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Infinite Jest (Paperback)

by David Foster Wallace (Author) "I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies ..." (more)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
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Infinite Jest + Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays + Oblivion: Stories
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Product details

  • Paperback: 1104 pages
  • Publisher: Abacus (6 Dec 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0349121087
  • ISBN-13: 978-0349121086
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 5.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 6,679 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #1 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > W > Wallace, David Foster

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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 'Funny, smart and perceptively written.' OBSERVER REVIEW 'Hugely ambitious... There are scenes of gruesome hilarity and some of genuine tragedy... The most relevant portrayal of American culture to appear in recent years, INFINITE JEST is fascinating, ridiculous and excrutiating.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY '[A] remarkable satire on American entertainment and addiction... the book's mixture of maniacal inventiveness and comic brio gradually becomes quite an addiction itself... Foster Wallace has already won comparison with post-modern giants like Pynchon and Gaddis- he has even been tagged "the slacker's Proust"- but I think we can say, in hope as much as in praise that INFINITE JEST is a one-off.' DAILY TELEGRAPH

Product Description

Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for the master copy of INFINITE JEST, a movie said to be so dangerously entertaining its viewers become entranced and expire in a state of catatonic bliss ...'Wallace's exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight, and he has deep things to say about the hollowness of contemporary American pleasure ...sentences and whole pages are marvels of cosmic concentration ...Wallace is a superb comedian of culture' James Wood, GUARDIAN
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I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. Read the first page
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Infinite Jest
87% buy the item featured on this page:
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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Customer Reviews

73 Reviews
5 star:
 (44)
4 star:
 (10)
3 star:
 (5)
2 star:
 (8)
1 star:
 (6)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (73 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars fabulous, 26 May 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Infinite Jest (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.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Like wading through champagne jelly, 12 Sep 2006
This review is from: Infinite Jest (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.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Reading... démodé?, 31 Oct 2004
By Ricardo Benitez (Viña del Mar, Chile) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Infinite Jest (Paperback)
I'm sitting in front of the computer trying to tell people that if they like not only reading but also being surprised, appalled, flabbergasted, astonished, stunned, intrigued, shocked, forever-amazed,novelicized, anti-stultified, dictionary-bound, positively carried-away, mentally refreshed, intellectually provoked, immensely challenged, highly stimulated, and sturdinesslessly motivated, this is THE book for them. Thanks, David
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning...

Well it took me two months ! I`ve seen quotes of five days...seven days. Speed read a book of this stature ? ! Read more
Published 16 days ago by Sam Sinclair

5.0 out of 5 stars Five stars and then some
This is a huge book with1,079 pages of small type, including a good 80 pages of footnotes. It is also indefatigably entertaining, erudite and human. Read more
Published 4 months ago by E. Shaw

5.0 out of 5 stars The ultimate riot of a read
I spent 4 months reading Infinite Jest. For me the book itself became an analogue for 'The Entertainment', the eponymous movie at the
centre of the novel. Read more
Published 9 months ago by M. Hind

5.0 out of 5 stars If you don't enjoy this book you are a moron without a soul.
I like the review by the guy who says he is "intelegent". Nice work, chump.

If I had to criticise this book I would say "that's stupid, how can you FORCE someone to... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Mr. Edward J. Forsyth

5.0 out of 5 stars One Star? WHAT!?
I'm a third of the way through. Extraordinary book, amazingly entertaining on every page, with a huge breadth of styles and subject matter. Read more
Published 13 months ago by fps

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, wonderful book.
Not everybody will "get" this book - and not everybody will want to. But for those who do, it's an incredibly rewarding experience that stays with you long into the night. Read more
Published on 31 Jan 2008 by lifeclearout

2.0 out of 5 stars Really not worth the effort
I remember the hype when this book was first released, seeing an article in a Sunday supplement and deciding that I just had to read this book. Read more
Published on 25 Oct 2006 by Peter Lee

5.0 out of 5 stars Precocious, arrogant, anally retentive, frustrating, brilliant!
I agree with other reviews that this book isn't for everyone, and many people will get 30 pages in and give it up as bad prose. Read more
Published on 25 July 2006 by Mr. A. Rickman

4.0 out of 5 stars infinte dismay
I am slightly dismayed by the supercilious vitreol harboured by some of the rahter ego centric reviews. Read more
Published on 28 Aug 2004 by mr j a copeman. * berini87@hot...

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Pynchon comparison and we'll scream
Infinite Jest has been repeatedly compared to Gravity's Rainbow, and (as with Neal Stephenson's Crytonomicon) the comparison is both obviously lazy, and patently unuseful. Read more
Published on 9 Jun 2004

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