BOOKLIST 197: INFINITE JEST: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

BOOKLIST 197: INFINITE JEST: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. The novel is widely noted for its unconventional narrative structure and its experimental use of endnotes (there are a total of 388 endnotes, some with footnotes of their own). It has been categorized as an encyclopedic novel and made Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. 

The novel's title is from Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1, in which Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!" Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.

Eschewing chronological plot development and straightforward resolution—a concern often mentioned in reviews—the novel supports a wide range of readings. At various times Wallace said that he intended for the novel's plot to resolve, but indirectly; responding to his editor's concerns about the lack of resolution, he said "the answers all [exist], but just past the last page". Long after publication Wallace maintained this position, stating that the novel "does resolve, but it resolves ... outside of the right frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens". Critical reviews and a reader's guide have provided insight, but Burns notes that Wallace privately conceded to Jonathan Franzen that "the story can't fully be made sense of"

LITERARY CONNECTIONS: Infinite Jest draws explicitly or allusively on many previous works of literature. As its title implies, the novel is in part based on the play Hamlet. Other links to literature include the Odysseyand The Brothers Karamazov.

The film so entertaining that its viewers lose interest in anything else has been likened to the Monty Python sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World", as well as to "the experience machine", a thought experiment by Robert Nozick. 

CRITICAL RECEPTION: Infinite Jest was marketed heavily, and Wallace had to adapt to being a public figure. He was interviewed in national magazines and went on a 10-city book tour. Publisher Little, Brown equated the book's heft with its importance in marketing and sent a series of cryptic teaser postcards to 4,000 people, announcing a novel of "infinite pleasure" and "infinite style". Rolling Stone sent reporter David Lipsky to follow Wallace on his "triumphant" book tour—the first time the magazine had sent a reporter to profile a young author in ten years. The interview was never published in the magazine but became Lipsky's New York Times-bestselling book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), of which the 2015 movie The End of the Tour is an adaptation.

Early reviews contributed to Infinite Jest's hype, many of them describing it as a momentous literary event. In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Steven Moore called the book "a profound study of the postmodern condition." In 2004, Chad Harbach declared that, in retrospect, Infinite Jest "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." In a 2008 retrospective by The New York Times, it was described as "a masterpiece that's also a monster—nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric." 

Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. 

As Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest is at the center of the new discipline of "Wallace Studies", which, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, "... is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise." 

Not all critics were as laudatory. Some early reviews, such as Michiko Kakutani's in The New York Times, were mixed, recognizing the inventiveness of the writing but criticizing the length and plot. She called the novel "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace's mind." In the London Review of Books, Dale Peckwrote of the novel, "... it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled." Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale Universitycalled it "just awful" and written with "no discernible talent" (in the novel, Bloom's own work is called "turgid"). And in a review of Wallace's work up to the year 2000, A.O. Scott wrote of Infinite Jest, "The novel's Pynchonesque elements...feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off." 

Some critics have since qualified their initial stances. In 2008 Scott called Infinite Jest an "enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation's benchmark for literary ambition" and Wallace "the best mind of his generation." James Wood has said that he regrets his negative review: "I wish I'd slowed down a bit more with David Foster Wallace." 

MY REVIEW: Let me start by saying; I would not recommend this book to anyone. Not because it’s not good, but simply because it’s infuriating. It’s not infuriating because it doesn’t end (we can debate this later); it’s irritatingly and unnecessarily long. I realised when I’d finished that I’d been reading this for around 6 months – that’s half of a whole year! It didn’t take me that long because it was lengthy (it’s a very hefty book) but because it was difficult. Getting a story out of this book was like trying to draw conversation from an awkward but precocious teenager – it read that way too. Some conversations between characters carried over many pages without any plot development; people were introduced without their story ending up anywhere and most frustrating of all; it just ended. The ending left you stranded, all that was left for you were the ideas about where you thought the story was going or the ends you tied up for yourself as you were reading. 

Earlier I said this book was good, or I eluded to as much, but I’m still not sure how to feel about it. It’s not terrible, it’s not a work of genius either, or is it? I’m conflicted but I will tell you this, if you don’t read it you’re not really missing out on much. I’d say the returns are not worth the hard work but it was interesting to read. 

If you’d seen the film The End of the Tour, as I did, then you might have believed that you’d start reading this book and get hooked and proclaim Wallace as a genius – I didn’t have this experience and, I suppose, because of this, I was a little disappointed. One interesting aspect of the book that I will share with you is the fact that it’s set in the future (the year is unclear) but interestingly for a book written in the 90s the word millennial does pop up quie a bit, also there are predictions about advances in technology and entertainment – all, for the most part, wrong but interesting all the same.

BOOK 192: ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE: GAIL HONEYMAN

BOOK 192: ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE: GAIL HONEYMAN

No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

The only way to survive is to open your heart. 

MY VERDIT: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It was refreshing to read such an original voice but a little scary at the similarities between the narrator and myself. I think that’s what pulled me into the story at first, luckily as he story progressed I saw that we weren’t the same but some of her habits and thoughts were familiar to me. It’s a heartwarming book that kept me interested from the first page and didn’t disappoint at the end, which was a great relief. I would recommend you read this book soon before the film comes out as I suspect this will also be excellent.

BOOK 188: THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG: MURIEL BARBERY

BOOK 188: THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG: MURIEL BARBERY

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (French: L'Élégance du hérisson) is a novel by the French novelist and philosophy teacher Muriel Barbery. The book follows events in the life of a concierge, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the upscale Parisian apartment building where Renée works.

Featuring a number of erudite characters, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is full of allusions to literary works, music, films, and paintings. It incorporates themes relating to philosophy, class consciousness, and personal conflict. The events and ideas of the novel are presented through the thoughts and reactions, interleaved throughout the novel, of two narrators, Renée and Paloma. The changes of narrator are marked by switches of typeface. In the case of Paloma, the narration takes the form of her written journal entries and other philosophical reflections; Renée's story is also told in the first person but more novelistically and in the present tense.

First released in August 2006 by Gallimard, the novel became a publishing success in France the following year, selling over two million copies. It has been translated into more than forty languages, and published in numerous countries outside France, including the United Kingdom (Gallic Books, London) and the United States (Europa Editions, New York), and has attracted critical praise.

CRITICAL REVIEWS

The Elegance of the Hedgehog was well received by critics. In the earliest known review, for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Maurizio Bono writes that "[t]he formula that made more than half a million readers in France fall in love with [The Elegance of the Hedgehog] has, among other ingredients: intelligent humor, fine sentiments, an excellent literary and philosophical backdrop, taste that is sophisticated but substantial" French magazine Ellereviewer Natalie Aspesi pronounced it one of "the most exhilarating and extraordinary novels in recent years". Aspesi, however, tagged the novel's title as "most curious and least appealing". Praising the novel in his review for The Guardian, Ian Samson wrote that "The Elegance of the Hedgehog aspires to be great and pretends to philosophy: it is, at least, charming." In an earlier review in the same paper, Groskop opined that the novel is a "profound but accessible book ... which elegantly treads the line between literary and commercial fiction". She added that "clever, informative and moving, it is essentially a crash course in philosophy interwoven with a platonic love story". A review in The Telegraph conjectured that "[i]f [the novel were] a piece of furniture, it would be an IKEA bestseller: popular, but not likely to be passed down the generations". A review in The Times Literary Supplement went further, calling the book "pretentious and cynical, with barely any story. It reads more like a tract than a novel, but lacks even a tract's certainty of purpose. The characters are problematic: most are puppets, and those that aren’t are stereotypes".

Michael Dirda of The Washington Post complimented Barbery, saying, "Certainly, the intelligent Muriel Barbery has served readers well by giving us the gently satirical, exceptionally winning and inevitably bittersweet Elegance of the Hedgehog." Louise McCready of The New York Observer praised Anderson's translation of the novel as "smooth and accurate". Caryn James of The New York Times hailed the novel as "studied yet appealing commercial hit", adding that it "belongs to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer".[7] Los Angeles Times' Susan Salter Reynolds wrote that "[The Elegance of the Hedgehog] is a high-wire performance; its characters teeter on the surreal edge of normalcy. Their efforts to conceal their true natures, the pressures of the solitary mind, make the book hum".

FILM ADAPTATION

The novel was adapted into a film The Hedgehog (Le hérisson) released in France in July 2009, starring Josiane Balasko as Renée Michel, Garance Le Guillermic as Paloma Josse, and Togo Igawa as Kakuro Ozu, with a score by Gabriel Yared. The rights for the film were bought by NeoClassics Film and it was released by the company in America on 19 August. Its reception at festivals was positive and it won the Filmfest DC 2011, the Best of Fest Palm Springs 2011, the Seattle International Film Festival 2010, and the 2010 Col-Coa Film Festival. Moira Macdonald of The Seattle Times called it "Whimsical and touching... Mona Achache's adaptation is wistful perfection". Stephen Holden of The New York Times said it "suggests a sort of Gallic Harold and Maude".

BOOK 186: FAREWELL, MY LOVELY: RAYMOND CHANDLER

Farewell, My Lovely is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1940, the second novel he wrote featuring the Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. It was adapted for the screen three times and was also adapted for the stage and radio.

CULTURAL REFERENCES

In the first shot after the opening titles of Get Carter, the character played by Michael Caine is seen reading a paperback copy of the book.

In the opening episode of the television series Bored to Death, the character Jonathan Ames, played by Jason Schwartzman, is inspired to become a private detective after reading the book.

BOOK 184: DON QUIXOTE: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA

BOOK 184: DON QUIXOTE: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA

While I was researching this book I noticed it had a few different names including The Ingenious Nobleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha, Don Quixote de la Mancha and The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha.

Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection that cites Don Quixote as the authors' choice for the "best literary work ever written".

The story follows the adventures of a noble (hidalgo) named Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story.

In the course of their travels, the protagonists meet innkeepers, prostitutes, goatherders, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts and scorned lovers. The aforementioned characters sometimes tell tales that incorporate events from the real world, like the conquest of the Kingdom of Maynila[citation needed] or battles in the Eighty Years' War[citation needed]. Their encounters are magnified by Don Quixote's imagination into chivalrous quests. Don Quixote's tendency to intervene violently in matters irrelevant to himself, and his habit of not paying debts, result in privations, injuries, and humiliations (with Sancho often the victim).

Edith Grossman, who wrote and published a highly acclaimed English translation of the novel in 2003, says that the book is mostly meant to move people into emotion using a systematic change of course, on the verge of both tragedy and comedy at the same time. Grossman has stated:

The question is that Quixote has multiple interpretations [...] and how do I deal with that in my translation. I'm going to answer your question by avoiding it [...] so when I first started reading the Quixote I thought it was the most tragic book in the world, and I would read it and weep [...] As I grew older [...] my skin grew thicker [...] and so when I was working on the translation I was actually sitting at my computer and laughing out loud. This is done [...] as Cervantes did it [...] by never letting the reader rest. You are never certain that you truly got it. Because as soon as you think you understand something, Cervantes introduces something that contradicts your premise.

WORKS INFLUENCED BY DON QUIXOTE: 1759–1767 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne was influenced by Cervantes' novel in several ways, including its genre-defying structure and the Don Quixote-like character of Uncle Toby. Intentional nods include Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humour" and naming Parson Yorick's horse 'Rocinante'.

1856 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert was heavily influenced by Don Quixote. In the view of the critic Howard Mancing, "of all the many female incarnations of Don Quixote, Emma [Bovary] is the most original, profound and influential. Flaubert's admiration for Cervantes knew no bounds. It has been suggested that it was his reading of Don Quixote in childhood which convinced Flaubert to become a novelist rather than a dramatist." In Madame Bovary, the heroine, like Don Quixote, tries to escape from the tedium of provincial life through books, in Bovary's case women's romances and historical novels.

1869 The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. Prince Myshkin, the title character of the novel, was explicitly modeled on Don Quixote.

1917-1919 (published posthumously in 1948) "The Truth About Sancho Panza" by Franz Kafka imagines Sancho as Author.

2002 Lost in La Mancha, a documentary film about Terry Gilliam's failed first attempt to make a film adaptation of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote has inspired many illustrators, painters and sculptors, including Gustave Doré, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Antonio de la Gandara. The French artist Honoré Daumier produced 29 paintings and 49 drawings based on the book and characters of Don Quixote, starting with an exhibition at the 1850 Paris Salon, which would later inspire Pablo Picasso.

TRIVIA: Though he’d eventually go on to pen one of the most famous novels in world history, a young Miguel de Cervantes suffered from a plight familiar to any aspiring writer: working a day job to pay the bills. Among the varied gigs Cervantes kept in the years before his literary breakout was a job as a tax collector for the Spanish government. However, frequent “mathematic irregularities” landed Cervantes in the Crown Jail of Seville twice between 1597 and 1602. It was during this time in the slammer that Cervantes is believed to have first thought up the story that would become Don Quixote. 

The variant of the Spanish language in which Cervantes penned his novel was actually a rather new development at the turn of the 17th century and would be much more familiar to contemporary Spanish speakers than the colloquial tongue of the era. The popularity of Don Quixote cemented the modern Spanish that is now the second most commonly spoken language in the world, behind Mandarin. 

A particularly empathetic sequence in the novel sees the hero and Sancho Panza freeing a group of galley slaves from captivity. Cervantes’ special sensitivity to these recipients of Don Quixote’s chivalry likely stems from his own experiences in servitude in the 1570s. Cervantes spent five years as a slave in Algiers, attempting escape on more than one occasion. 

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky committed his admiration for Don Quixote to print on numerous occasions. In a letter to his niece Sophia Ivanova, Dostoevsky heralded Cervantes’ protagonist as the superlative literary hero: “Of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don Quixote,” adding, “but he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous.” 

While the age of the novel makes it hard to fully estimate the scope of its distribution, many scholars estimate that it has reached a readership of 500 million. This figure would make it the best selling novel in world history by far, topping Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities’ 200 million count and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy’s 150 million count.

(Information found from Modern Floss and Wikipedia)

BOOK 180: JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT: LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE

LITERARY STYLE: Céline's first novel is probably most remarkable for its style. Céline makes extensive use of ellipsisand hyperbole. His writing has the flow of natural speech patterns and uses the vernacular, while also employing more erudite elements. This has influenced French literature considerably. The novel enjoyed popular success and a fair amount of critical acclaim when it was published in October 1932. Albert Thibaudet, perhaps the greatest of the entre-deux-guerres critics, said that in January 1933 it was still a common topic of conversation at dinner parties in Paris.

INFLUENCE AND LEGACY: Paolo Sorrentino's 2013 film The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) opens with a quote from Journey to the End of the Night. The film concludes with a visual of the last paragraph of the book, passing under bridges, arches, and locks along the city's river.

Will Self has written that Journey to the End of the Night "is the novel, perhaps more than any other, that inspired me to write fiction".

The song "End of the Night" by The Doors references this book, as it had a great influence on the work of Jim Morrison.

Charles Bukowski makes reference to Journey in a number of his novels and short stories, and employs prose techniques borrowed from Céline. Bukowski wrote in Notes of a Dirty Old Man that "Céline was the greatest writer of 2000 years".

Céline's literary style greatly influenced Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

In Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 dystopian science fiction film Alphaville, protagonist Lemmy Caution dismisses a taxi driver's offer of route options to his destination by stating that he is on "a journey to the end of the night". The film depicts the use of poetry as a weapon against a sentient computer system.

MY VERDICT:

I can understand why this is cited as a great novel, however I did not enjoy it at all. This book probably, of all the books I’ve ever read, took me the longest to complete. The only reason I can give, is because of the disheartening subject matter that although travelling around the world to many different situations almost each one was more, or as, depressing as the last. There is no hope is this book, no humour, no let up, and because of that I found it difficult to get through. The protagonist is more unlikable the longer the story progresses and I found it hard to sympathize with him even when he was in sympathetic situations. I can see that it is well written, I believe there’s no argument on that part, but above all I want to be able to enjoy reading a book and I did not enjoy one part of this.