INFINITE JEST

The physical state of the book is quite good.The binding is good given this book has 1000+ pages The font is also decent and is NOT as small as other reviews have stated. It is quite readable.

Best novel I've ever read but I don't recommend this edition. Either get the hardcover or the Back Bay books edition, you pay slightly more but the font size on this one is tiny, and you will read over lines and that will cause problems as this book is dense, really dense. You need to understand every word and actively keep track of characters and events and descriptions of the environment and read a LOT of other literature to truly appreciate it. Caught a TS Elliot reference in an endnote in the middle of a conversation, for example

Definitely one of the best books there is on addiction. Must read for literary enthusiasts and readers willing to encounter something thoughtful and brilliant

When we talk about certain books and how they change you after tou complete it, it's one of those har hitting books. Really difficult yet profound. "It's a book on everything about everything." And that really sums it up.

The print quality is good. The font is much more readable than the paperback edition. See the font size in picture. If you are planning to read this book, remember to keep an online dictionary handy. The first few pages are incredibly atmospheric and spare no detail. Reminds me of the courtroom scenes in 'snow falling on cedars' This is the kind of book that is meant to be read over months. I love books like this.

The benchmark opus of postmodern fiction. DFW's prose, while maximalist, I found enjoyable for its own lilt. Finely etched characters, all of whom are flawed, and many of whom will evoke a deep pathos in any reader with an ounce of empathy. Three plots race along toward a collision...which happens "off-screen", as one of DFW's main structural devices is leaving chunks of narrative unwritten like the negative spaces in a Sierpinki triangle. The book is very funny, but usually in a subtle way that you won't be able to describe to your friends what's funny; you just have to take the ride along with DFW to get DFW.

The pages are very light and binding is sensitive. Qlty is not very good but moderately fine.

David Foster Wallace is a master at his art and you can see it in every frenzied word of his. It is a must have on your shelf and the quality of the product is also top notch

Couldnt hold my interest.

Having spent the last 6 years reading every single thing that DFW had written in a prolific and varied career, this remains, by far my favourite book of all time. I have read a number of books of a similar length, so upwards of 500k words or 1300 pages, namely, Gravitys Rainbow by Pynchon (laugh out loud funny!), Ulysses by Joyce (awful and felt like a torture, took almost a year to read I hated it so much!), War and Peace (deep and profound and philosophical, I feel I was too young, at 16, to truly understand its real themes), Atlas Shrugged by Rand (read most recently in just 6 weeks and my god was it preachy and needed an editor, desperately!) and it was Infinite Jest (a direct quote from Hamlet, 'a fellow of infinite jest') which I read in 5 months which I enjoyed the most. This is a thoroughly post-modern novel and books being a form of entertainment, is going full meta by being about the nature of entertainment itself. It present a world of a tennis academy, the nature of addiction, a dystopian future in which Mexico and the States and Canada united together into what DFW calls ONAN (Organisation of North American Nations). Canada, in this vision of the future, is a nuclear wasteland, where there prowl giant feral mutant rats, while Quebecois separatists are assassinating their enemies via a very unique style - by giving them a copy of a film on a VHS tape called, appropriately, 'The Entertainment' which the person puts into their VCR player and watches on loop until they die of malnutrition/exhaustion imposed on them by their inability to stop watching such a compellingly, addictively, entertaining film. DFW riffs on this theme in an earlier essay called 'De Unibus Pluram' (which you can find online for free) which was written on the back of the statistics, at the back-end of the 1980s, that the average American household spends 6 hours a day watching TV (it's probably considerably longer, 3 decades on!) So if you like the essay, I'd suggest you get the book. It is incredibly fresh and laugh out loud funny in an enormous amount of places. Once thing that will probably annoy people who buy the physical books are the endless footnotes and endnotes (some running for 10 pages and often having footnotes to the footnotes!) which are integral to the plot and for which you will probably require a separate bookmark at the back of the book to refer to. I read this book digitally and it very helpfully has hyperlinks allowing you to jump to the footnotes/endnotes and back to the main text at will. I suspect this book is a lot harder to read in physical form and there are some reviews that say they had to break the spice of the book to separate the final 150 pages - which is the footnotes, as otherwise, it is very difficult to read this novel. This novel is broadly about the nature of modern entertainment, addiction, tennis, drugs and a whole lot else. It is hilariously funny and self-aware. DFW is possibly the greatest fiction writer (and definitely THE greatest non-fiction writer) of his generation and he was a person who was both exceptionally smart and talented (at Amherst he was doing 2 dissertations simultaneously, one on philosophy and one on creative writing, the latter being published as The Broom of The System, his first novel, when most of his peers were struggling with just 1). He has written extensively on all sorts of topics, from AVN awards to lobsters in Maine, to tennis, Terminator 2, philosophy and mathematics (see his book Everything and More) and I am sure I am not doing justice to the sheer breadth of the things that he writes about with refreshing candour and incredible humour. He was also a tragic figure, hanging himself when changing anti-depressants in 2008. He did though, leave behind a hugely impressive body of work and Infinite Jest, in my opinion, having read everything he has written over the years, is his crowning glory. It is the most fun book of this length that I have ever read. As somebody who had to give up alcohol through recovery, the sections of the book concerning itself with AA is absolutely 200% accurate and my understanding is that DFW in fact spent many hours/days sitting through AA meetings and absorbing the fellowship's take on addiction and its trigger factors. It really reads like he knows exactly what goes on there - as he really did, in real life. DFW was a complex figure and there is a strong argument to be made that his best work, is, in fact, his NON-fiction (a supposedly funny thing I'll never do again, aboard a luxury cruise liner, will always remain the funniest bit of non-fiction I have ever read!). But in this humble reviewer's opinion, Infinite Jest, for its sheer scope, refreshing honestly, spot on observations and dialogue and just satire and humour - will push it close. DFW is one of the greatest minds of his generation, yet he writes in such an accessible manner in all his work so as to become something much, much more than just another crusty intellectual, speaking down to us to, plebs, from his high horse. I believe what he really is - he is a voice of his generation (80s and 90s) - and Infinite Jest is a testament to that. Of all the long, classic books, that people read (or more often take selfies with to show off their nauseating 'intellectualism' on Instagram - rather than actually read), think War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged, Capital In the 21st Century, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Finnegan's Wake, Ulysses etc and so forth, this is BY FAR the most fun book of its length and type. Infinite Jest is both sad, depressed and funny and even 25 years after it was published (in 1994) remains relevant to the modern age. In fact, its take on the very nature of entertainment itself perhaps foresaw the age of vanity and social media, as seen through the prisms of Tinder, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The end result is a triumph for a tragic figure who left us far too soon. His legacy, as both an acute observer and reader of people in his non fiction as he is in his fiction - is absolutely secure, and will remain so for a long time to come. I don't know to what extent DFW can pass for 'one of us, a man of the people' given his fairly privileged upbringing of being the son of 2 university professors (one in philosophy, one in English, and hence being exposed to both subjects from birth, pretty much) but the way he writes certainly speaks to his audience in a way that few writers (fiction, non-fiction and every shade in between) every succeed in doing.

Este livro não é um livro comum, seja pelas 1100 páginas, seja pelas mais de 300 notas de rodapé¹, seja pelo estilo literário incomparável de Wallace. O livro, fisicamente, é deveras grande e por muito tempo ficou impondo-se monoliticamente em comparação com os meus outros livros na minha estante. Foram necessárias várias tentativas para que eu pudesse conseguir ler este livro. Mas esta obra recompensa fartamente aqueles que perseveram nela. David Foster Wallace tem um domínio incrível da língua inglesa e da capacidade analítica, especialmente dos temas de vício, entretenimento, solidão e falta de empatia, nos quais este livro está fundado. O seu maior talento, contudo, é ligar esses temas entre si, criando um quadro complexo e belo (ainda que desesperador de vez em quando) do mundo que nos cerca, ou gestalt, como ele prefere chamar. Por isso, nenhum resumo o faz justiça. Este livro é exaustivo, como uma montanha a ser escalada. Nunca vai pelo caminho mais curto, e faz você se perguntar se isso tudo não é supérfluo, mas assim como numa escalada, no momento que você chega ao topo é recompensado com uma visão de mundo nova e faz valer a pena cada passo dado até ali, fazendo você se perguntar quão diferente será sua visão do mundo daqui pra frente². ¹ Que por sua vez são completamente brilhantes e diversas, desde um simples "No clue" até notas de 9 páginas com suas próprias notas de rodapé. ² No clue.

日本語の情報がとにかく限られているので、参考までに。15年越し3度目の挑戦でようやく読了。最初にハードカバーを読み始めたときは、全く情報もなく、何が起こっているか分からないまま、とにかく頻繁に出てくる巻末の脚注（特に最初は麻薬類の説明ばかり）を読むのにも疲れて挫折。注が多いといっても、House of leavesのような、まだ本文との関連性が高いものが中心の脚注ではなく、興味のない人間には全く意味のない麻薬やジャーゴンの詳細な解説の中に、何が起こっているか理解するのに必須なものが埋もれていて、結局全部目を通さないといけない。少し前にKindle版がアップデートされて脚注へのリンクやX-rayが使えるようになっていることに気づいて、最初から読み直しました。Kindle版は非常に読みやすくなっています。また、Infinite jestに関する様々なwebsitesも出来ていて、それらを参照すると、かなり細かいことまで情報が得られるようになっています。特に最初の方はとにかく記述が断片的で、時間と場所も飛びまくるので、何らかのガイドが必要な気がしますが、250ページを超える頃からだんだんと記述はリニアーになります。特に後半は、ストーリーはほぼ一直線で、アメリカの最近のポストモダン風な小説に共通するのかもしれませんが、見た目と違って主題は孤独や家族、addiction等、意外と近代的・伝統的な印象を受けます。ただし、麻薬中毒者の意識の流れ的記述で何が起こっているか分からない部分が延々と続いたり（フォークナーの The sound and furyの最初のパートのvariationsが何度も出てくる感じ）、重要なイベントの記述が欠失して、全く関係なさそうなところにわずかにほのめかされる等、とにかく読者に対して不親切。これをパズルのように楽しめるかどうかでも、評価が大きく変わるでしょう。文章と内容は、時々心に響くところがあったり、一瞬きらめくようなところがあったりしますが、一方で、どうしようもなく単に饒舌に言葉が続いているだけで内容が全くなさそうな文章が何ページも続きます。結局最後まで読み通せましたが、完全に興味を失う局面が何度もありました。また、主に今世紀の最初の10年くらいが舞台になっていますが、出版後のコンピュータやメディアの変化が激しすぎて、細かいテクノロジーの説明がちょっと古びた印象を与えるところもあります。ジュニアテニス、メディア中毒、薬物中毒に興味がある人にとっては、これらに関する細かい情報をもっと楽しめるかもしれません。個人的には、もっと若いときに読破すべきだったと思います。いずれにしろ、非常に読者を選ぶ小説であることは確かかと。

Un vrai chef-d’œuvre, très expérimental sur la forme pour mieux servir le fond : comment notre quête de divertissement finira par nous aliéner et nous couper du reste du monde. Je n’ai jamais lu de personnages aussi bien décrits, y compris les secondaires. L’histoire, au départ plutôt opaque, s’éclaircit au fur et à mesures des pages. Et le style est magnifiquement riche, comprenant à la fois de beaux courants de conscience plutôt ardus et des dialogues à mourir de rire. S’il faut un peu se forcer pour les 100/150 premières pages, on prend ensuite beaucoup de plaisir à lire ce roman et on se perd totalement dans la narration. Mon seul avertissement est qu’il faut un niveau assez élevé en anglais pour le lire non traduit. Si vous estimez avoir moins qu’un vrai C1 en lecture, je vous conseillerait plutôt de le lire en français.