Poor David Foster Wallace. If it can be argued that someone can be too smart for their own good. Wallace is exhibit A. We liberal arts folks have been trained in the art of criticism, which then gets applied to our worldview - nothing escapes the urge to make meaning of our experiences.

These essays are long, digressive, and lousy with Wallace's trademark footnotes. He writes both in the self-conscious new journalism mode, placing himself as a character in the essays, but also has some poststructuralist moves, dissecting cultural phenomena like state fairs, cruise ships, and tennis tournaments as if they were deeply revealing cultural texts.

It's come out in the years since is death that Wallace was a deeply flawed person in the way he treated others, especially the women in his life. There's a bit of the objectifying male gaze happening here, and the kind of elitism that comes from descending from the ivory tower to walk among the soiled masses.

But ultimately it is honesty, or more specifically intellectual candor, that makes Wallace so appealing as a writer and thinker. He has his pet obsessions (David Lynch, Roger Federer, junk food) and a tendency to head straight for the moral and cultural ambiguity in any situation. I was expecting a hagiography in his Lynch essay - instead, he acknowledged the darkness and horror that Lynch is constantly poking at in his films, and how there is something dark and horrifying about the director himself.

One other point - this is perhaps the worst book cover by a major author that I have ever seen. Is it supposed to be Lynchian? It's just confusing and aesthetically nauseous. ( )

Diseguale come può esserlo una raccolta di saggi (peraltro direi tutti rinvenibili in inglese sul web: affrontare la produzione di saggi di Wallace significa anche confrontarsi con le più o meno furbe politiche di pubblicazione editoriale), è un buon compendio della grande scrittura, sorretta da un approccio onesto e insieme ironico, di Wallace. In ossequio alle mie passioni per il tennis e il cinema, i saggi che parlano di questi argomenti sono quelli che mi hanno più colpito (su tutti: Tennis, trigonometria, tornado). ( )

Unico, divertente come pochi, un libro che mi è piaciuto tantissimo.
Non ho mai desiderato fare una crociera, non rientra proprio nel tipo di vacanza che amo, ma se anche ne avessi avuto l’intenzione questa lettura sarebbe bastata a dare il colpo di grazia a qualsiasi velleità mi fosse venuta.
Ironia e sarcasmo fanno da sfondo alle “avventure” del nostro scrittore che si imbarca per una crociera di lusso della durata di una settimana. Ci farà compagnia con le sue scoperte, le amicizie, le avventure e tutto quello che gli succederà in quei sette giorni.
Ho riso a più non posso e lo consiglio di cuore. Un libro ben scritto, uno stile fluido e molto scorrevole, dove la satira si affianca adeguatamente alla vena brillante dell’autore.
Assolutamente imperdibile. ( )

DFW’s writing is most definitely 5-star stuff. Although it seems weird to combine in one volume essays written for Harper’s and Premiere magazine with ones written for literary journals, it’s quite a sampling of DFW’s range. I can’t honestly say I understood every word (the man had a vocabulary that could beat up mine and steal its lunch money). What I can say is that I greatly admire the author (I actually formed something of a crush on him while reading this book)and I wish he were still alive and writing; his wit and perspective on such a variety of topics is impressive and a little intimidating. My favorite essay was the title essay, maybe because it was more personal. Plus, it had the most footnotes, and I dearly love his footnotes. But there’s a lot to love in this collection otherwise, and I have to agree with my brother-in-law who recommended it-DFW can make anything interesting. ( )

As my APUSH teacher'd say, "Intellectual masturbation AT ITS FINEST." I might be too dumb or impatient for DFW's sinewy, steroidal muscles of prose stretched hundreds of pages too long, but this is summer and I want something to read that I actually enjoy, or at least 80% of me enjoys. DFW is gifted but I wish he hadn’t known it. He thinks readers like being dumped into a vat of liquid they have no clue what it is but that they’d like swimming in it for the very same reason they don’t know what it is and frankly, it got to the point where I didn’t care what the liquid was. I just wanted out of it. And because of his giftedness and subsequent knowledge of, W is obsessed with technique and the actual tedious infrastructure of good writing, splattering his essays with stretched-out footnotes and stifling, inane digressions. WHO CARES. I didn’t care. Actually, it all made him seem somewhat dishonest, which is the last thing you want in a collection of nonfiction essays. That’s why I gave up twenty pages into the fair essay, the entire second tennis essay, two pages into the Lynch essay, and like three pages into the cruise ship essay. (I sadly read the entirety of the other essays.)

I actually quite liked the first tennis essay, but the literary criticism one and the rest of them that I wholly read just turned me off DFW. I hated Infinite Jest when I read the first 500 pages of it over winter break and I’m so sad about my dislike for DFW because he’s really actually quite genius. The first paragraph of the book was, like, life-changing. But the rest of the book goes downhill right after that and I’m not ashamed to say that, I might be too dumb or impatient for W. He sucks. Two stars for this abandoned mission.
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