most moving, personal story in the collection, and the latter simply because I thought it was a very unique approach to what could hav...more Based on some negative reviews I had read of this book, I started reading it expecting to be disappointed. Far from it; it actually ended up sucking me in, and I thought that it was an excellent read overall. Some stories are far stronger than others, of course. "Good Old Neon" and "The Soul is Not a Smithy" were my two favorites, the former because it seemed the most moving, personal story in the collection, and the latter simply because I thought it was a very unique approach to what could have been a more conventional story (this could be said of a great deal of Wallace's work, but I thought that his style of writing really lent itself well to "The Soul is Not a Smithy"'s plot and structure). The weakest stories in the collection, in my opinion, were "Mister Squishy," and "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." Wallace's trademark style of not providing real conclusions to his stories works for me a lot of the time, but in the case of these two pieces I found myself wishing that just once he could have given the reader a bit more to go on.

I also loved the last, and longest, story in the collection, "The Suffering Channel". I am a huge fan of "Infinite Jest," and to me "The Suffering Channel" read like a miniaturized version of that novel. One review I read claimed it's the most conventional story of the lot, which in my opinion is a description similar to "the skinniest kid at fat camp" or something like that. The story is set in July 2001, and its characters all work in NYC's World Trade Center. As such, I feel that Wallace's habit of not wrapping up stories properly works particularly well in this case. He doesn't provide a real conclusion to the narrative, but in a way he doesn't need to; the reader knows that the majority of the characters are doomed, and this dramatic irony makes the story extremely morbid and yet also, ultimately more satisfying than a few of the others in the collection.

Overall, I would recommend "Oblivion" to any David Foster Wallace fan, as well as anyone who wants to get into his work but doesn't feel like laboring through "Infinite Jest".(less)

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Jun 11, 2010 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is more of a 3.5 than a 4, that I'm rounding Wallace up for. This book is an interesting read for a number of reasons. It has some great stories ("Good Old Neon," "Incarnations of Burned Children," and "The Suffering Channel"--who doesn't love a good poop story?), some solidly good stories ("Mr. Squishy," "The Soul is Not a Smithy," and "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) as well as a couple I found less rewarding. Anyway, it's interesting b/c the collection has such a different feel from...more

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Sep 13, 2009 Ricki rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed the title story from this book and at least parts of the others. This may sound horrid but from his writing in this book I could understand why he committed suicide: his mind must have been constantly working, looking, dissecting and analysing - living with a mind like that must have been incredibly difficult. This tendency to dissect situations and people meant that, in most of these stories, what started out interesting, expanded into something deeper and more interesting, but...more

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Jul 18, 2009 Chris McCracken rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read a review recently of DFW's dealing with a book I've not read by David Markson called Wittgenstein's Mistress. (This is how much I love DFW -- I'll read reviews he's written on books about which I am clueless) In the review he mentions the narrator's explicitly revealing stream-of-consciousness which includes everything that passes through her mind's periphery. He notes his admiration for this technique. He seems to see it as more honest than the narrators of what he calls "the Carverians"...more

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About David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it fe...more

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Quotes from Oblivion

“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.” — 149 people liked it

“The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think...The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali--it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody.” — 98 people liked it

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