/lit/ - Literature

>>21060695
Infinite Jest

???????

Why do Americans like everything to be big and bloated?
The great French classics, at least since modernism, are often just 100-200 pages long and every sentence is well-crafted. L'Etranger, La route des Flandres, Thérèse Desqueyroux, Les Enfants Terribles, Nadja, La Symphonie Pastorale, La Nausée, the novels of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Bernanos, and so on... They rarely exceed 300 pages. Proust and Celine are exceptions, and both could be shorter.
The best modern American novelists, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Faulkner, also wrote short/medium novels.

You read a book like Infinite Jest and there are many pages which are fun and alright but you know they're there just because DFW felt like writing a big book. It's not even that they're bad, because they're not (with exceptions), but are they at such a high level that they can justify themselves as being part of such a big book? There are many sequences in IJ which would be better if they had been short-stories or separate novels (one novel about AA, one novel about tennis, one novel about drugs and student life with everything well-structured instead of the big many-novels-into-a-single-one which IJ became). I know there's something beautiful about uniting all of those worlds into a mess, but maybe he should have published it in separate novels like La Comedie Humaine or something, with every novel exploring one side of that world in a more compact manner. I am not at all against confusion in literature (I love it), but even then you need at least some kind of structure to sustain it or else just write a bunch of separate vignettes, which is what IJ feels like a lot of the time.
I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow recently and got seriously annoyed by the amount of unnecessary clichés, it feels as though Pynchon didn't bother to cut anything, it's so overwritten. I saw nothing of higher-than-normal aesthetic value in the first pages and closed the book. Mason & Dixon looks way way better, as does the Tunnel. I might read them when I have the time, some day.
I liked V. and Lot 49 has some funny bits. Gass's essays are very good.

Why read one 1000 pages mess when you can read ten 100 pages books in which every sentence is written with proper care? I will probably never reread IJ (unless it's for nostalgia, because I read it as a teen), because I don't see any justification for reading it instead of rereading ten plays by Shakespeare.

Why does it cause such rage in some people?

*shoves a feel good cheesy story at the end for no reason*
Coward

What the fuck am I reading
Words words words noise noise noise, it's literary waterboarding

How did he write a novel that captures the 2020s so well in 1996?

Did he off himself because he knew what was coming?

>Dude, Republicans are bad

Was it because of the mold?

All memes aside, is it a meme? Or actually a Great American Novel?

Just finished this. Might be the worst case of blue-balls in the history of literature, or even media.

Why do Americans like everything to be big and bloated?
The great French classics, at least since modernism, are often just 100-200 pages long and every sentence is well-crafted. L'Etranger, La route des Flandres, Thérèse Desqueyroux, Les Enfants Terribles, Nadja, La Symphonie Pastorale, La Nausée, the novels of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Bernanos, and so on... They rarely exceed 300 pages. Proust and Celine are exceptions, and both could be shorter.
The best modern American novelists, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Faulkner, also wrote short/medium novels.

You read a book like Infinite Jest and there are many pages which are fun and alright but you know they're there just because DFW felt like writing a big book. It's not even that they're bad, because they're not (with exceptions), but are they at such a high level that they can justify themselves as being part of such a big book? There are many sequences in IJ which would be better if they had been short-stories or separate novels (one novel about AA, one novel about tennis, one novel about drugs and student life with everything well-structured instead of the big many-novels-into-a-single-one which IJ became). I know there's something beautiful about uniting all of those worlds into a mess, but maybe he should have published it in separate novels like La Comedie Humaine or something, with every novel exploring one side of that world in a more compact manner. I am not at all against confusion in literature (I love it), but even then you need at least some kind of structure to sustain it or else just write a bunch of separate vignettes, which is what IJ feels like a lot of the time.
I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow recently and got seriously annoyed by the amount of unnecessary clichés, it feels as though Pynchon didn't bother to cut anything, it's so overwritten. I saw nothing of higher-than-normal aesthetic value in the first pages and closed the book. Mason & Dixon looks way way better, as does the Tunnel. I might read them when I have the time, some day.
I liked V. and Lot 49 has some funny bits. Gass's essays are very good.

Why read one 1000 pages mess when you can read ten 100 pages books in which every sentence is written with proper care? I will probably never reread IJ (unless it's for nostalgia, because I read it as a teen), because I don't see any justification for reading it instead of rereading ten plays by Shakespeare.

>>19492292
The funny thing is: for me, it's Infinite Jest. DFW is probably the real laureate of Gen X and Bloodlines is peak Gen X comfy. The way characters like Pemulis, Orin, Steeply, and Avril pursue their personal desires in a world about chasing pleasures is very Vampire: The Masquerade. It also matches the "vague sort of adapting stories" thing the game does, but instead of classic gothic and horror fiction, it's with /lit/ shit.

> this made genxers shit and piss and cum their pants

>Just started reading this
Yeah I think I understand why DFW is such a meme. He took his own life from depression; I might take my own out of boredom.

Besides pic related, what are some other books that tackle consumerism, entertainment, shallowness of modern life, etc? I'm talking contemporary lit. Nothing written before like the 70s.

Did he fail at establishing New Sincerity because of the inaccessibility of IJ

Is this thing as retarded as it sounds?

What was your favorite tangent /lit/?
My all time favorite is the tennis champion who doesn’t actually play, he just brings a gun to every match, holds it to his head, and says “let me win this game or I’ll commit suicide.”
A close second is the essay on the history of video calling, explaining why it was replaced by the telephone

Why are there so many stupid fucking details about the people in admissions meeting such as one of the guy's hands being a different color than his face?

>Is this going to be a pouty Gen X piece like all the other pouty Gen X media from that hopeless generation?

i hear people mentioning the need for two bookmarks for this book

one for the story proper and another for a appendix section in the back

would this be too frustrating on a kindle or will it be ok?

I wanted to share what happened to me since the root of it all is /lit/.

I was thinking of reading Infinite Jest since it’s the flagship of /lit/ and I’ve seen the damn blue cover hundreds of times after years of lurking /lit/.So I checked the library catalog and there are two copies which can be borrowed. One is the iconic blue one the other one is not blue. The blue one, it seems, is lost, since the catalog says it’s borrowed till May 15th 2020- obviously someone took it and never returned it. I didnt want to borrow the other one since it’s not blue- and I think the reason is simply my wanting to finally see and read from the oh-so memed and omnipresent blue edition.
So I checked a bookstore’s webpage and it said that they had the blue one. I go to the store and it’s not there- there’s only the other edition, the same other thats in the library. I ask the guy who works there, he checks all the shelves nearby and in the back and the book is nowhere to be found. He says someone probably stole it, since it still says they have it (online) but not in the store. I found it funny and I think DFW would also be amused (havent read him yet, just my thinking) that someone simply snatched the thickest book in the store and no one even noticed, probably hours before I came (since they did not change the web info).
So I went out of the library surprised but not sad, since there are other books I want to read. Then I checked the library catalog and of course the other edition was got borrowed till October 19th, this year. So I’ll just wait to see if they get the blue one again in the store or I’ll borrow it once the other edition is returned.
Interesting (to me at least) because of how a meme made an interesting string of events.

>tldr I wanted to read the blue Infinite jest bc meme and /lit/ and couldnt because it’s stolen and borrowed, now I wait

>Read Infinite Jest
>No longer addicted to internet or to masturbation.
Thank you, friends, for recommending this book to me.