If you’re wondering how you’re going to fill in your time for the next few months of lockdown, wonder no longer! Infinite Jest is an astonishing 99p on the kindle today.
Seriously, if you’ve ever wanted to tackle David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, now is the time.
If you’ve already read it, feel free to add your thoughts on it below.
My favourite piece of David Foster Wallace writing is “This is Water”, his famous 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. This is tremendous stuff – much more cogent and disciplined than the one DFW novel that I’ve read (“The Pale King”).
https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
Bought – although if I make it past 50 pages I’ll be surprised [that’s all about me, not the book]
Has anyone read it without reading the footnotes? Is it possible? Does it still work as a story without reading them?
Number one best seller in Hair loss, it would seem…
Unreadable.
Film:
The End of the Tour (2015)
A journalist for Rolling Stone magazine (Jesse Eisenberg) spends time with author David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) as his book tour for Infinite Jest (1996) comes to an end.
I was inspired to watch it again because a few days before I bought a copy of Infinite Jest. I believe I approached the book with good intentions. The film had stimulated my curiosity in advance and I felt a desire at this point in time to read a big, thick, obtuse, challenging 1000 page novel. The one thing its lovers and haters agree upon is that it’s well-written. I doubt I’ve ever read anyone say it was badly written. I disagree. Strongly. The definition of good writing is that it’s easy to comprehend and understand what the author is saying. Ease of communication is a hallmark of competent writing. My English teachers would not like it if I handed in writing as confusing as this. I found on a sentence by sentence level, never mind the larger picture, that it was close to impossible to follow. It was so obscure and vague that I had no idea what I was reading. This was the very definition of bad writing. There were so few anchors or footholds on what was happening and why that I found it to be utterly unreadable. I started skipping pages within the opening scene (why this bloated scene is even in the book I can’t say). Then I skipped pages in the second scene. I gave up after about fifteen minutes of reading. There might be some merit to the book as David Foster Wallace is definitely a smart man and the film suggests there’s lots of intriguing content within the book, but he’s written these brilliant ideas into a reader unfriendly novel that I’m not going to waste my time trying to understand.
Well that’s saved me 99p that I will instead spend on Edd China’s likely more coherent memoir of Wheeler Dealers…
I have read it – in the mid 90s when it came out – and remember enjoying it, though the tennis academy bits more than the rehab. A word of caution: a large part of the fun of the novel is the footnotes (200 pages) and flipping back and forth on a kindle I am guessing is considerably less easy than in the printed version. However, weightwise only one winner! Without footnotes is almost exactly the same length as the current Mantel doorstopper , The Mirror and the Light. That is so heavy in hardback am struggling to hold it with one hand in bed. On DFW style @loudspeaker you either buy into his overly-specific detailing or not.
And if you have 56 hours to spare there is an unabridged audiobook, but its not for the fanboys as there’s no footnotes.
I read it on holiday, several years ago. I can’t remember that much about it, except that I hadn’t a clue what it was all about. I was no wiser when I had finished, but felt there should be a medal for getting to the end. I am sure that I read the footnotes along with the text, but I don’t think they helped me understand it any better. I didn’t review it on Goodreads, so that makes it before 2012 – no wonder my recall is fuzzy.
Personally, I liked it (though it’s a good few years since I read it). I don’t think I could propound at length on the plot, meaning etc. I just just, you know, got into it.
I thought there were some amusing touches – the wheelchair assassins, the US firing its rubbish up into Canada, each year sponsored by a different product etc. And the concept of the Infinite Jest video itself is intriguing.
Thought I’d take punt on it for 99p.
If the footnotes are as essential / numerous as people are suggesting, I might try having it open on the Kindle to read and also on the phone app to show the footnotes.
According to one reviewer the footnotes on the Kindle are hyperlinked which makes it easier to read.
Got plenty of reading material already, both on my shelves and on my Kindle. With the very mixed reviews above, I think I’ll pass on this one.