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A review by remlezar
Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace
3.0
This one is tough to review. On the one hand, I love David Foster Wallace's non-fiction, and it was great to experience some of his essays for the first time. On the other hand, it's obvious why many of these weren't put into his previously released, much higher quality collections, Consider the Lobster, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
There are a few essays here about tennis, a sport I generally don't care much about, but DFW always manages to make interesting to me. There are some book reviews, some of which are great, and some of which are so insanely niche it was hard for me to get into, especially with zero knowledge of the book in question. One essay was the introduction to a collection of essays he edited, and one (fantastic) essay was basically a bunch of tips on proper English language usage.
All in all, it's a bit of a mess, but some gems made it worth getting through. However, the pessimistic part of me feels like this is a nasty little money grab book designed to rob the grave of DFW as much as humanly possible.
Example: Wallace was obsessed with words, so, at the beginning of each chapter the editor of this collection decided to list completely random definitions from Wallace's favorite dictionary edition. There are a few possibilities for why they would do this, and none of them strike me as good moves. 1) They thought, "This is totally a Wallace type thing to do, listing definitions. He would love this." This is dumb in the same way that people trying to emulate the style of Dr. Suess is dumb. It feels forced and phony. Besides, I don't think he would ever do this. It's not engaging to the reader at all, and it's just stupid. 2) They wanted to pad the total page count of the book to make it seem like more of a substantial collection than it really is. Or, 3) some combination of these two reasons.
If I had been reading the hard copy of this book, I would roll my eyes and skip past these pages. But I was listening to the audiobook, which meant that for approximately four and a half minutes at the beginning of EVERY SINGLE ESSAY I was stuck listening to someone literally read the dictionary. It's bad enough that someone thought it was a good idea to include the definitions in the print version, but it's downright idiotic to include them in the audiobook version.
Basically, if you're a DFW fan, it's worth checking this out from a library and reading the essays that sound interesting to you. But if you've never read any of his non-fiction collections, there is no reason to start with this one.
There are a few essays here about tennis, a sport I generally don't care much about, but DFW always manages to make interesting to me. There are some book reviews, some of which are great, and some of which are so insanely niche it was hard for me to get into, especially with zero knowledge of the book in question. One essay was the introduction to a collection of essays he edited, and one (fantastic) essay was basically a bunch of tips on proper English language usage.
All in all, it's a bit of a mess, but some gems made it worth getting through. However, the pessimistic part of me feels like this is a nasty little money grab book designed to rob the grave of DFW as much as humanly possible.
Example: Wallace was obsessed with words, so, at the beginning of each chapter the editor of this collection decided to list completely random definitions from Wallace's favorite dictionary edition. There are a few possibilities for why they would do this, and none of them strike me as good moves. 1) They thought, "This is totally a Wallace type thing to do, listing definitions. He would love this." This is dumb in the same way that people trying to emulate the style of Dr. Suess is dumb. It feels forced and phony. Besides, I don't think he would ever do this. It's not engaging to the reader at all, and it's just stupid. 2) They wanted to pad the total page count of the book to make it seem like more of a substantial collection than it really is. Or, 3) some combination of these two reasons.
If I had been reading the hard copy of this book, I would roll my eyes and skip past these pages. But I was listening to the audiobook, which meant that for approximately four and a half minutes at the beginning of EVERY SINGLE ESSAY I was stuck listening to someone literally read the dictionary. It's bad enough that someone thought it was a good idea to include the definitions in the print version, but it's downright idiotic to include them in the audiobook version.
Basically, if you're a DFW fan, it's worth checking this out from a library and reading the essays that sound interesting to you. But if you've never read any of his non-fiction collections, there is no reason to start with this one.