Infinite Jest

De: David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers

Narrado por: Sean Pratt

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.

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 renew the idea of what a novel can do.

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

©2024 David Foster Wallace (P)2024 Little, Brown & Company

Wonderful in audio

I couldn’t imagine this in audio but narrator did an amazing job, with DFW long sentences and great wordplay. Narrator was smooth and really brought IJ to life in unexpected ways.
IJ one of my favorite books. This makes my 5th reading as it’s so dense & not easy to hold & read such a heavy book that you also can’t put down.
I’d put this audio version over reading it first for its clarity and excellence overall. You can follow along with the book to get into the longer footnotes and not get lost.
Amazing job. Kudos to narrator and production team.

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.

Incredible

This version of the audio book is so impressive. Love how they handle the footnotes - it was a touch distracting at first, but you get use to it quickly and I don’t think there is a better way of doing it. The narrator really brought the characters alive. Amazing performance. I was never able to make it through the print version, so happy the audio book was so well done. It’s a life changing novel. It’s worth the effort and time.

Listen to this and you won’t need to read the book

A narration like no other. This book is given a fantastic narration. It is hard to imagine it being any better. The narrator gives a different voicing to each character which makes them immediately recognizable. If you’ve always wanted to read this book, but something about it was holding you back, then this is what you want. What about the story? It’s nonlinear and has multiple points of view. The author had an incredible imagination. When people ask me what it is like I say that you might imagine Charles Dickens on steroids (for the descriptive detail and memorable characters); Kurt Vonnegut (for the fantasy elements); and L. Sterne’s (author of “Tristan Shandy”), for the incredibly comical situations.

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.

An Impressive Recording, All Things Considering — The Narrator Is Brilliant, Does Not Give One ‘The Fantods’

For first time readers/listeners, as well as those that are unfamiliar with D.F.W, do yourself a favour and read the book while you’re listening. Read a few hundred pages then listen to ten hours or so, and just keep on until you’re done with both. There is a common misconception that D.F.W is dense. He is not dense at all. He is wonderfully easy to read and understand. The predicament with Infinite Jest is its length, and for first time readers/listeners a lot will simply get missed because it’s such a significant amount of literature to digest. So read while you’re listening.

The voices Sean Pratt hear employees are well deployed and useful. There are so many characters,and each are lengthily-developed and more complex than the last. Listening to this work be performed so to speak allows one to paint stronger mental images about what is occurring, why it is occurring, and how each segment is connected to the next/last.

I am of the impression that there are two types of D.F.W. readers; those who are interested in being entertained and potentially generating some input on entertainment as well as addiction, and those who are attempting to decipher what Infinite Jest is “really all about.” I think moreover that both types are of course linked at least to a degree… This recording with Sean Pratt will help you determine just which type they are.

Moreover; being that this is as long of a work as it is, a few pointers: A) Look up words you don’t know… B) Don’t pause the recording in the middle of a footnote as you’ll get confused/lost when you un-pause… C) Abstain from reading/watching any critical analysis of this work before or while you’re reading; this will impede your ability to paint your own imagery and/or draw your own responses.

-Noah Balfour
Listened from the 1st of May, finished on June 19th — 2024; re-read the work throughout the month of May 2024

Achievement unloockef!

This work is as long as the Old Testament, and has about as much mystery surrounding it. Loosely based on "Hamlet," it's a story about a short piece of media (called a "cartridge") that is so entertaining that viewers cannot do anything else once exposed to it, causing death. This work had a long, rambling narrative that is almost impossible to decipher due to the many digressions, exhaustingly long cast of characters, and a plot that is extremely non-linear. Did I forget to mention the footnotes? This audiobook is a fantastic way to experience the work, as its narrator nails a dizzying array of accents, affects, and attitudes and the footnotes are conveniently delivered with a brief into and bell sound when concluded. The only criticism I have of this work is that it is so dense that it *will* escape your comprehension. Since it's author knows how to write in a more common, accessible style, as witnessed by his nonfiction work, one can only assume the inaccessibility is a feature, not a bug.

I misjudged this book back in the day

I remember everyone who thought themselves cool had this book on their shelves in the late 90s. They would condescendingly tell teenage me I “probably wouldn’t get it”.
Then as the years went by and it attained “lit bro” status I avoided it even more.
I finally decided to give it a shot as part of a book club I’m in. I’m so very glad I did. I had no idea how funny, deep, poignant, and relevant it would be. Maybe I would not have “got it “ back when I hadn’t lived through some of the harder parts of life. For whatever reason this spoke to me on a profound level.

Once again the books that make me feel this way are usually written by people who de-map themselves.

Read it. If it isn’t right for you then try again in a few years.

Also, the narration was some of the best I’ve ever heard. So good that I emailed the narrator, Sean Pratt, to tell him so. I have never done this before. It’s that good.

raw human experience

amazing... quite possibly the best book I've listened too... I didn't really follow a lot till the second time through