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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Taxes We Paid Along the Way
§19-> §22
§19-> §22
This is a largely philosophical but humoristic work in my opinion. The main themes of the said book is dullness and boredom. It would be a lie to say that it is boring. But it is dull indeed. There are some events which can put this book into fantasy or scifi genre. But those are of few. Thouhg despite those premises they never delivered. Probably because of the fact that author died before finishing the book. Or as I believe more likely that it is one of parallels to life. In your life you have a lot of premises which can lead you to many places, possibilities and opportunities. The list goes on and on. But practically you won't have much interesting going on in your life like in the life of others. Which makes the said book even more realistic and philosophical
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
50 chapters, maybe 15-20 are interesting. A real slog, some are straight up boring. There's not really a storyline to follow, each chapter is loosely associated in the same universe. This is not really a complete work by DFW.
I don’t think I can give a star rating to a 538-page rumination on boredom. Also, hard to tell what form it was really supposed to take? It’s really hard to judge an unfinished work. Much of it was oppressively boring, but then that was sort of the point, no? It was like meditation. It made me desperately wish DFW was around to weigh in on our current social media situation. The whole thing felt both completely removed from life and al
Just how well written is David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King? The unfinished novel, published posthumously, almost won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Many (myself included) believe the Pulitzer jury just couldn’t bring itself to award this finalist the prize due to its unfinished state, so no Pulitzer was awarded in 2012 for fiction.
Editor Michael Pietsch performed admirably stitching together the manuscript Wallace left behind. Certainly, Wallace’s numerous notes assisted the process.
Ultimately, The Pale King serves as a predominant work illuminating the challenges and anxieties most all must overcome while attending tedious careers, day after day, battling mind numbing boredom all the while. Wallace, of course, possessed a freaky capacity to dig deeply within the darkest recesses of the human condition. Numerous vignettes presented throughout The Pale King evidence Wallace’s skill helping readers understand the angst, distress, solicitude and worries they battle are not unique and are, in fact, shared experiences. You should read this novel if for no other reason.
Editor Michael Pietsch performed admirably stitching together the manuscript Wallace left behind. Certainly, Wallace’s numerous notes assisted the process.
Ultimately, The Pale King serves as a predominant work illuminating the challenges and anxieties most all must overcome while attending tedious careers, day after day, battling mind numbing boredom all the while. Wallace, of course, possessed a freaky capacity to dig deeply within the darkest recesses of the human condition. Numerous vignettes presented throughout The Pale King evidence Wallace’s skill helping readers understand the angst, distress, solicitude and worries they battle are not unique and are, in fact, shared experiences. You should read this novel if for no other reason.
I was a fan of Infinite Jest but found Oblivion and some other, shorter fiction by Wallace to be pinched and cynical and really hard to get through. I waited a long time to read this, but I got to a place where I wanted that kind of Wallace novel vibe again, and this book, mostly, delivers that. Sure, it's unfinished and really who knows what the point of all this was meant to be. But it does have, sentence by sentence, a lot of the qualities you expect. There's the playfulness, but also the accumulation of detail that reads now as pretty obsessive a catalog of life, but also sometimes fun. There are strange swerves and characters, there are lots of voices (or maybe only a couple, but they are notable). There are HUGE holes in the way this world is processed; the roles for women in this book are so small as barely deserving notice and when they are there, it is kind of icky.
So, overall, for me this is a mixed bag. It gave Wallace, in highs and lows. But it didn't give much more than that. It sort of maybe argues for a cultural shift around Reagan and changes to tax enforcement, but since it's not fully worked out, it's hard to know if that was an idea Wallace believed or one he was sending up to lampoon or ignore. The obsessive interest around 1984-5 was surprising to me, but maybe worthwhile? The details are so in your face you want to trust them, but I'm pretty confident many of them are made up, except when they are not, which creates a strange no floor quality to what reads at times like social critique. And if Wallace was predicting the general drift of the country that started in 85 and took us somewhere new, past his death, boy it has gotten worse in so many stupider ways.... In other words, as a futurist/ social critic, this book is kind of a dead letter, but maybe that's not a fair value to place on a novel.
There's supporting material, about how the book was assembled which is really tempting to read as another layer of Wallace's fabultion, like the intro to those Victorian-era "found manuscript" novels. In a hundred years, I hope we all read it that way...
So, overall, for me this is a mixed bag. It gave Wallace, in highs and lows. But it didn't give much more than that. It sort of maybe argues for a cultural shift around Reagan and changes to tax enforcement, but since it's not fully worked out, it's hard to know if that was an idea Wallace believed or one he was sending up to lampoon or ignore. The obsessive interest around 1984-5 was surprising to me, but maybe worthwhile? The details are so in your face you want to trust them, but I'm pretty confident many of them are made up, except when they are not, which creates a strange no floor quality to what reads at times like social critique. And if Wallace was predicting the general drift of the country that started in 85 and took us somewhere new, past his death, boy it has gotten worse in so many stupider ways.... In other words, as a futurist/ social critic, this book is kind of a dead letter, but maybe that's not a fair value to place on a novel.
There's supporting material, about how the book was assembled which is really tempting to read as another layer of Wallace's fabultion, like the intro to those Victorian-era "found manuscript" novels. In a hundred years, I hope we all read it that way...
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Pulitzer in Fiction for 2012 was not awarded. They couldn't decide between:
[b:Swamplandia!|8584686|Swamplandia!|Karen Russell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320536498s/8584686.jpg|13438215], [b:Train Dreams|1821187|Train Dreams|Denis Johnson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188814001s/1821187.jpg|2046778], and this novel.
Had I not been trapped on an intercontinental flight, I might still be trying to read this novel. The Times got it right when they said Wallace "depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom."
Unfortunately, I was bored too, and often frustrated.
I'm afraid post-post-modern novels are just not my cup of tea.
[b:Swamplandia!|8584686|Swamplandia!|Karen Russell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320536498s/8584686.jpg|13438215], [b:Train Dreams|1821187|Train Dreams|Denis Johnson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188814001s/1821187.jpg|2046778], and this novel.
Had I not been trapped on an intercontinental flight, I might still be trying to read this novel. The Times got it right when they said Wallace "depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom."
Unfortunately, I was bored too, and often frustrated.
I'm afraid post-post-modern novels are just not my cup of tea.
Mostly I find discussions of what is and is not a novel to be a bit bland and unimportant, but for the purposes of a review I think it is probably important to stress that The Pale King is not what I would call a novel. It is a posthumously compiled Wallacian stream-of-conscious not of a person but of a place and idea, the place being an IRS processing center and the idea being how waves of humanity crash against pure, unadulterated tedium. Stream-of-consciousness is not quite accurate though, implying a type of fluidity that is a bit counter to DFW's whole thing. Woolf writes a stream of ideas flowing into each-other and mixing together in whorls, DFW plays with a bunch of legos and sharp corners. A Koch snowflake is made by recursively altering the line-segments comprising a triangle so that each has a triangle coming out of it, and each of the lines in that triangle has a triangle coming out of it, and so on. The Pale King likewise has a plot within each plot that kind of makes it look like it follows the curve of a story but is not in itself a story.
Anyways, the editor did a stupendous job here. To my mind, persnickety and patient and perhaps a bit inoculated against the excesses of DFW by reading and enjoying his other works, I found (re)reading The Pale King to be a lovely experience.
Anyways, the editor did a stupendous job here. To my mind, persnickety and patient and perhaps a bit inoculated against the excesses of DFW by reading and enjoying his other works, I found (re)reading The Pale King to be a lovely experience.
There is the skeleton of a great book here but so much is clearly not done, it becomes confusing: not for ordinary modernism-means-less-exposition reasons, but because there is just a lot that isn't rendered consistent, or contextualized correctly. Moments of hilarity, pathos and insight, but they're not centered in the way I'm sure DFW would have wanted.