/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14275357]

Is it actually good or a meme i'm not aware of?

[Anonymous No.14275365]

I just opened my copy for the first time yesterday. I'm gonna force myself to read it, no matter what it takes. I'll report back in 2-3 months

[Anonymous No.14275372]

>>14275357
yes, it is good. it is like someone put a gun to Pynchon's head and told him to write as neurotically lucid and as sentimental as possible.

[Anonymous No.14275376]

>>14275357
It is 1000 pages of memes. It has been written to that every page has a hook.

It's alright I suppose. It's more of an experiment than a great novel.

[Anonymous No.14275377]

>>14275357
It's shit.

[Anonymous No.14275379]

>>14275372
>Comparing DFW to Pynchon

[Anonymous No.14275787]

>>14275357
Don't listen to this >>14275377 faggot. It's a good book.
Don't listen to this >>14275379 faggot. It was heavily influenced by Pynchon and you can tell it, if you have read the book, of course.
Don't listen to this >>14275376 faggot. It's a good book and you will never be able to discuss it here because of "muh memes". Sometimes it is tedious because of some stupid idea DFW had about "people in the background and how nobody pays attention to what they say in films, books and tv series, by the way guys remember sierpinski triangle???". Sometimes it is genuinely great and beautiful and thought-provoking.

[Anonymous No.14275797]

>>14275357
its a good book, the question is: are you smart enough to read it?

[Anonymous No.14275807]

>>14275357
I'm like 3/4 through it and I absolutely love it
>>14275379
>what is an encyclopedic novel
lol what a fucking moron you are

but seriously OP, it's a phenomenal book

[Anonymous No.14275810]

>>14275797
nono common misconception, dave purposely wrote in a way which the common man could understand. Neither narrative (in general) nor writing is difficult, tedious, sure, but the avg person with some determination could power through it

[Anonymous No.14275814]

>>14275357
Don’t listen to >>14275787 he’s an underage newfriend.

[Anonymous No.14275818]

>>14275807
what is an encyclopedic novel?

[Anonymous No.14275844]

>>14275818
it'sa novel that is enormously complex and consistently self-referential

not only is IJ like this because of the end notes, but the themes repeat in ways that are self-reflexive than redundant.

[Anonymous No.14275848]

>>14275844
*reflexive RATHER than redundant

[Anonymous No.14276579]

It’s extremely good. The first and last section of the book are incredible.

[Anonymous No.14276649]

>>14275787
Fuck off back to redbiit, garfield.

[Anonymous No.14276696]

>>14276649
Make me, niggerlover.

[Anonymous No.14276726]

>Kate Gompert. Suicidally depressed 21 year-old Kate Gompert is the most uncompromising and affecting character in this entire novel, and perhaps the biggest bone I have to pick with the late Mr. Wallace concerns his failure of her. For this is a case where we actually can speak of an author failing one of his characters. When she is introduced in a 10-page scene beginning on page 68, she seems (like Erdedy) to be destined for a major role in IJ, but (also like Erdedy) we only have a couple scenes and a few brief glimpses of her thereafter. (It occurs to me that in both these scenes DFW is playing with readerly expectations, artificially heightening and then gradually dashing them.) She is a character strong enough to carry an entire novel and to be at least the equal of Hal and Gately in this one, but after the strong intro, Wallace uses her briefly and then drops her cruelly to her death. And the word 'uses' is carefully chosen. Kate Gompert provides the thin, U.H.I.D.-style veil through which DFW tells us all he knows firsthand about the suicidal depression that will eventually kill him. If you read nothing else in Infinite Jest, read pages 692-698, where Wallace dons the mask of Kate Gompert's free indirect narration to write a 12-years premature suicide note. They're some of the most brilliant and moving pages ever written about suicide, and they're well worth the price of the book. When Wallace is done with them, however, he's pretty much done with Kate. A couple hundred pages later she falls unwittingly into the hands of the sadistic "wheelchair assassins" and presumably becomes a "test subject" victim of Infinite Jest V. The character Wallace created deserves better than this; her author fails her.

Why did he fail her?

[Anonymous No.14277269]

>>14276726
>Why did he fail her?
He didn't. Mr Green should probably read IJ again, probably would be wise to take notes this time.

[Anonymous No.14277295]

>>14276726
>slandering the work of a significantly more accomplished dead guy to win points with depressed, suicidal and vulnerable young girls
What a worm
Also he’s wrong; Gompert has a much more important, albeit it soul-crushing role in the book that he’s deliberately ignoring. The fucking leech.

[Anonymous No.14277312]

>>14275357
It's genuinely one of the best books I've ever read

>>14277269
>He didn't.
As in, she didn't actually falll into the hands of the AFR? It's been a while since I've read IJ

[Anonymous No.14277338]

>>14277312
Kate most probably watched the cartridge, but it was her voluntary choice. It's important that she could choose to watch IJ because it is that that there are were people (Randy Lentz and Tony Krauze) that were made to watch it.

[Anonymous No.14277361]

>>14277338
No she didn't, Ray was getting shit faced, he was not on the job.

[Anonymous No.14277426]

>>14276726
her titties were too big

[Anonymous No.14277470]

I read IJ a few years ago despite the memes. It was a genuinely good, thought provoking book for the most part. I recommend it, but don't take it too seriously.

Pseuds on the internet who think they are smarter than everybody else love to hate on it because they can't bring themselves to enjoy anything that a significant number of others also enjoy.

[Anonymous No.14277488]

>>14277312
She was explained what it would do before being asked if she wanted to watch it. She agreed because she wanted to escape her depression. This wasn't some sort of failing of the author, if anything it was him recognizing the futility inherent with chronic mental health problems.

[Anonymous No.14277519]

>>14276726
this is the attitude jealousy takes when you realize that a footnote character outshines your entire career

[Anonymous No.14277536]

>>14277295
>>14277519

> "Dave, dude, why's your book so white?" This is not an idle or PC-motivated question. Whenever we consider a work as large and seemingly all-embracing as Infinite Jest, we should think about what it excludes and/or marginalizes. There are African-American characters in IJ, but they are without exception minor and/or stereotypical. In terms of memorable characters, this novel is as white as a Woody Allen film. A brief early scene narrated by Clenette in the first person (37-8) seems to promise an expansion of the novel's range into the African-American housing projects of its Boston milieu, but the end of the novel leaves this promise unfulfilled and Clenette never becomes more than a minor resident of Ennet House, an extra, a 'figurant.' In the early scene, Wallace briefly opens a window upon a true American hell a world away from the absurdist pseudotragedies of E.T.A. But that window is just as abruptly closed and never really cracked again. This single scene aside, the color line is a boundary IJ doesn't even attempt to cross.

Why did John Green hate DFW so much?

[Anonymous No.14277710]

>>14275357
It's a fun book that says nothing which causes DFW fans to seethe when such a fact is pointed out to them, causing them to pivot and flinch and deploy such words as filtered and accusations that you didn't get it. Read the first few pages, see what you think, and have fun.

[Anonymous No.14277755]

>>14277710
>Read the first few pages, see what you think
You never read it, anyone who had read it would recommend reading past the year of glad at the very least. The style in that first bit does not really give enough for someone to see what they think.

[Anonymous No.14277777]

>>14277755
I've read it in full and DFW's style is consistent across his career. The idea that somebody need ingest 100 pages of Infinite Jest versus 30 to take an accurate stock of his proclivities and talent is ludicrous. You could read Good Old Neon and decide whether or not to pursue more DFW from there.

[Anonymous No.14277799]

>>14277777
>DFW's style is consistent across his career.
you have a small view of what constitutes a style, he grew greatly as a writer over the years and his style shows that.

[Anonymous No.14277813]

>>14277536
John Green is insufferable and his brother is somehow even worse

[Anonymous No.14277819]

>>14277799
And as I mentioned above, we are now veering toward "you didn't get it," territory. Infinite Jest earns DFW's place in the canon. It does not retroactively improve the majority of his surrounding work, all of which employed the same hyperactive, blogger-on-a-bender prose style. If this wasn't the case, his work wouldn't have been submitted to his publisher's hatchet job and tossed together into the David Foster Wallace Reader. I guarantee I've read more of his writing than you have, twit, which is why I'm comfortale saying I like his most famous novel while at the same time dismissing the majority of the rest of his shit.

[Anonymous No.14277849]

>>14277819
Ok, so his style never grew, The Pale King is the same as Broom Of The System and Infinite Jest is the only thing worth reading but there is not real point because Good Ol Neon sums him up. Did I get that right?

I can be ridiculous too.

[Anonymous No.14277864]

>>14277819
>all of which employed the same hyperactive, blogger-on-a-bender prose style
fucken brutal

[Anonymous No.14277889]

>>14277777
Nice Quints.

[Anonymous No.14278770]

>>14277777
Nice. Epic. I like it.

[Anonymous No.14278795]

>>14275797
>>14275372
>>14275787
>>14276579
>>14277312

God, I can't wait until these DFW fans commit suicide just like their idol.

[Anonymous No.14278805]

>>14278795
Thanks for bumping my thread, cuck.

[Anonymous No.14278809]

>>14275357
Its a shame that IJ is often judged based on its cult-like fan base and equally obnoxious detractors.i believe it is both overrated and underrated at the same time.it is an ambitious work that can fall flat at times but overall it is an enjoyable read.it is neither a masterpiece nor a piece of shit as people will often have u believe

[Anonymous No.14280078]

If you are interested, just read the first chapter. The style of the whole book is similar. If you don't like the first chapter, I would not bother continuing. Personally I liked it a lot.

[Anonymous No.14280169]

>>14277819
a teenager trying very hard to "win" this meaningless exchange

[Anonymous No.14280287]

>>14280169
Nothing he said was incorrect tho

[Anonymous No.14280318]

>>14275787
>>14275807
Hoes mad

[Anonymous No.14280761]

this thread is basically just people bitching about stylistic and structural choices which are completely subjective and not really essential to the quality of the writing, subject matter or thematic depth
the fact that you could unironically assert that DFW had "nothing to say" is hilariously spiteful and shallow

[Anonymous No.14281242]

>>14280287
Appreciating subtlety and development is almost never “not getting something” even if that something is not high quality so that’s wrong

[Anonymous No.14281259]

40 pages in and it's awful

[Anonymous No.14281443]

>>14275357
It's good only when the kids play tennis, the rest is meme

[Anonymous No.14281918]

>>14280761
>the fact that you could unironically assert that DFW had "nothing to say" is hilariously spiteful and shallow
This, but no one ever seems to discuss what he has to say, they just meme about his style and suicide. A terrible shame.

[Anonymous No.14282033]

reading it at present after a several years prior abortive attempt, becoming increasingly disgusted by the style DFW laboriously maintains, with his and but so thens, and so forth, to the extent that i gave the book up as a sort of failed attempt at greatness, and an overall mediocrity of pastiche ridden juvenilia. my first inclinations were absolutely correct as i pass through the work this second time. i have committed to it with a firmity i admittedly lacked on my first round with the book, so i may find myself coming to separate conclusions as i proceed through the work. i doubt that my impressions will change, as it goes, i am left only with the sensation of what not to emulate, as i am that sort of reader, the insufferable type who diminishes a work by demanding of it the service of usable technique or themes for my own purposes.

[Anonymous No.14282161]

>>14281918
i'm trying to be patient, but to have to soil my mental cove with his ikean prose is to dehisce my approbation for any themes or messages he might have to present. at its core it seems a panoply of jocularity and it hardly serves to inspire a modicum of elation in me. i am instead left to look at a predecessor of his in my readings of late, with softer eyes, more accepting of what appeared at the time to be glaring flaws. what i mean to express, really, is that with gimmicks, he murdering my pleasure. the book i read before, a smuggler's bible, while also rife with gimmick, was of such execution that it makes the current work almost seem infantile. i worry what sort of canonical works might come about to follow if one were driven to inspiration by muses of DFW's ilk. Perhaps he was trying to make a point with his style, the fragmented text, and i intend to find out what that point is, certainly. but i cannot join the group who is happy to see a prose style fashioned specifically to be without beauty. to embrace the decline of the language rather than to battle it, to not use his talents, which he obviously had, to restore the language to its proper heights, to give in, rather, and to call it an effect, seems to me to be an act of luskiness i don't accept with any pleasure.

[Anonymous No.14282701]

It's good. The opening chapters give a misleading impression of the later content, but it's good
>>14278809
is on the money. It was so widely overrated that it wound up underrated by the people who would otherwise have given a shit about it. People who were longing for a literary savior made out it was perfect, and anything wrong with it was only subjective criticism, and then the contrarians were so happy to counter the fans by pointing out actual failings that they forgot to enjoy its best passages.

>>14282161
>to soil my mental cove with his ikean prose is to dehisce my approbation

genuine lol

[Anonymous No.14282736]

>>14275357
It can be a bit of a slog at times and there are some stylistic experiments thrown in that really don't work but it's largely very funny, clever and entertaining. Don't take it too seriously.