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Oblivion: Stories
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Oblivion: Stories
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Oblivion: Stories
Audiobook14 hours

Oblivion: Stories

Written by David Foster Wallace

Narrated by Robert Petkoff

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 7, 2012
ISBN9781611135176
Unavailable
Oblivion: Stories
Author

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) wrote the novels The Pale King, Infinite Jest, and The Broom of the System, as well as the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Everything and More, and This Is Water.

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Rating: 3.9050217248908297 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A remarkable set of stories. As with Tenth of December, almost all of them can be recalled at will. My two favourites were The Soul Is Not A Smithy, with its bizarre duelling narratives, and Oblivion, with pulls the reader in, toys with them and then jerks them with a superb ending. That said, you really can make a case for any of these being the best.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Worst. Book. Ever.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Pervasive dread. Brilliantly written. It makes me miss him terribly.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sometimes I find David Foster Wallace a little hyper-intellectual and what I mean by that is he has many great ideas that get lost in his own hyperbolic self. Some of the appeal of the greatest writers of our time-take Hemingway or Kerouac for instance is that they were able to write novels that anyone with interest in literature could grasp and understand. Wallace is (was) a bit of an elitist in this respect. He writes novels for the highest literary echelon to try to fathom and after awhile it seems almost pointless..it's a sake of writing to impress and it's, quite bluntly, wankery. It's akin to hearing a 20 minute reeling guitar solo that signifies absolutely nothing besides how fast someone can use their fingers. I know Wallace can write a slew of big words, but can he make me feel something besides? That's where the bottom line comes in for me.

    Of course, Oblivion is insufferable to the reader in many ways and Wallace was certainly oblivious for not seeing how over 60 pages of tiring descriptions of corporate product focus groups and marketing would inspire anyone to do anything besides take copious quantities of Ibuprofen. If you can get past this first story entitled "Mister Squishy", it does get better. The story about the insane substitute who starts writing KILL THEM all over the chalkboard during a Bill of Rights lesson for instance is quite interesting (The Soul is Not a Smithy). It's also not surprising that one of the student hostages taken (a protagonist) is a perpetual day dreamer. There's also the story (The Suffering Channel) of the very anal man who excretes literally works of art every time he uses the toilet and Style magazine has to decide whether or not to run an article about it. Of course, it's set about a month from 911 and the offices are high up in the World Trade Center so you have to figure all of the execs making the decisions will be passing away soon anyhow, making it seem like a rather futile story just like all of Wallace's stories inevitably do seem. Some of the complexity of a relationship crossed with paranoid delusions and possible hallucinations are explored well in "Oblivion" Probably the best story is "Good Old Neon" which is about a man who feels so fake and like a fraud he must kill himself.


    Wallace has some excellent ideas and I'd really like to rate this collection higher but ultimately many of the emotion and the feeling of what he could bring out gets lots in pretension. That's not good writing in my opinion. It's frankly a waste of talent.


    Give me Dostoevsky instead any day of the week. There's an intellectual that could write with the kind of feeling that helped the reader understand the deep nature of his darkness.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Phew - what a collection.

    I can see traces of DFW's later work in here - the first part of the beginning story reminds me of the tedium of jargon in The Pale King. He's still fumbling a bit, and some of these stories seem rambling and pretentious and just bad compared to the rest of his work (!), but his incredible talent with language is here, not a doubt.

    As for my humble recommendations, Good Old Neon, The Soul is not a Smithy, and Incarnations of Burned Children were brilliant.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was my introduction to David Foster Wallace. I enjoyed the first story but felt as if someone had given me an assortment of wildly diverse paperclips to sort...and by the end I still had a bunch left unsorted. I started relaxing into his long sentences and amazing vocabulary during the second story. Loved some of his words. I've never seen "thermi" (plural of thermos) used before!! ..which was oddly exciting. I can't see interpreting the shortest story as anything but tragic, but the others have a tragic / humour double edge... Woody Allenesque maybe. I hope DFW had some fun writing these stories.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    ** spoiler alert ** The eight stories that make up David Foster Wallace's Oblivion are perhaps the bleakest I've read from him. Just looking at the title can tell you that. An infant trapped in a scalding diaper, a mentally deranged substitute teacher, a marriage teetering on the outcome of a snoring diagnosis...His characters tend to project a sad sack-ish nature bordering on some kind of mania. They're also difficult reads. They're tersely written stories and as much as DFW has confused me with his prose his ability for garrulous paragraphs that seem to extend forever are constantly pushing the limits of what the reader would put up with (sometimes comprising an entire story in a single paragraph (Another Pioneer).Perhaps the most daunting is the last, The Suffering Channel, which centers around the (I hope) fictitious exploits of the very real InStyle magazine leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Observing a workplace that seems populated with nothing but female interns it's one of the paid male employees, Skip Atwater, who goes to Indiana to follow up a story about a tradesman (Brint Moltke) that has a certain skill for being able to manipulate bowel movements into works of out, that forms the bulk of the action. When it becomes apparent that the offices are located at the World Trade Center it makes all of the action at the office seem painfully silly and lends a sympathetic note to every conversation.Another piece, Good Old Neon, follows around a self-described fraud, whose insistence of such leads him to ultimately commit suicide and continue to wonder (because death is never really the end) what other people must have thought of him as a younger person who's internal thoughts must have been really fucked up to lead to such an end (though the eyes of a character named David Wallace). Given the unfortunate end of David Foster Wallace you certainly wonder how much he's suffered through in his forty-something years.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the first I have read by Wallace which I picked up after having read about his posthumous work The Pale King. I am so glad I found him and so sad that he won't be writing any more (RIP). The style is difficult with footnotes, acronyms, obscure vocabulary and a quite dense convoluted prose. But its well worth persevering with him. Oblivion is a collection of short stories and range from humour to existential despair of modern American life (especially the for want of a better word a focus on the emptiness of the lives of affluent sections of society - I wonder what a book about low downs would have been like). Entertaining, detailed, funny and creepy, otaku-maniac hyperprose style. I am looking forward to reading his 1000 page work Infinite Jest and The Pale King. Heavy stuff to get into and read but worth the puffs of steam and grinding cog work required to digest. Not for intellectual lightweights since this guy is coming from a serious math and philosophy area and you will need to have done some of both to really appreciate his peculiar brand of autistic counterblasting against the mundanity of life and the insanity of other people.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow, what a head trip. I'll admit, some of these stories (particularly the first one) were hard to read thanks to what seems like Wallace's willful attempt to be flat out boring in places. I have no problem with convoluted sentences that go on for pages, but when they're only describing the minute details of a fictional marketing strategy, it's hard not to tune out.And yet, even in that story, once I slogged through I couldn't help be dazzled by Wallace's literary pyrotechnics. Forget everything you thought you knew about point of view or the demands of narrative or structure or character... Wallace never met a rule he couldn't break. And while it doesn't work 100% of the time, it works a lot more often than it should.The other stories in the collection were a lot more accessible, but still full of trippy examinations of narrative and mimesis and the illusion of memory. Most of these stories are, in one way or another, grasping attempts to describe the indescribable, to put the unspeakable into words. Even when it doesn't quite work, you can't help but admire the ambition.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When news of David Foster Wallace's death reached me, my first temptation was to reach for his collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Alas, I had long ago loaned this book to someone, and both loaner and loanee have forgotten its proper home. So instead, I thought: why not read one of his works you have not yet read? This left me with either Oblivion or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men ... and as it turns out, Oblivion fell into my hands first.What surprised me was HOW LONG it would take me to get through this. Perhaps it was my state of mind, but Oblivion feels like a collection of stories where DFW was trying to figure out where to go next after the epic Infinite Jest -- playing with storytelling and prose styles ... with the predictable success.For me, the strongest story by far was the final "novella" (the second strongest being the first one) ... and by the time I had reached "The Suffering Channel" I had come to terms that, with this book at least, it's much more about the journey than the result. Even if you're a big DFW fan, I think to enjoy this book you need to be a writer, and the kind of writer who goes "meta" while reading, becoming aware of what the author is doing and pondering why he might be doing it. I know, I know: this sounds like a HORRIBLE thing to be doing with your time, doesn't it? So even though in the end I can say I enjoyed the book, it WAS quite a bit of work, and I can't say I'd recommend it to others -- or at least not unless I had a conversation with them first about where there "head is at" before they take it on.I'm also pleased to say that, thanks to Bookmooch, a new copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing ... is winging its way to me right now, and I look forward to immersing myself in the DFW I first fell in love with and really, truly missing him.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    As one would expect from such an aggressively experimental writer, not all the experiments here work fully, but each story is interesting, at the very least. My recent reread convinces me that three are in fact brilliant, perhaps even masterpieces: The Soul is Not a Smithy, The Suffering Channel, and (a flat out classic) Good Old Neon. Formally inventive, funny and sad, and moving, especially Good Old Neon.

    DFW works very interestingly with narrative time throughout these stories as well, sometimes working almost in real-time, other times zooming in so close on the overwhelming rush of internal life that time seems hardly to move at all.

    Read Good Old Neon at the very least.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I made myself read the whole thing and it felt like an unwelcome chore. The stories felt labored, so that the humor and interest got buried.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Strong collection from Wallace, with the opening and closing stories ("Mister Squishy" and "The Suffering Channel") being the high-water marks. These two stories are perhaps the strongest pieces of fiction I have ever read about life in corporate America, revealing yet another vast field of human experience that Wallace has seemingly obtained mastery over. Impressive.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Eh...I guess I'm kinda *off* DFW - I did a project on form in postmodern short stories when I was finishing my degree, and I kind of OD'd on him.There are some good ones in here, and some weak ones. The opener is the best of the bunch.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    It's very rare that I give up on a book, but this pile of unreadable, self-indulgent wank lasted 30 pages into the first "short" story before I gave up in disgust.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There are a great many positive and negative reviews from NYT and other sources on this important last collection of DFW's stories.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I struggled my way through this. Through no fault of the author I struggled to follow the stories. His style of long sentences with parenthesis and suchlike, plus the descriptive style was too much for my limited brain power. With that said, I did enjoy it. His psychological insight had me thinking of Dostoyevsky. I had a craving to go back and read Note From Underground after this.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Mr. Squishy"The complexity of "Mr. Squishy" has been compared to a Magic Eye poster. Reading and rereading will yield varying results. Getting up close will show you something different than if you backed away or circled it, growling like a battle-ready rabid dog. As readers, we step into the scene as it is already underway, a focus group talking about an initially unnamed product. Then we discover we are focused on a chocolate dessert food product under the brand name of Mr. Squishy. The company is trying to market a chocolate dessert with the name "Felonies!" At the same time, unrelated to the scene on the inside is an individual climbing the outside glass wall. The duality of scenes implies an inside looking out/outside looking in desire."The Suffering Channel"Brint Molke is an artist. His medium is not oils or watercolor. He specializes in his own excrement. Not to say he is a sculpture in sh!t. He just happens to defecate art. This astonishing feat caught the attention of Skip Atwater, writer for Style magazine. The title of Wallace's short story comes from Skip's coverage of a cable channel called...wait for it...the suffering channel. A 24/7/365 channel where, you guessed it, one can watch images of all kinds of suffering. There is more to the story than this, but the overlaying detail that shrouds everything is Style magazine is located in one of the World Trade Center Towers and it's September 10th, 2001. In other words, nothing in the story matters because in a day's time everything will change.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't particularly rate Wallace's first two short story collections, Girl With Curious Hair and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. As the author himself commented on BIWHM: "There isn't really an agenda with this book, except for a certain amount of technical, formal stuff that I don’t know if I want to talk about and I don’t think people really want to hear about." That was always my problem with both aforementioned collections of short fiction: they were overtly technical exercises for Wallace to show off his skillset and remind everyone just how smart a writer he was. The problem was there was no payoff for the hardwork involved, something that Wallace knew was required and explains why his novels feature as many hilarious sections as they do intricate technical passages. The point being, Wallace's short fiction often doesn't have the space to be both technical and engaging.Oblivion is certainly the best stab at this combination in the short form that Wallace made, with "The Suffering Channel" being exactly what I wish more of his short stories were like: readable, true to his style, but dealing with heavyweight themes in a manner that interested, rather than alienated the reader. Even better is "Good Old Neon", which is without doubt the best short he wrote (much better than "The Depressed Person" to which it is, understandably, frequently linked). It makes for grim reading in retrospect of Wallace's death, but even had I read it before that event it still would have registered as a brilliant piece of writing. Its insight and conveyance of a particular mind is almost unmatched. "Mister Squishy" is interesting in its portrayal of boring business matters in America, somehow remaining interesting in spite of tedious subject matter; a talent more fully developed in The Pale King.The other stories in this collection whilst not such standout efforts certainly didn't bore me in the way that certain stories from both GWCH and BIWHM did. With a few exceptions Wallace does away with the footnotes and endnotes that characterised his earlier work and were in danger of becoming a cliche. Oblivion is definitely a more mature work than his other short story collections and the best of the bunch. Overall, it still doesn't scale the heights that Wallace's novels reached - given his maximalist style Wallace needed the breathing space that novels permit - but there are gems here that are an essential part of Wallace's output and not to be missed.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I’ve decided that Wallace’s extraordinarily complex sentences and paragraphs, digressive to the point of parody and out the other side, are best in nonfiction, though I’m still going to try Infinite Jest because so many people I respect love it. In short fiction, though, Wallace’s loopy, recursive stream of consciousness—often revealing very bizarre and possibly even compelling circumstances that are quickly lost behind his narrators’ self-obsession—seems pointless. I learned something about cruise ships by reading his essay on the subject, but when you make your characters/situations too ridiculous in fiction, it’s hard for me to care.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was less befuddled by Oblivion than by Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, probably because the stories that tended to befuddle me in the latter were the very short ones, of which it has quite a few and Oblivion doesn't. I loved the first ~half of the book. "Good Old Neon" is the hands-down highlight of the collection, although it tends to really screw with my head and I was depressed for days the first time I read it. "Mister Squishy" is also great. It's pretty much signature DFW stylistically and thematically (which makes me wonder what he was thinking, exactly, when he tried to publish it under a pseudonym--I think he was constitutionally incapable of not sounding like himself). As to the last couple stories, I found the eponymous story intensely irritating (partly what was irritating was intended to be, but not all), and I would have liked "The Suffering Channel" more except that I don't think it really said anything he hadn't said better before. And I was discomfited by its weird scatalogical fixation; it just seemed unsubtle and unnecessary to me. Again, he's said this better before; why sink to this now, is what I found myself wondering. As with Brief Interviews, absolutely no question it's worth reading overall, but I wish his editors shared my opinions of which stories are weaker, and didn't seem to always stick them all at the end.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The sentence is possibly the most basic grammatical tool used by writers, a standard format by which information is conveyed to a reader. But there are sentences, and there are SENTENCES, and American author David Foster Wallace most indeed writes SENTENCES.These are sentences that defy easy categorization - sensational amalgams of disparate thoughts and hidden meaning. These are sentences that push the boundaries of both style and length, wherein the format itself is as important as the content.When they work, the result is breathtaking in its audacity and verve. With sentences as perfect as “the angle of his shoulders as he leaned into the door had the same quality of his eyes,” Wallace truly earns the accolades he had accumulated.Be forewarned: reading Wallace can be exhausting. He makes you work. And in Oblivion, his uneven collection of short stories, the rampaging prose overwhelms everything else in its path.Wallace is in the higher ranks of modern writers, often mentioned in the same breath with postmodernist icons Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His award-winning prose, most vibrantly on display in his mountainous bestseller Infinite Jest, takes modernist techniques to their most extreme, threading themes and motifs in an artificially self-conscious style that is now Wallace’s trademark.With Oblivion, Wallace presents a bewildering display of bizarre narratives, each notable for never once treading familiar roads. A boy daydreams his father’s existence while a teacher slowly goes insane. A man recounts his suicide. A husband goes to great lengths to prove he does not snore.In the very funny “The Suffering Channel”, Wallace tackles “the paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity.” While a magazine editor anguishes over how to correctly market an artist of magical faecal manifestations, a television executive takes reality television to its logical next step, wondering, “How far along the final arc would Slo Mo High Def Full Sound Celebrity Defecation be?”Wallace’s overall style, when it works, captures those moments and thoughts “that flash through your head so fast that [italics] flash isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by and they have so little relation to the sort of non-linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.”Yet unlike the brilliant stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which manage to combine his manic vigour with subtle restraint, Oblivion ultimately never satisfies. Many of the tales trail off to nothing, their ultimate arguments lost in the raging sea of Wallace’s text. Oblivion displays all of the worst tendencies of an author lost to his talent, refusing to reign himself in, running roughshod over the page.In the end, Oblivion functions best as a Wallace primer. If his convoluted expressions exhilarate the reader, Wallace’s better works beckon. If, however, the reader is confounded more than engaged, tackling his Infinite Jest may seem like just that.--------------------Stone Junction is a freelance writer fully capable of writing short sentences; also long sentences, if need be, although “Brevity is the soul of wit,” as the Bard says, or said, rather, past tense; anyway, Stone can write short sentences anytime he wants, don’t you worry about it.