It is actually impossible to talk about David Foster Wallace’s monumental opus in just a few lines. The literary scholar Tobias Gnüchtel does it just the same.
A tennis academy in which older players buy urine from younger players for the purpose of covering up their excessive consumption of drugs. An ominous film that is such a wonderful pleasure to watch that those who do so once never want to do anything else--let alone can; it paralyzes them, leaving them to vegetate away. A terrorist group made up of Quebec separatists in wheelchairs who want to reverse Canada's annexation by the United States and are therefore on the hunt for the film in order to use it against the civilian population.
Chaotic, Wild, Excessive
It is actually impossible to talk about David Foster Wallace's monumental opus in just a few lines. The first American edition runs to 1,079 pages, and the German translation to 1,552. A general overview of the themes, plot threads, settings, and characters alone would quickly fill an entire book; it would be utopian to provide a description of the broken-up chronology and the polyperspectivity created by the complete lack of a narrative center to hold the wild hodgepodge together under the length of a dissertation. Added to that are a hundred pages of endnotes that are in part longer and more important than the passages they refer to, or in other cases supply utterly superfluous information, such as the chemical composition of drugs. The whole thing is related in run-on sentences with an encyclopedic vocabulary that can hardly be managed without a historical dictionary, even by native speakers.
Although the novel is really as chaotic, wild, and excessive as this brief approximation suggests, as the first to review it astonishingly note, reading "Infinite Jest" is itself never-ending fun, the apparent chaos brilliantly structured, and the formal experiments never laborious but virtuoso. And a warm humaneness shines forth from behind the mercilessly culturally pessimistic analysis of the present that is on a quest for answers; how kindness, closeness, and happiness are still possible in dissociated times of permanent media consumption, drug addiction, and alienation.
David Foster Wallace, Talent of the Century
When the novel was published in February 1996, no one expected it to be one of the biggest literary hits of the late twentieth century; a book that has no need to hide itself either from its contemporaries, from the great postmodern novels by Thomas Pynchon or Don Delillo, nor from modern classics such as Joyce's "Ulysses", Proust's "Recherche", or Musil's "Man without Qualities". Yet one could have expected as much. Having majored in English and philosophy, Wallace graduated from college at twenty-three; his philosophy senior thesis focused on modal logic, and his honors thesis for English served as the basis for his first novel, "The Broom of the System". At this point at the latest, it was clear that the young author was an exceptional talent, though not that he was also to become a talent of the century.
Wallace, who suffered from depression all his life and ultimately lost his battle against it, committing suicide in 2008, wrote Infinite Jest by hand in just four years while teaching creative writing at Illinois State University, subsequently typing it out with one finger from his drafts. What resulted are 192 disparate, non-chronologically arranged sections that with the exception of short detours cover a period from the early nineteen-nineties to 2010, whereby the years meanwhile sponsored by major corporations bear corporate names--2010, for example, is the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment." The novel plays through all of the conceivably possible--and up to that point impossible--narrative perspectives or "focalizations," which is how they are referred to in the language of more recent narratology; it relates passages from characters who are completely uninvolved and never again turn up, whereas others communicate oral reports of oral accounts videotaped during interrogations by the police.
Tennis, Depression, Drugs
One can't get rid of the feeling that the lecturer for creative writing schooled in literary methods wanted to set scholarly narratology a years-long, irresolvable task by breaking up its categories with masterly ease. The 388 endnotes furthermore interrupt the reading flow, already pursued to the extreme, permanently reminding readers that it is their responsibility to create coherence, which the text deliberately disallows. Yet the dystopian vision of the future permeated by formal experiments is an unusually biographical and personal novel, dealing with the issues that accompanied Wallace all his life: tennis, depression, drugs, withdrawal, excessive media consumption, language fetishism.
The fact that the novel was still a literary sensation of epoch-making dimensions when it finally appeared in German thirteen years after its initial publication and has lost nothing of its fascination to this day is evidence that the author, who died much too early, was an exceptional writer who wrote an exceptional novel that is as new, improbable, and fresh today as it was in 1996.
The novel "Infinite Jest" by the American author David Foster Wallace was published in the United States in 1996. The German translation of the book, "Unendlicher Spaß", on which Ulrich Blumenbach worked for six years, runs to 1,552 pages and was published in 2012 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch.