So this one is better than IJ? It's going to be publish in portuguese, it's been 2 or 3 years of translating...

nvm i get it now. You don't need to be aware of your body to go to sleep; you do to kill yourself

The Pale King is not, to Infinite Jest, what Against the Day is to Gravity's Rainbow--i.e superior but less-discussed--but it is meditative and well-written and, obviously, a very personal cryptogram.

I think Infinite Jest a captital-G Great book; occasionally stunning, often sad and full of comic brilliance. If other people enjoyed Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow more, I'm nothing but happy for them; I found little joy in either myself, and if I could only take one of the three to a desert island, it would be Infinite Jest, with no hesitation whatsoever.

people call sleep the cousin of death and sometimes compare death to "drifting" off to sleep
asphyxiation is pure agony

>Gately witnessing a giant feral infant massacre a family picnic
>A grammar test from April's class

WHY DIDNT THEY INCLUDE THIS SHIT

>translation

Do people actually do this? Either learn the original language or don't bother. I want the author's vision, not the translator's.

DFW writes difficult fiction
he'd 100% get more out reading a translation in his own language than he would trying to piece together what "catadromous", "peritrichous", and "tarantism" mean
do you even know what those mean? no.
you're probably a pathetic monoglot yourself

Eventually, there will be an original text edition, like they did with 'Look Homeward, Angel.' Little, Brown is not going to leave that money on the table.

I don't know what I think about finding obscure words and keeping lists of them to force into one's writing, as he was known to do. But I'm certain he's not the only writer who does this. It just seems somewhere between dishonesty and posturing.

he was very left brained and loved scientific vocabulary. He roomed with medical students for two years in college and I know for a fact he had a Pharmaceutical dictionary that he loved

His wasn't a complex word choice out of deliberate obscurantism, the strange words he chooses are usually very musical or gorgeous sounding terms.
What makes an obscure historical reference in Pynchon or an old flower name in McCarthy any different?

>if I could only take one of the three to a desert island

fuck, that's a depressing choice.

That's what dictionaries are for.
And no, I'm not monolingual. I read stuff like Blood Meridian and Moby Dick in English because I want the actual reading experience and not a cheapened version muddied by the translator's preferences.

From my experience, languagelets like you are much easier assblasted when someone dares point out the obvious flaws of translation. Sorry, but you'll never read the whole canon with half a brain.

Canis matrem tuam subagiget

Blood Meridian is one of McCarthy's worst books, pleb

>What makes an obscure historical reference in Pynchon or an old flower name in McCarthy any different?
I don't know if they are different, if they weren't evoked in the writing process itself and were instead inserted for sort of showy effect. It just seems inorganic, like '*this* will impress 'em.'

>fuck, that's a depressing choice.

Hey, if there's as much laughter coming from your island with U or GR, I'm nothing but happy for you.

see people like you really need to leave this board. Literature is about loving language and using as much of it as possible to come as close to a symphony as possible. Instead of realizing this, people like you are obsessed with finding faults in writers and trying to nickle and dime them with the most bizarre criteria. You're obsessed with trying to determine whether the author has stayed within the bounds. You interpret literature as a state of intelligence of the author and you think using too many big words shows that the author is trying to compensate for some other area. You completely ruin the point of art. You eat the artist and pretend that you could've improved his work if only he would've done what you thought was "right". Pathetic and sad. Leave literature to those of us who appreciate that anything of that kind even exists in the first place.

He had a point tho. There’s some real try hard shit in DFW’s choices. Pictured is IG vocabulary.

...

Yeah but English it's not my first language. I could read, but with a dictionary at my side. I can read in English but not those post-modernist authors, not yet.

1/10 bait

don't worry about that asshole senpai. read it in translation, same with infinite jest. If your english improves, The Pale King has much plainer language than IJ does

Like those best-sellers author are easy to read. The "top level" in terms of language, that I read and understood perfectly was Joyce Carol Oates, but only her short stories and one novella.

Reading this thread feels like a borgesque meta-puzzel.
I read a few pages of TPK in my kindle and I'm considering buying it in the physical version.
From what people here and in the other thread have said, it seems like TPK can be a drag sometimes but also really genuine and heart touching in others.
I want to read it, but I'm afraid of the dense and fracted nature of the book and also insecure of me not being well-read enough for it, with a poor knowledge about dfw's life in general. This would be the first DFW novel I will read.
Should I buy it?
What motivates me the most to buy it and read it are the posts from that DFW autistic fan in that other thread.

I'll do it. I'm just waiting the end of the translating. Sometimes you must trust in the translator, like there's this guy, who translated almost all Pynchon novels, to Portuguese, and he was helped by Pynchon himself. The translator send some letters, and Pynchon answered all of them with extreme details and good humor.

I always liked that one

The references to DFW are all buried deep in the novel and you can read it all the way through, not know them, and still consider it a 10/10
It isn't a drag, certain parts of the text accentuate the tedium and mundanity of day to day life (and particularly life in a tax facility) but they do so in a beautiful way.
If you're a pleb to hard reading you should definitely start with The Broom of the System. TPK is a fantastic work by itself but the way it develops important themes from IJ make it a fantastic duology.
I read IJ in Grade 10 three times and The Pale King when it released in Grade 12, so if you have above slightly average reading comprehension and are very patient/love wordplay you need IJ and TPK, they'll be your favourite books
that being said DFW's whole thrust as a novelist is anti-metafiction. A reaction against writers obsessed with reflexivity, apathy, and irony (specific targets of his ire being John Barth, Bret Easton Ellis, and television's self aware aloof shtick ) so the book would be slightly more meaningful if you knew what he was trying to push against. Ofcourse he attacks metafiction from within metafictional boundaries, so if you do like Barth or Pynchon or Gass he's great.

tl;dr buy it and also buy IJ, you'll never read a dense, fractured and allusive book unless you try one first

TPK is worth it for the opening alone

>tfw just ordered IJ and TPK
Finally, I will read the last one of the meme trilogy
Are IJ and TPK similar somehow with GR and Ulysses?

TPK is very different from the meme trilogy, its not as dense and feels a lot looser, sketchier. I honestly dont think IJ is on the same level as GR and Ulysses, but IJ is still a dense read.

Opinions about the artwork? The hard cover one has the best cover

Finnegans Wake should be in the meme trilogy, get IJ out

DFW is vaguely similar to Pynchon (he's a kind of lovechild of DeLillo and Pynchon)
lemme find a shit summary I wrote of IJ's setting the archive

Its set in an alternate reality where VHS/DVDs/Internet were yet to be properly invented, media is largely distributed through an "Interlace" system wherein small cartridges of your choosing are mailed to you containing daily news, action films, television, etc (like Netflix before it became a streaming service). Canada, the United States, and Mexico have all formed one tremendous Union (think the EU) and Quebec/parts of the US northeast are deemed toxic dumping grounds. Canada is partly destabilized by Quebec and Albertan ultranationalists. The US has become largely corporate and the years themselves have become subsidized (the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the Year of the Trial Size Doze Bar). Feral hamsters roam the american midwest in the hundreds of thousands and the ecosystem of the nuclear zone is akin to Solaris/the Southern Reach (rumours of giant babies, impossible ecosystems, etc). It revolves around a halfway house for recovering drug addicts (that appears about 2/5ths of the way in) and an elite tennis academy (and the disfunctional family that resides within it)

It has definite themes crossing with GR, a weird alternate history, endless period references to popular media, paranoiac conspiracy theories, supernatural powers, weird surreal humour, strange characters, excessive and borderline encyclopedic science references (you need two bookmarks for IJ, one for the primary and text and one for footnotes)

TPK is a much more realistic (albeit with still surreal elements), less wacky, and much more subtly funny novel that addresses many IJ themes and others much much more head-on
if you're in your early 20s and heading into everyday mundane work life in a short while its a perfect read

Ulysses is a modernist text so it doesn't really fit with DFW. Though there are many stream of consciousness passages in IJ (and a few in TPK)

it does but the pale king paperback now almost perfectly matches the new edition of Infinite Jest

My hardcover has a slightly different font, huh.

don't worry you still have the 4 previously unpublished scenes

TPK threads are always comfy
I enjoyed reading it

>tfw you want Drinion's laser concentration
>tfw you used to idolize heroics and courage but now all you ask is for infinite patience and a zen-like approach to the obstacles of everyday life
my dad died thinking I was a disappointment
I had a high school girlfriend who had an abortion too
it hit me really hard

jog on

your post gave me a case of the howling fantods

Well, if I was going through my dictionary to make this response ring with erudition that isn't natural to my writing voice, I would feel like I was trying to convince you that it was. Whether you were mildly disappointed, as I was to find that the voice I was so impressed by was to whatever extent the product of artifice, is your business.

Would you, on behalf of all the true lovers and appreciators of literature that you're so confidently speaking for, mind sucking my nuts?

>don't worry about that asshole senpai.

>Ignore all opinions that don't conform to my perception of reality

There's a website for people like you, you should go back there

It's a promise rather than a full novel. But if the novel were finished I don't think it'll outdo IJ. It's Wallace trying to write a more grounded fiction but only getting halfway.

>It's going to be publish in portuguese
Same translator? IJ first edition had a lot of errors (some of them funny like the Year of Dove translation) and I finished it recently, might get into TPL since I'm already on a DFW mindset.

what did they translate funny about the Year of Dove?

once an author passes away its inevitable that there will be error in translations. Typically the author corresponds with the translator and helps correct much of the work, but once an author's gone all the publisher could do is put them in contact with family/friends who may not know the whole of the work

>Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
They mistook the 'bar' for 'chocolate bar' but because of context later it's obvious it's 'soap bar'. And the way they translated 'trial-size' was using something that back in english would be something like 'little-mouth sized'.

he's right to

>le autistic rambling riddled with pretentious made-up words that have no narrative purpose or aesthetic merit and only serve my little ego

woah genius, truly

should've necked himself earlier tbqh

I read this novel in 2013 when I was 21 and it really affected me. I admit that I don't remember the various subplots in any great detail (someone mentions in a recent thread a scene about someone spiking a picnic with LSD, and I don't recall that). But the main point or theme I remember is that fame, popularity and so on are in themselves worthless, and that society itself, despite - especially in the USA hip culture of the late 80s / early 80s - celebrating the hot young celebrities, the most publicized authors, the most outspoken rockstars etc, is actually maintained by an unseen, overlooked, underappreciated mass of obscure individuals working jobs that mean nothing to them on an existential level, which promise no great public reward or recognition, and which are often very boring, dull, unfulfilling etc. There'a side-point which is that good fiction often necessarily is boring and dull for extended periods, but ultimately for a good reason. In both cases (dull fiction, and a dull job) Wallace encourages us to welcome this boredom and to both interpret it as a necessary aspect of a well-managed society whose countless regulations, conveniences etc we could easily take for granted, and to try and find a "deeper" or less self-centred ideal or meaning that we should each sacrifice our selfishness in service of. I'm reading Wallace's bio at the moment and as a young guy he is so hot-tempered and dismissive of "boring" fiction, and at the same time he has a near-breakdown when he's at Yaddo and he is asked to join a group photo, at which point everyone around him starts smiling and looking at the camera confidently. The "fame" aspect gets to him, and this carries through to TPK. He also doesn't "mess around" with the names of several characters whose lives he treats compassionately at the risk of being sentimental. The story of the trailer park girl who is almost killed by her father / husband later on comes to mind, as does the chapter about the young couple deciding whether to abort their child (one of my all-time favorite chapters). I think Wallace knew that his style of writing and intensity of thought, if applied to a "realistic" style of writing, had the capacity to be moralizing, sappy and un-subtle. But here he writes that way without disguise. As in the first chapter where he subtly compares the natural world (insects "all business all the time") to the human world, which at the same time both valorizes the natural world and humbles the human world of fame-grabbing, money-hoarding etc. It's a very transcendental book IMO, despite the usual Wallace gags and riffs. And I say that as a virgin.

AN obscure reference
AN old flower name
pages of medical terms

yeh senpai. The picnic scene is part of Lehrl's planned takeover of the IRS facility. Diablo from Chapter 29 doses the picnic to raise all hell. The whole Lehrl takeover is central plotwise but only ancillary to the main themes of the book (like marathe and steeply in IJ).

TPK really brings out how his main merits as a writer was his short story output. When you look at the nonlinearity and hidden archplot of IJ, and the tornado of characters in TPK, you start to see how many of the chapters are almost entirely self contained and only linked through side characters with other major portions of the book. If he approached IJ from a chronological and fiercely linear perspective it would undoubtedly ruin the work, because I don't feel his capable of a sustained 600 page realist output of a handful of characters. His short story collections are really underrated imo. As said, Oblivion should practically be read in conjunction with TPK, he wrote both in the same time span. DFW's style reminds of the way Pynchon approached characters in Against the Day. They aren't developed over a sustained period of time, but within a few short pages you come to love them through the uniquity of their experiences and atypical mannerisms/interests. Pynchon got a lot of flak for AtD, especially after Mason & Dixon where almost the whole work revolves centrally around Jeremiah and Charles, but I treasure AtD and M&D the most out of all of his work.

ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

>but I treasure AtD and M&D the most out of all of his work.

Agree completely. The shame was that Underworld got so much praise that M&D went comparatively unloved, when really Underworld was a graphophilic slog, M&D was this unbelievable stunt-writing of a 19th century narrative voice channeled through a 1960s pomo hippy-cum-1990s novelist. Who else could have done it?

>M&D was this unbelievable stunt-writing of a 19th century narrative voice channeled through a 1960s pomo hippy-cum-1990s novelist. Who else could have done it?

yes, ie the word 'translation' exists? You seriously have never heard of the idea of translation? You just learn a language for the sake of reading a novel? I dunno but this seems like total bullshit

There are people who are just that smart; John Milton learned Hebrew to read the old testament and then learned Syriac because he was interested in the etymology of Hebew. These people are rare but theyre out there

>learned Hebrew to read the old testament and Syriac to understand Hebraic etymology
gee maybe if he learned to write english he would have penned an enjoyable poem

youtu.be/sXvAd7COpJY

As a medical professional, I found his word-play with anatomic and medical terms hilarious. His names of medicines and drugs is also great. It really made me realize how ridiculous the names of so many medications sound, and how many are strangely poetic.

I swear I could say Xarelto over and over again. And meds like allegra are so on the nose it is hardly funny.

these are the kind of people DFW actually hated the most

Why?

This is probably the best discourse on DFW posted since this board's conception, damn.

Is he being ironic?
Does it even matter?