- Hardcover: 1088 pages
- Publisher: Little, Brown & Company (4 July 1996)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0316920045
- ISBN-13: 978-0316920049
- Product Dimensions: 16.5 x 6.4 x 24.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (88 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 336,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Infinite Jest
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything (NEW YORK TIMES )
Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight (James Woods, GUARDIAN )
He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He's damn good (Nicholas Lezard, GUARDIAN )
One of the best books about addiction and recovery to appear in recent memory. (SUNDAY TIMES ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight (James Woods, GUARDIAN )
He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He's damn good (Nicholas Lezard, GUARDIAN )
One of the best books about addiction and recovery to appear in recent memory. (SUNDAY TIMES ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
* 'Ambitious, accomplished, deeply humorous, brilliant and witty and moving. A literary sensation' INDEPENDENT
* With a new foreword by Dave Eggers
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
69 of 73 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The proverbial Book-That-All-The-Fuss-Is-About in America, Infinite Jest hasn't made a big splash in England for some reason. Set in the near-future, the story zips back and forth between a dope-addicted teenage lexical genius in a Tennis academy in the suburbs of Boston, a recovering demerol addict at a half-way house down the road, a gang of murderous Quebec separatist terrorists in wheel chairs, and a film that is so addictively entertaining that once you've been exposed to it you lose all will to do anything else in life except watch it again and again until you die. You also get the experialist evil of ONANism (referring here to the Organization of North American Nations), the death of the TV industry at the hand of tongue-scraper ads, giant feral rats in New England, hyper-obsequious mothers, filmakers killing themselves by putting their heads in a microwave and a girl so devastatingly beautiful she's forced to wear a veil at all times. What's not to like?
But never fear: beneath all the whimsical plot-digressions and flippant deployment of words you don't understand, DFW has a big heart, and IJ never degenerates into the standard I'm-so-postmodern-I-can-just-sneer-and-not-care posture that makes so much contemporary prose detestable.
If the book has a theme, it's addiction...in the broad sense...not just to various drugs but also to entertainment, to sport, to sex, to nationalism. The neat thing is that the book itself is addictive...although it's not a plot-driven page turner in any traditional sense, once you get into it it's hard to put down.
You should know the book is very very long, has 200+ pages worth of bizarre footnotes, 3 dozen subplots, and a whole lot of generally fascinating characters. The pace can be sloooooooow, but you won't mind. Like I said, it became VERY trendy in America a few years back...it's now required reading for the terminally hip 20/30something intelligentsia. For once, the hype was warranted...if you trudge through the (admittedly impenetrable) first 200 pages, you'll be hooked.
Oh and, I don't care how lexically gifted you think you are, you have to read IJ with a dictionary at your side.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I came in expecting to hate it. Comparisons to Pynchon; "genius" shown on the cover to be what seemed a twerp in a baseball cap; footnotes... but this turned out to be a darned good book. Why? Everything seemed to be against it. The Science Fictional element was very weak; the story had no beginning or end; there were endless digressions... but the author really IS brilliant; the characters are terrific; there is wit, (human)realism, pithy commentary on today, and humour --and unlike Pynchon, it's honest humour. (Pynchon rips you off consciously. Wallace on the other hand is genuine. He really has things to say and he honestly says them.) I put down the book (after days of not being able to put it down much) and said, "well that was really worth reading."
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Cor! I would like to tell you that this book is all the things that these other reviewers say it is - amazing, brilliant, flabergasting etc. Well, it is. However, after pushing through David Foster Wallace's interminable digressions and massively complex clauses, sub clauses, sub sub clauses etc, the brilliance could be said to have been dulled somewhat. Nevertheless, It's still a top-notch piece of boundary-pushing fiction, a brain-pulsingly engaging read, and a mad piece of food for thought. It would've got five stars if I could have persuaded any of my friends to read it too. Those slackers!
Read it. It'll do your brain good.
Read it. It'll do your brain good.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
It beat me
I'm sorry to say I abandoned this part-way through. Don't be mad at me! I feel like I've given it a pretty good shot. Read more
Published 10 days ago by Marie
Very unengaging
Many of the reviews talk of a "tour de force" entertaining characters, and so on. I've read the first ten percent of the book, and I couldn't tell you the names of any of the... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Jenny Barnes
enter with caution
This book is the 'entertainment' in that once you've read it you may find yourself needing to be institutionalised. It gets right to the core of how absurd it is to be conscious. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Mr. M. Y. Karius
Kindle
You can feel the truth hit you in the face sometimes and I had to reread some passages several times, especially when he talks depression----you can get a feel for his minds world. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Michael Smith
A bit like a David Lynch film
This book is immense... Ok, there is no doubt that it's difficult, and at times I did consider giving up but I'm glad I persisted with it as the last third is totally compelling... Read more
Published 7 months ago by sledge
Good but endless
I really enjoyed the first couple of hundred pages of this book but, oooh boy, it's so long-winded and so repetitive I ended up putting it down and simply not picking it up again. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Heliotrope
Insomniac
Anyone utterly enamoured with modern America and the modern "American Way" will probably love this book. I just found it too American - much too American altogether...!!!
Published 13 months ago by BreakingWind
Infinite Jest
The first thing I did when I finished Infinite Jest was start it again. You learn things as you're reading about stuff that happened early on, which make you want to go back to... Read more
Published 13 months ago by vapidness
Think I'm in love
This is the one. I'm in love. All goosebumps and thrills and joy. Please have a go, if you're in any doubt. You might fall for it like me. I'm so happy. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Kees Popinga
I love you DFW
There's very little to add to all the other reviews published here and elsewhere about this magnificent book. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Esofagus
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