ON THE DEATH OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Sep 19th, 2008 by Sean Baite
I’m afraid I’m about to again demonstrate my adhesion to the Western Death Cult that comes down to me from my maternal side. During the summer my wife* ordered a French translation of a collection of short stories by an American writer by the name of David Foster Wallace. The title, ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’ marked me somewhat but reading a translation from your own native tongue is about the book equivalent to watching a dubbed film and I was too lazy a Western Death Cultist to go off looking for his books in the original out there on cyberspace.
I think my wife** came across DFW through mention of him by someone out there in the blogosphere. While doing her nightly web rounds on monday, she learned the news that DFW had taken his own life on the 12th of September (from the Libération site). Ostensibly another victim of depression.
Smiffy has written very well on DFW on the basis of a much longer acquaintance with the author over on the Cedar Lounge Mr Squishy RIP In turn, Smiffy learned the news from this Salon tribute Salon DFW Tribute
In the below clip DFW reads 2 non-fiction pieces at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego :
The first piece reminds me uncannily of long tedious days spent at my own childrens’ gym competitions - although the US midWest seems to manage to multiply the grotesqueness by a certain factor. A pity he never got to cringe (and set his cringing down on paper) through Irish dancing competitions.
I thus add DFW to the list of books I’ll never get to finish between now and I die. I’ll never get through them all, of course - sad to note that there’ll be no more DFW titles to add to said list.
* well, all but on paper…
** all but on paper and before the eyes of any church
Final footnote : There’s an interview with the Cruiser somewhere else on that UCTV YouTube channel for those curious
I gather this unfortunate writer published a novel of 1057 pages. Life seems too short for plodding through novels of such length when there are so many thousands of interesting medium-length novels that run between 60,000 and 120,000 words. I once tried to read, in English translation, Swann’s Way (a volume of A la Recherche du temps perdu) by Marcel Proust, and found those long, rambling wistful sentences with all their complex sub clauses and ponderous minute details too tedious to bear my admittedly limited span of concentration. Give me a concise novella any day that packs lots of meaningful reflection and plot and verbal sparkle into its short read. I think of works such as Voltaire’s Candide, Steinbeck’s moral tale The Pearl, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denitzovitch, or Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm.
All good works, Gar, but not as funny as DFW.
I think you’re referring to ‘Infinite Jest’, Gar - which seems to illustrate a certain reluctance to edit on the behalf of DFW. I’m afraid I’d have to see Proust as a more satisfying reading experience than most of the works/authors you cite - but I do resign myself to the fact that my life expectancy will probably not allow me to finish it.. Mann and Sozhenitsyn also wrote a few fairly thick volumes, I seem to remember.
Re Proust - am stuck somewhere in the wonderfully titled ‘A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur’ at the moment, and have been for a few years. It’s a bit less poetic in English ‘Within the Budding Grove’, I think