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A review by angethology
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
2.0
"Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."
Finally finished this after 2 months and while I don't regret reading the book, I'm glad to be done with this beast. Infinite Jest is purposely chaotic and incoherent, full of absurd humor, irony and tragedy. Covering a few intertwining plots, the book follows the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy, residents at a rehab program near it, the Incandenza family, and of course, the titular "samizdat" or cartridge that causes its watches to become so addicted to it to they don't want to do anything else in their life.
Underneath the haphazard structure and endless run-on lines, there are several profound thematic connections in regard to drugs and addiction, mental health issues, existential crises and the dark sides of technology and consumerism. But while I admit that there are bits and pieces that resonate with me deeply, the book failed to engage with me on a bigger picture. It's overall more tedious than enlightening, and 1000+ pages of it almost cloud the most interesting passages of it. You can't get any more meta than an encyclopedic novel with hundreds of footnotes, but only the narratives of the Incandenza family sort of stuck with me.
I see the humor in certain passages and I don't think I was able to fully appreciate a lot of aspects about it — although one darkly tragic part that I found funny was Hal thinking something in the microwave smelled delicious, during that one incident. The parts regarding technology and the nature of videocalling, the use of filters (masks) were so prescient and mindblowing to read, especially post-covid times: ".. but it turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they were themselves in person."
Ultimately, a lot of the struggles the characters deal with boil down to obsession, and while a lot of them feel lonely, some of them really aren't: "It's what we all have in common, this aloneness .. The suffering unites us.". In some characters that translates into an addiction, others suicide or a kind of depression where your own mind becomes a prison: ".. most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their thinking."
I didn't enjoy around 70% of the book, but the parts I did were quite memorable.
Finally finished this after 2 months and while I don't regret reading the book, I'm glad to be done with this beast. Infinite Jest is purposely chaotic and incoherent, full of absurd humor, irony and tragedy. Covering a few intertwining plots, the book follows the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy, residents at a rehab program near it, the Incandenza family, and of course, the titular "samizdat" or cartridge that causes its watches to become so addicted to it to they don't want to do anything else in their life.
Underneath the haphazard structure and endless run-on lines, there are several profound thematic connections in regard to drugs and addiction, mental health issues, existential crises and the dark sides of technology and consumerism. But while I admit that there are bits and pieces that resonate with me deeply, the book failed to engage with me on a bigger picture. It's overall more tedious than enlightening, and 1000+ pages of it almost cloud the most interesting passages of it. You can't get any more meta than an encyclopedic novel with hundreds of footnotes, but only the narratives of the Incandenza family sort of stuck with me.
I see the humor in certain passages and I don't think I was able to fully appreciate a lot of aspects about it — although one darkly tragic part that I found funny was Hal thinking something in the microwave smelled delicious, during that one incident. The parts regarding technology and the nature of videocalling, the use of filters (masks) were so prescient and mindblowing to read, especially post-covid times: ".. but it turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they were themselves in person."
Ultimately, a lot of the struggles the characters deal with boil down to obsession, and while a lot of them feel lonely, some of them really aren't: "It's what we all have in common, this aloneness .. The suffering unites us.". In some characters that translates into an addiction, others suicide or a kind of depression where your own mind becomes a prison: ".. most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their thinking."
I didn't enjoy around 70% of the book, but the parts I did were quite memorable.