David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow | of infinite jest. I had promised myself to write this review when, on aNobii, after joining the DeBaser group, I crossed paths with Blechtrommel, who piqued my interest in writing "something small" and, more than three (3) months later, here is the response, a review, and just to crystallize the literary locus where the seed was planted, a review on a book, but not just any book, rather the magnum opus of one of the most important contemporary writers, David Foster Wallace, quintessentially postmodern, disciple of the more vibrant Pynchon and DeLillo, who passed away after a suicide in 2008.

The problem before me was the beginning, because I didn't want it to be a trivial quote from the Shakespearean novel from which the title of Wallace's novel was drawn; I preferred, rather, something more personal and, given the bulk of the book I was about to (de)review (one thousand two hundred and seventy-nine (1279) pages in the Einaudi edition, of which one thousand one hundred and seventy-nine (1179) are the novel and the remaining one hundred (100) are notes and errata), I thought of starting in a sappy way - like, with a single word followed by a full stop, for example. The dilemma before me, tautologically speaking, was that, even though I had a mini-list of potential ad hoc words, I didn't know which to choose and, even after crossing many off, I still had three left: Audacious, Depression, Entertainment. The logical consequence was to tear the sheet from the notebook and stare at the screen, as if waiting for some divine illumination. The fact is, you can't summarize this book in one word, because it seems that nothing ever takes precedence: Wallace's metanarrative audacity is directly proportional to the plot (the entertainment) of the book, which is directly proportional to the leitmotif that veins it (depression). In an interview, DFW said he wanted to write something sad, and the result is a novel where in a not-too-distant future (in 2009, according to some critical essays, a year relatively distant from the present in which the book was published and imagined by David as a time when entertainment occupied every crevice of daily life, from drugs to TV series) a film cartridge annihilates any desire that is not to watch that fateful cartridge in an eternal loop, around which gather typical characters of that literary genre known as hysterical realism (crossdressers, addicts, athletes, conspirators/terrorists, medical attachés, failed artists, secret services...); this babel of personal stories and priapic descriptions is narrated with a unique style, made up of sentences that hold for more than seventy (70) lines and truly innovative stylistic exercises (the footnotes containing the filmography of an imaginary director, the reckless use of cut-up [a technique that combines fragments or different texts within the novel], etc.).

Already these two elements are enough to bring to light "Infinite Jest", a novel that wants - like Melville's Moby Dick, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, DeLillo's Underworld, Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down: Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means and so on - to be unapproachable, by definition unreviewable; however, Wallace is one of those minds you'd love to engage with and "I.J." manages to capture your soul, to make itself loved... perhaps because, in the end, the author conveys the sigh of existential emptiness that links him to the reader, of the sadness and desolation of incompleteness that makes humanity such.