David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.” | Hacker News Reader

David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”

newyorker.com

45 pointstshtf21 comments

I like DFW, Infinite Jest, and The New Yorker, but I question the increasingly regularity of this kind of content on HN and would like to gently recommend metafilter.com.

Here is this article posted there:

http://www.metafilter.com/79589/David-Foster-Wallaces-unfini...

Indeed. Metafilter is a wonderful site, and an excellent complement to HN.

It's hard for me to get too wound up about DFW stuff being on the front page when it's otherwise occupied by "AngelGate" drama.

I still haven't been able to finish Infinite Jest. It's just... not that interesting, I guess. Part of me thinks English is not a very good language for what's been attempted there; English as it is usually written is too terse and direct, which is precisely the opposite of what DFW was going for.

Novels like 2666, written in Spanish, feel a lot more natural in their distorted rambling and crazy deviations from what you guessed should be the plot.

But then again, I can't judge it until I finish it. These are just my thoughts after having it around for over six months.

It takes hundreds of pages to get going. Then it goes wonderfully. It't not easy to read, but it is worth it.

Don't think of it as one coherent novel; instead, think of it as a collection of loosely-related DFW essays, untethered from reality, glued together with 3-4 major characters.

One thing he's doing earlier in the book is setting things up so that when he explains things, like the Concavity or why the assassins are in wheelchairs, there's capital built up in the ideas when they pay off. Which, for the first few hundred pages, is actually really annoying.

I also highly recommend reading it on a Kindle or iBooks, where the footnotes and dictionary is hyperlinked.

there's also a couple of reader's guides, some short, with a thematic focus (http://amzn.com/082641477X), some longer and more exhaustive (http://amzn.com/0976146533/) that can help.

when I was first reading infinite jest, there was a section about fifty pages in that stopped me cold a number of times. it was written using a black vernacular, and was about wardine and roy tony and whatnot. for whatever reason, I re-read the first fifty pages until I got to that part, couldn't get through it and put the book down. it turns out that that section has no real bearing on the plot and can be safely ignored, especially if it's obstructing one's first read.

I can't speak to the Spanish language, but I think his use of the English language is one of the more incredible things he accomplishes in this novel. Really, this is the type of thing that must be read more quickly than not: because he introduces so many things that don't get explained until hundreds of pages later, it is best if they are at least sort of remembered. If not remembered, you may get to the end of the book and have kind of a "huh?" feeling. If this is the case, re-read the first 50 pages. But hey, this book is so much more about the journey that getting to the destination probably won't change your opinion of it much. If you don't like it now, might want to just pick up another book.

"English as it is usually written is too terse and direct"

If only. Too many people waste too many words dancing around what they really mean to say.

English can be terse and direct (love those anglo-saxon words!), but having glommed so much from so many other languages it affords endless variety for circumlocution.

Not endless. I'm brazillian, and more than once when translating a good, terse, phrase in english to portuguese I felt the need to "pad it up" with rethorical and discourse markers that have no meaning in themselves; conversely, when translating from portuguese to english most of a sentence becomes unnecessary and the final result is a lot terser. I can give you examples if you want.

Well, I'd like some examples :-)

A sentence I extracted from a particularly idiomatic piece of portuguese:

> O primeiro, presença ofuscante na consciência social, tem nome definido e inscrição temporal supostamente clara: a crise financeira global.

If you translate it idiomatically to English you have

> The first of them is the global financial crisis.

But if you translate if literally you have

> The first, a blinding presence in the social consciousness, has a definite name and a supposedly clear temporal inscription: the global financial crysis.

You will not believe me, but in portuguese all this extra unnecessary rhetoric reads a lot better than the equivalent in english. Also, there is a tendency in portuguese to write using as erudite a word as you can think of, which in English mostly sounds pathetic. I'm looking for better examples right now.

Terse and direct aren't Anglo-Saxon. Terse is from Latin, via French (16th century). Direct is from Latin (14th century).

And "pedant" comes from French.

As a Spaniard and Spanish native speaker, i agree with you. Also, from Wikipedia's page for 2666:

"Over 1100 pages long in its Spanish edition and almost 900 in its English translation"

Seems like English it's a bit more direct than Spanish in average. The wording is shorter.

I'm brazillian and can't speak (but can read) spanish. The translations of bolaño to english I've glanced over read really bad, when compared to the original (or the translations to portuguese). I think terseness is an issue here.

Its sad to hear he struggled so mightily to write more novels given the incredible power of his essays and short stories. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", about the pleasures and distractions and ultimately the "despair" of a 7-Night Caribbean cruise (which he helpfully abbreviates 7NC) is both the funniest and one of the most stark and cold works I've ever read.

Here is a link to that essay:

[PDF] http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-000...

I had to stop reading when they said he wanted to write a story that would show people how to lead good and happy lives. Too sad.

Yeah, all I could think was "physician, heal thyself."

Evidently The New Yorker doesn't like linking to the printable version. Link below should work:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_...

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