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Infinite Jest: A Novel

Infinite Jest: A Novel

List Price: $18.95
Your Price: $18.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: everything and nothing
Review: i stayed up all night every night for two weeks reading this epic, and in the end i felt, well, enlightened, but i don't know why. it is, as i said, about everything and nothing. it is hallucinatory in nature, visual, tactile, engrossing. i loved it, and it is a work of genius, and if it is metaphor, i missed it, but damn it, i am ready for genius that is not measured by the obtuseness of its metaphor. so there! don't tell me, cuz i don't want to know!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The finest literary achievement of the decade
Review: Wallace addresses the topics that are truly important to Generation X. Entertainment in an age where video on demand is a reality, nuclear war, and the dysfunctional family are just three of the issues in modern life that Wallace comments on. The recurring theme of addiction resonates beautifully in this world filled with twelve step programs and self-help vernacular. Even if he never writes another word, Wallace is the great writer of my generation.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Neurotic determinism and the subsidized future.
Review: With wonkish verbal wizardry and a shuffled, fragmentary plot structure, D F Wallace thrusts us into a near future even more absurd than the present. A rich and hilarious cultural satire met with a deceptively empathetic approach to character development, Infinite Jest is a suprisingly moving post-modern (whatever that means) masterpiece. Sports, drugs, science, personal technology, extremism, alienation- yes, we've seen it before, but never with this much determination and meticulous accuracy. Mind boggling ambition rarely pays off this well. More pendantic than Pynchon and less terse than Barthelme, David Foster Wallace nevertheless deserves to be counted among the greatest American writers of the late twentieth century.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Possibly the most important book this decade (and beyond)!
Review: After finishing Infinite Jest, and throughout reading it, I was alternately intrigued, confused, enlightened, entertained, and tickled silly. I cannot think of anything I've read to match the pure depth and breadth of Wallace's writing style. Somewhat like Pynchon, or Gaddis, but for me more entertaining. Wallace's take on the nature of entertainment and our relentless drive toward new experiences, and where that drive is likely to take us as a society, is frightening and dead-on. Also, his information on the Recovery Movement, AA, and all the associated splinter "Anonymous" groups is very accurate, funny, and tragic. Everyone should be required to read this book!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: modern shakespeare
Review: This is not a book you should read. This is a book everyone must read, like Faulkner or Tolstoy, something which must be done. However, brace yourself, because it's a very difficult book. Reading it quickly may seem enticing at times, but the only way to read this book is one word at a time, very, very carefully, reading all the footnotes. The book functions similar to TS Eliot's The Wasteland in it's disruption of traditional reading habits. However, what Wallace is doing is not driving a wedge between us and art, but making our lives art. He makes the mundanities, the details, the math equations, the defecations of a cross dressing addict on the Boston T, the fundamental realities of our lives. Wallace refuses to let us hide from our lives. It makes this book difficult, because it is a book that necessitates the reader. Read it please and don't stop after 150 pages. I did once, right at 150, but it was the most rewarding novel I've read in a very long time. It is, like all great writing, a story that doesn't end.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great if you don't mind some work
Review: David Foster Wallace is the best author to come out since Kurt Vonnegut. Infinite Jest is an incredibly complex but rewarding showcase of his talents. If you are just looking for some light bedtime reading, look elsewhere, but if you are willing to put the time in to read it and the effort in to search for the greater meaning of the Infinite Jest, I guarantee that it will be one of your most rewarding literary experiences

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: woo!
Review: This may be the most fantastic, invigorating and inventive novel in the past several years. If you can get past the first one-hundred pages, and all the quirks and nuances to Wallace's prose, you will actually wish the novel was infinite. For you classicists out there who have trouble with Wallace's lack of linearity or his stilted use of imagery and tone, check for Hamlet references. Feed you canon, if you must.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good book, but would be better if it did not end!
Review: This book is an excelent book, all the way up to where it abruptly ends. It is a highly entertaining read, with many fascinating side paths, that will not let the discerning reader down.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I got the truth...straight from Wallace's mouth...
Review: I already reviewed this book once, but I got to let those people here who loved this novel in one the book's "secret." David Foster Wallace teaches Lit classes at the University I attend and after reading IJ for the first time, I had many questions for him. Instead of answering them, he pointed out in my ideas where I was on the right and then suggested I read the novel again. I did and loved it even more the second time.

The reason I'm writing is this...David (excuse me, Mr. Wallace) let the class in on the book's ending. Impressive!

David requested that I not post the "secret" on this page but I am free to explain and discuss with individuals who care to e-mail me and find out more.

Damn, what a twist!

E-mail if you'd like.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This Novel was written by a Cray/Military Computer.
Review: Is it possible that this Novel was really written by mathmatical systems with a Cray/Military Computer and elite University Profs?


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