Infinite Jest (30th Anniversary Edition)

De: David Foster Wallace, Michelle Zauner - introduction

Narrado por: Sean Pratt, Michelle Zauner

The 30th anniversary edition of the virtuosic, wickedly comic modern classic about the pursuit of happiness in America, with a new foreword written and read by Michelle Zauner, author of the New York Times bestselling sensation Crying in H Mart.

“To my mind, there have been two great American novels in the past fifty years. Catch-22 is one; this is the other.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

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 questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renews the idea of what a novel can do.

“Uproarious ... Infinite Jest shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer … who can seemingly do anything.” ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“The next step in fiction ... Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty ... Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think.” —Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic

One of Time magazine’s “100 Best Novels” (1923—2005)

Publishers note: This unabridged audiobook edition includes all footnotes, signaled by a brief chime, and read in sequence throughout the main text as part of the full immersive listening experience.

It seems impossible that this classic work could be improved, but Sean Pratt's reading is that brilliant.

I love this book and have read it twice, but we all agree, that's an undertaking. So dense, it has eluded many. Now that this audio version is available, many more people will experience this stunning work. The book interweaves several plot lines, each in the voice of an artfully drawn, idiosyncratic character, and Sean Pratt brings them all to life. Wallace would have been more than pleased by this performance of his opus.

Infinitely jesting but thankfully not interminably so

Review First Half to footnote 202:

Seduction strategies #12 and #16 being applied… but in the end it’s just Christ on a jetski! Complaint, but seriously: I had to look up “soccum” - hundreds of footnotes, but none explaining that? C’mon! …

Presenting: speedy seduction strategy #7! It never fails! We like chortles - chortles are good! Let the EEC pay for their own defense! Motions are gone through … then I took a breather - after 32h, I think I deserved it! …

Also, just coming to my mind: I really, at this point, could not imagine anything I’m less interested in than prep school or college tennis. Needed to say that. Québec is okay, though, somehow.

Review Second Half on from footnote 203:

“The unfortunate me” - unfinished, unreleased … The Year of the “let’s vote for the guy who we can be sure screws all of us over intentionally rather than for the lady who just pretends to care about us” Election … They took away my belt and my shoe strings - but I noticed they didn’t take away my feelings! …

“Now, you’re going to risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I goin’ to rip off your head and shit in your neck!” … It’s the chill of inspiration and all the girls in grass skirts. The daily bullshit here is hip-deep. The terror over the fall is overcome by the terror of the flames.

“No towardness. No narrative movement toward a real story.” Exactly. “This is no “saliva sticking to frozen metal”-type of situation.” No, it isn’t, or what sayest thou, Madame Psychosis, or Phully (sic!) Phunctioning (siccer!) Fill (siccest!), no DDD?

Although … … … Up to about 50h in, I thought about this book as sidetracks of sidetracks to sidetracks, with yet more sidetracks sidetracking these sidetracks… and when the author couldn’t narratively handle the third or fourth sidetrack level (it’s his book, after all, fair enough) he just put it into a sidtrack, uh, sorry: footnote.

Now, towards the end, it starts to feel like there is a book or story here. Unfortunately, it is a semi-bleak, semi-neutral, semi-detached - but beautifully worded - illicit drug addiction story in funny and/or graphic detail. And yeah, those poor drug users. Good thing we don’t have to worry about the other ppl who get robbed, fleeced, injured, killed, damaged by these drug users. At least not in this book. They’re not even in the footnotes here. Because that might just have made it less easy to read and too senselessly bleak? I understand noone is a winner here, baby, that’s the truth, and all are victims, but aren’t there some perpetrators, anywhere at all???

I read about David Foster Wallace only in the last hour of listening to this… and: what a surprise! He was a tennis-playing drug addict abuser. I am shocked - shocked, I tell ya!

What do I hear? I should be nice to him, post mortem? I think we should be as nice to him as he was to Linda McCartney, okay?

Oh, well. On to shorter oeuvres.

Good Luck...

Years ago a good friend of mine was on a beach in Mexico. a local teenage boy, likely know older than 16 or 17, approach the two of them with a basket of oysters and clams on ice and offered, for the price of $0.25 each, shucked fresh oysters. they were hungry, and so between the two of them they ate about 16. Very fresh and very delicious. my friend was there with his buddy, who had a hard copy of infinite Jest on his beach towel. As the oyster vendor picked up his basket, dripping a bit from the melting ice chunks that were keeping the remaining oysters cool and fresh, he starts to walk away from them, stops, turns and says before moving on- "Good luck with David Foster Wallace."

Narration

I thought a halfway decent IJ audiobook would be impossible—that’s not what i got. This exceeds all precedent set by previous recorded novels. A feat. And one the most important novels of the last hundred years, of course.

The production honors the text.

I have read IJ in the 1990s paperback, then again in the Kindle version. The audiobook added rather than detracted.