Oblivion: Stories
Ratings13
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings13
Average rating3.8
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
Reviews with the most likes.
I love DFW. This is the first collection of short stories of his I've read, it was as delightful as I'd hoped. As with his longer-form fiction, the stories are almost over-the-top satiric while remaining fiercely relatable. DFW demands your constant, unhurried attention through his prolix explorations of the inner lives of these characters (which are really just substitutions for the author himself, and in that way are quite like his essays); and if you aren't paying attention, be prepared to be confused by the delightful, absurd end-of-narrative turns & plot-twists: rewards for making it through the dense prose.
My favorite is easily Good Old Neon, because I think that's the truest insight we'll ever get into the exact nature of DFW's depression, and ultimately why he took his own life... knowing that adds an intensity that feels so painfully and captivatingly real.
Though the last story about the poop sculptures was pretty great, too.
“Good Old Neon” is worth the price of admission. I'm less impressed with the rest than I was the first time around.
Didn't feel like it achieved the feeling of being both individually great with each story as well as a unified brilliant sum of the parts like Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (the only other short story collection of his I've read) but still a treat.
Good Old Neon is a masterpiece.
