November 2, 2009
So, it’s David Foster Wallace Week here at 3000 BOOKS. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace Week, but that would be more unwieldy than a 50x real size Rubik’s Cube. Imagine permuting the LL corners on that. I loved Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and there were a few things I wanted to get my head around (or, in some cases, simply put into a list). So, this week there will be multiple posts dealing with various aspects of my reading of this book.
What did you get up to this weekend? How about me, you say? Oh, well, just THIS: righteous bruises.
Comments (5)
Amateur Reader | 2nd Nov 09 | 10:17 am |
Hooray for week-long book blog projects! Good luck. I'll be reading with interest.
Simon the Jim | 2nd Nov 09 | 12:19 pm |
i'm concerned i won't have liked biwhm as much as everyone else – and that if i say this, i will be less popular… than usual. is there a word or term for when someone gleefully tries to reveal that there's not much worth in humanity? Ivan Karamazovianism? i don't know… i think this is my main downfall in general.
estelle | 2nd Nov 09 | 3:27 pm |
Thanks, AR. No doubt it's just a sneaky attempt by my brain to conceive of smaller pieces than usual, so as to accommodate my depleted attention span, but we'll see.
Jim, I'm pretty sure that if we all liked the book, it would be boring. However, it may be even more boring to you to listen to why everyone liked it so much if you didn't like it as much as us. I haven't read Bros. Karamazov, so I can't say if that's the right term. Wait, you think there's not much worth in humanity, or Foster Wallace does?
Simon the Jim | 5th Nov 09 | 2:54 pm |
mainly foster wallace – and not so much foster wallace, as an impression that comes from some of the styles he uses… this is not a very coherent thought of mine but it's like: characters are written devoid of virtue, and the reader identifies with a behaviour or some of the internal monologue – and is therefor convinced that virtuouslessness is truth… but the behaviours and internal monologues occur out of context and therefor don't capture the complexity of how things really are… so this is the impression i get sometimes from writers like kundera, coetze, some dfw, sartre and a stupid book called "the origins of virtue" which is nf. i think sometimes they're just excusing their own shortcomings… i know that i have needlessly junked up your blog – sorry about this.
estelle | 7th Nov 09 | 10:03 am |
Simon, DFW definitely lays his characters bare, and lots of his characters are pretty nasty people. But I guess I read his stories as being revealing about those people in particular, or as writerly illustrations and exaggerations of observable characteristics that are not sympathetic. Probably because the book's title is so explicit about how the characters are to be read. I think I read these characters as caricatures, too, not so much as a mirror of reality.