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A review by avicosmos
Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace
4.0
This is a different world built with familiar words. How, I wonder, can that be? How can words mean something alone and something very different when set together in a certain way? Words are mechanical things, how can they inspire emotion? No, how can they be emotions themselves?
The essays presented in Both Flesh and Not are very becoming of the title. My interpretation, maybe a wrong one, is that the title refers to things that are human and alive and things that are mechanical. Both of these are important. I cannot judge the essays individually, I believe I only grasped about 70% of them. That's not enough to pass judgement. Instead, I will tell write about some of the feelings that the book brewed in me.
Tennis was this guy's thing. It is amazing how big a thing it is to him. But maybe, like me, the reader doesn't follow tennis. I didn't even know the rules of the game, let alone the many great players he mentions. By the time I'm done reading how Federer's game is one of the paradigms of beauty, I felt I learned half the game. Agassi V. Federer was the game he writes about, but the detours he takes both in the main text and the footnotes should not work towards a great article. But they do, they do it so exquisitely.
Something: People blame him sometimes for being too high brow, too intelligent and arrogant because he knows it. The feel I got was he was trying his best to humanize everything. Everything.
That's what the detours are for. I don't call them digressions because digressions usually lead to places where one is required to say: 'Anyway, what was I talking about?' Some good may come from that digressions, or may not.
There are very few such digressions he makes. I call them detours because like in detours they are made so as to visit some place or idea in the middle of the bigger idea that is being presented. Almost always some good comes from that. That's why after the first few footnotes, you don't mind breaking away from the main text, you start to welcome some of them.
In this essay or another about tennis- something about money making at tennis games- he writes about a woman who finds him repulsive. This is a footnote in an essay about tennis game.
One glaring attempt of humanising things in the book was his simple one sentence, three-word review of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A novel that asks for a good essay on itself. He simply writes: Don't even ask.
Another one of his things was Cinema, maybe he wasn't as fanatical about it as he was about Tennis. There is an essay about the (as it were) seminal importance of Terminator 2. He alludes to the decline of cinema in this; alludes to how, like everything, it stopped being art and started being a business. He picks Terminator 2 because that's where the mindless CGI epidemic that still ails Hollywood today started. He doesn't entirely imply that T2 was mindless, he says its use of CGI has opened doors to mindlessness that later became a forte for Hollywood.
And then it writes about sex and how it cannot and shouldn't be a loveless process.
And about the meaning and mismeanings of general words. This is more of a writer's thing.
In between the essays, there are words he liked and typed into his personal computer or something. These are words that would be deemed obscure by someone who isn't well-read. I'm one of those someones. There were but a handful of words that I recognised.
One of the words that lingered in my mind: Satyromaniac.
It expanded my world just a little. I wasn't even aware of the idea of male nymphomania. It did not exist for me, and then it did once I read the word. That goes some way in explaining his obsession with words and Wittgenstein, who believed once that our world and existence were limited by language; that the horizons of language were the same horizons of existence.
**I have never reviewed a book of essays and I'm pretty sure this isn't the way to go about it. I just put down some things in the book of many, many things. I hope I didn't kill whatever zeal you had to read this book.**
The essays presented in Both Flesh and Not are very becoming of the title. My interpretation, maybe a wrong one, is that the title refers to things that are human and alive and things that are mechanical. Both of these are important. I cannot judge the essays individually, I believe I only grasped about 70% of them. That's not enough to pass judgement. Instead, I will tell write about some of the feelings that the book brewed in me.
Tennis was this guy's thing. It is amazing how big a thing it is to him. But maybe, like me, the reader doesn't follow tennis. I didn't even know the rules of the game, let alone the many great players he mentions. By the time I'm done reading how Federer's game is one of the paradigms of beauty, I felt I learned half the game. Agassi V. Federer was the game he writes about, but the detours he takes both in the main text and the footnotes should not work towards a great article. But they do, they do it so exquisitely.
Something: People blame him sometimes for being too high brow, too intelligent and arrogant because he knows it. The feel I got was he was trying his best to humanize everything. Everything.
That's what the detours are for. I don't call them digressions because digressions usually lead to places where one is required to say: 'Anyway, what was I talking about?' Some good may come from that digressions, or may not.
There are very few such digressions he makes. I call them detours because like in detours they are made so as to visit some place or idea in the middle of the bigger idea that is being presented. Almost always some good comes from that. That's why after the first few footnotes, you don't mind breaking away from the main text, you start to welcome some of them.
In this essay or another about tennis- something about money making at tennis games- he writes about a woman who finds him repulsive. This is a footnote in an essay about tennis game.
One glaring attempt of humanising things in the book was his simple one sentence, three-word review of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A novel that asks for a good essay on itself. He simply writes: Don't even ask.
Another one of his things was Cinema, maybe he wasn't as fanatical about it as he was about Tennis. There is an essay about the (as it were) seminal importance of Terminator 2. He alludes to the decline of cinema in this; alludes to how, like everything, it stopped being art and started being a business. He picks Terminator 2 because that's where the mindless CGI epidemic that still ails Hollywood today started. He doesn't entirely imply that T2 was mindless, he says its use of CGI has opened doors to mindlessness that later became a forte for Hollywood.
And then it writes about sex and how it cannot and shouldn't be a loveless process.
And about the meaning and mismeanings of general words. This is more of a writer's thing.
In between the essays, there are words he liked and typed into his personal computer or something. These are words that would be deemed obscure by someone who isn't well-read. I'm one of those someones. There were but a handful of words that I recognised.
One of the words that lingered in my mind: Satyromaniac.
It expanded my world just a little. I wasn't even aware of the idea of male nymphomania. It did not exist for me, and then it did once I read the word. That goes some way in explaining his obsession with words and Wittgenstein, who believed once that our world and existence were limited by language; that the horizons of language were the same horizons of existence.
**I have never reviewed a book of essays and I'm pretty sure this isn't the way to go about it. I just put down some things in the book of many, many things. I hope I didn't kill whatever zeal you had to read this book.**