Charles Dickens and DFW shared more than a voyage at sea. While Dickens was describing his first trans-Atlantic crossing, in this title essay of the eponymous selection, DFW describes, on assignment from Harpers, a luxury Caribbean cruise. It is an opportunity ripe for beady-eyed observations of social behaviour and the zeitgeist, and DFW rises to it with Dickensian aplomb, describing his fellow passengers and shipboard activities, organised or otherwise, with delicious laughter and thought-stopping insight.

Read the full review on The Lectern:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/0... ( )

This collection of essays by David Foster Wallace is maybe the best of its kind ever. Whether he describes a country fair or a luxury holiday cruise, he has an incredible eye for detail and an even more incredible sense for language and gives descriptions unequaled by other contemporary writers. ( )

A superlative collection. The two DFW-as-a-pseudo-journalist-reports-from-somewhere-you'd-least-expect pieces for Harper's were indeed fun in their comic barrage, but I think I enjoyed the one about Michael Joyce with the long title the most. I'm not a big fan of sports (with the exception of basketball), especially not the spectatorial aspect, and making watching a yellow ball bounce back and forth seem so compelling to me is tantamount to doing the same thing with watching the proverbial paint dry. Not all of the essays were as nifty: "Greatly Exaggerated" I skip-read and "E Unibus Pluram", while it had some insight, was much too long. Oh, look at me, I'm actually accusing DFW of verbosity! How ur-whatever.

His suicide in September 2008 makes it extremely poignant whenever depression or map elimination is mentioned and no doubt changed how we regard his writing. Because it does have a lot of dark moments amid all the hilarity that previously you might have shrugged off.

I'm out of my depth trying to be unshallow even for just two sentences. Well, anyway, about the title story. They've built some of those Caribbean cruise liners here in Finland too and in fact the world's largest is being built in Turku as I type. One of the shipyards, not the biggest one though, is near my school. Is this some semblance of patriotic pride I feel? Nah. It's all owned by South Koreans anyway. The biggest ships are exported of course, but we do have a "healthy" cruising tradition of our own. Videlicetly, two-day cruises to Stockholm or Tallinn and back where the ship metastasizes into a bar/sleazy hotel/public toilet on screws and the aim is to drink your weight in duty-free booze, excrete all over the place and rape as many passed out people as possible. Luxury and pampering is when someone holds your hair while you throw up. Cultural differences. ( )

Placeholder: One particular joy of owning these essays in book form (at least for me) is the awareness that you’ve been able to peek at footnotes that may have received the editorial hacksaw at Harper’s or Premiere. Prior to reading this collection, I thought my favorite essay of DFW's was either "Tense Present" or "Shipping Out." And while "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All" is, in many ways, a direct ancestor of "Shipping Out," I discovered my true favorite in this collection: "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness," published in Esquire in 1996 under the title "String Theory."

It is my new favorite for two reasons: (1)The utterly casual, sincere, unapologetic and somewhat stunning deployment of the adjective "faggy" in reference to Andre Agassi, and (2) the searing, brilliant etiology of dedication, tucked into a handful of sentences at the end of footnote 24. ( )

hilarious and brilliant. ( )