The 3 best books by David Foster Wallace

Despite being an emblematic figure in the United States, the arrival of the work of David Foster Wallace to Spain it occurred as a kind of posthumous recognition of the myth. Because David suffered from depression that followed him from his youth until his last days, in which suicide ended everything at the age of 46.

An age inappropriate for the purpose, in which the echoes and contradictions of the gifted and creative mind, but at the same time peering into the abyss of destruction, are paradoxically transformed into a greater interest in the work.

In 2009 the David Foster Wallace books They began their journey through parts of the world that they had not previously reached, consuming themselves mainly until then in an American market in which their proposal had indeed emerged as an interesting composition of very deep characters plunged into the whirlpool of modernity.

Diverse topics from sports to television media or the usual critical review of the American dream. His arrival in Spain was carried out first in approaches to his facet as a storyteller and then with the full weight of his most relevant works. Wallace, despite his more chemically regrettable circumstances, was not a writer dominated by some kind of pessimism characteristic of his illness or his medication.

Not at least in the typical moral of the disaster that can emerge from authors such as Bukowski o Emil cioran, to name two illustrious pessimists. Rather, we find in his books quite the opposite, of an intention to build vivid and even histrionic characters in sometimes delusional approaches that arouse humor and confusion indistinctly.

Utopias and dystopias that assault a transformed reality, characters who doubt the construction of the world that surrounds them or who allow their existence to rock on it. A critical intention on reality itself in an exquisite form that spreads ingenuity, like an automatic writing, later revised and scripted in search of a meaning that both discovers the sarcasm of our human condition and projects us to that space where fiction is full of symbols that break down the world into parts.

David Foster Wallace is the narrator of a world devoured by the dreamlike. And it is already known that in dreams we go from humor to fear or from desire to the disgusting, from one scenario to the next.

Top 3 Recommended Books by David Foster Wallace

The infinite joke

Depending on which books, trying to present a critical synopsis becomes a practically crazy mission. Because Infinite Jest is an absolutely subjective novel (if not all of them are). Because the author plays with an imaginary that transforms with each new perception of the reader. It is clear that we are facing a dystopia located in some near time, perhaps already installed in our daily lives.

Except that the references to the moment are shipwrecked in temporary references jokingly fixed in commercial products that are released on the market, or in the infinitesimal replacement of a film, the perfect film that everyone must watch over and over again as a more constructive form of leisure.

The symbols towards the comparison with our reality range from metaphor to hyperbole, depending on the understanding of the reader on duty. Totalitarian governments that point to the neglect of a society centered on individualism as a form of self-destruction.

Life is a joke that awakens hilarious sensations converted into echoes of acid laughter. A novel made the longest allegory ever written. A mixture of The Truman Show with the Divine Comedy (version made in the XNUMXth century USA) that surprises and never leaves you indifferent.

The infinite joke

The system broom

Lenore Beadsman is a character you will love and hate. Because her world is built on a brilliant absurdity or on a maddening unreality, depending on the moment and the chapter.

An extensive novel but that can never be heavy because in its avant-garde it always disposes you to the disconcerting discovery of a narrative knot made constant twist. Laughter of the bizarre and grotesque. Characters made charlatans of wandering, emptiness and the fullness of our contradictions.

A resounding case of mass disappearances from a nursing home confronts us with that acid humor of disaster, of the inhuman. An investigation to discern the truth in an uncertain world in which the cockatoo Vlad, Lenore's pet, becomes a particular oracle towards the clarification of a dark matter that could involve collective abduction, the escape of nonagenarians or the transfer of the elderly to the fourth dimension... And yet, in the end, a strange doubt arises about old age and its value in the world...

The System Broom

Short interviews with repulsive men

Trying to approach Wallace's work is an arduous task. Because deep down the issue borders on metalinguistic. It's not that Wallace is a storyteller attuned to innovative narrative structures. The chaos is there and it is becoming noticeable. But the point is that his usually extensive novels link, marry, compose that something from a subliminal vision.

Trying to achieve your intentionality will perhaps be seen more clearly in this book of stories about the ridicule of the most mundane existence. It is not philosophy but it gives off an analytical point about the human; It is not comedy but it makes us laugh at the absurdity.

A set of more than twenty stories that make up a crucible in which nothing melts and everything comes together. There is no narrative thread that links the stories but there is a fundamental harmony about fears disguised as grotesque, other people's obsessions made into jokes and a feeling that the universe of creativity found in the author a bottomless pit, a dizzying creativity in free fall.

Short interviews with repulsive men
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