Paperback, 1088 pages
English language
Published Aug. 13, 2005 by Back Bay Books.
A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
I am not eloquent enough to review this book.
It was Entertaining
Sooooo this book is considered a classic? Pure genius or sumthing? I'm afraid I don't see that. The book isn't rubbish, sure, it's long and full of many many characters, tough to read and not well written like, but I did enjoy the story. Being over 1000 pages it didn't drag once.
I can see it is one of those books that will produce endless conversations as people see things in their own way, it's probably produced other books discussing it and I'm sure many Eng lit uni students have had to deal with it at some point. The feeling I got from the book was DFW's own insecure feelings coming to the surface, it feels like he doesn't want you to like the book he deliberately makes it a tough one to read. The long lists, many acronyms, the almost 400 endnotes and suddenly jumping somewhere else in the …
Sooooo this book is considered a classic? Pure genius or sumthing? I'm afraid I don't see that. The book isn't rubbish, sure, it's long and full of many many characters, tough to read and not well written like, but I did enjoy the story. Being over 1000 pages it didn't drag once.
I can see it is one of those books that will produce endless conversations as people see things in their own way, it's probably produced other books discussing it and I'm sure many Eng lit uni students have had to deal with it at some point. The feeling I got from the book was DFW's own insecure feelings coming to the surface, it feels like he doesn't want you to like the book he deliberately makes it a tough one to read. The long lists, many acronyms, the almost 400 endnotes and suddenly jumping somewhere else in the story just as you were starting to enjoy things. For me though the most annoying thing was the characters ignoring each other, so caught up in their own little world that they end up have different conversations at the same time. So rude!
The book is a mixture of things, dystopian where the years are sponsored by a product?...I think. At times it is also a comedy, I'm not sure if I should have been laughing as much as I did when the kid gets his forehead frozen to the window.
If you want to read a book that is at times depressing, features tennis, wheelchair bound assassins, drugs and endnotes then pick up this good book and give it a go.
This is my favorite book.
