by David Foster Wallace
How do you review an unfinished book? How do you even start to review an unfinished DFW book about magical tax agents and boredom?I think I start by saying that the book I read is quite a different book to the book that DFW apparently wanted to write, if you believe the endnotes. The eight pages at ...
Man is this ever unfinished.
My quest to read every last word written by DFW continues. Infinite Jest, This is Water, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and now The Pale King have been checked off the list.I feel bad for giving this only 4 stars, considering the reason why it remains an unfinished novel, but still, it...
this is the review that got me on to goodreads.com essentially the reviewer is admitting that hard-core use of hard stimulants is necessary to get through this work, but if you commit to this course of action, the results can be rewarding! "Nomen-Mutatio," one thinks, is mere cognomen. but I digress...
Too early to report much though you'd recognize the prose style as Wallace's if you only had one sentence, one four page sentence, to go on. My vacation book, my beach book, because the work part of life is a much harder time to read challenging fiction, I think.
A few weeks before I purchased The Pale King, I looked through its reviews here on Goodreads. People were waxing poetic about Occam's Razor and all sorts of other potentially pretentious thematic ideas, and even though I liked David Foster Wallace's writing, I was a little off-put. Could this unfini...
Disjoint, scattered, and somewhat hard to follow. Despite this, an eloquent and fierce testimony on how lost and empty some parts of our society have become. Chapter 19 should be required reading in every American civics class... oh wait, we don't teach civics anymore....
The Pale King would have been his best work yet had Wallace lived to see it through. As it stands, the book contains some of DFW's best writing in what amounts to a series of linked stories and character studies. In pursuing themes of mindfulness and attention in the face of boredom and the pervasiv...