The Howling Fantods

David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97

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Home News by Category The Pale King Pale King Updates 26th April

Pale King Updates 26th April

Hi everyone, a couple of updates that appeared while I was away with family for the Easter break.
 
  • Michael Sayeau's review for The Observer at guardian.co.uk. Spoilers. (24/4/11):
What Pietsch has produced is a stunning if clearly incomplete novel, as thematically daring as anything that Foster Wallace attempted. A summary of the episodic and digressive plot doesn't begin to do it justice.
Robert Baird's article is worth reading and examines the ways in which many critics are choosing to focus on Wallace's life, and death, when reviewing his work:
 
One trouble with making Wallace’s art answer to his life—and, even more problematically, to his death—is that we risk ignoring all the other things his work was about. A bigger danger is that each word he wrote starts to look like a symptom in need of diagnosis. Already it’s started happening. Already we've seen stories that once bewildered critics with their involutions and opacities spun into transparent allegories of Wallace’s depression and addictions. Already we've watched his carefully constructed halls of mirrors razed and rebuilt as glass cathedrals where each of us can bend a knee to the horror of his suffering. 
 
 
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