Infinite Jest in On Paths Unknown

Jul 16, 2016 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, american-21st-c, novels, post-modern, classics, fiction, american-20th-c

Admittedly, Infinite Jest is a tough book. You start the book having no clue when it is happening and who the various characters are. There is stuff that happens in the opening pages that explains events at the end of the book, albeit over 1000 pages and hundreds of footnotes away. I'd say it is quite elliptical. That being said, it is an amazing piece of literature. I forced myself through the first 300 and then 400 pages and at about 500 pages I finally hit my stride and was able to follow thr Admittedly, Infinite Jest is a tough book. You start the book having no clue when it is happening and who the various characters are. There is stuff that happens in the opening pages that explains events at the end of the book, albeit over 1000 pages and hundreds of footnotes away. I'd say it is quite elliptical. That being said, it is an amazing piece of literature. I forced myself through the first 300 and then 400 pages and at about 500 pages I finally hit my stride and was able to follow through to 1071 (yes this was the British printing not the American one). I loved the characters and the high comedy that is here as well as all the wacky situations in the drug rehab centre and the tennis academy. The president reminded me a lot of the current American regime (I could almost see the Statue of Liberty carrying a Trump Tower logo across her forehead or maybe a Chick-Fil-A sign) and the text was occasionally of incredible beauty and insight.

Take this passage from the Marathe/Steeply dialog:
“Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what.Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say choose to you you make expressions with your face such as “Herrrrrre we are going.” Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions.”

This is such a perceptive description of why Drumpf was elected. A vast swath of Americans are driven by short attention soans, knee-jerk reactionism based on their inability to choose and their reliance of "alternative facts." President J. Gently is eerily similar to Drumpf - the coming destruction of Standing Rock by the pipeline (from which Drumpf himself - oh, sorry his son - will profit), how is that different from the Concavity? DFW's book can be read as much of a warning againsy Drumpf as Roth's The Plot Against America or Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. And I digress...An important book for the 21st C! And oh, so relevant!

I talked for a few hours to fellow Goodreads reading addict Nocturnalux and tried to get her convinced that this should be on her reading list. It remains for me a landmark work requiring infinite patience to get the reveal of the infinite joke at the end. ...more

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Jul 17, 2017 Ashley added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017

16 JULY – YEAR OF THE TRUMP® BRAND TOMATO-BASED STEAK CONDIMENT

For those of us standing outside of Trump Tower one chilblains-inducing night late last November, it looked as if consensus would not be reached w/r/t the official subsidized name of the year that even then felt as if it was barreling towards us (or maybe, we were barreling towards it?) like a runaway truck rocketing through Wolf Creek Pass, heedless of the sloping gavel ramps that terminate in a phalanx of yellow trash barrels, pres ...more

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Jan 25, 2017 Ronald Morton rated it it was amazing

Shelves: half-of-1001-books

It’s been almost 19 years since I read this book for the first (and only) time. I was fairly young when I read it, and remembered very little of it (outside of a few funny moments that had embedded themselves in my memory, and a loose idea of the general plot) – and as such (much like Gass’s The Tunnel, which I read around the same time) this has long been marked for a re-read in my mind. In fact, I picked up a copy of it around four years ago to do just that, and finally decided it was time.

Som ...more

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